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"The Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with me, and I asked them how they dared so roundly to assert that God spake to them; and whether they did not think at the time, that they would be misunderstood, & so be the cause of imposition.
Isaiah answer'd. 'I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discover'd the infinite in every thing, and as I was then perswaded, & remain confirm'd, that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for consequences but wrote.'
Then I asked: 'does a firm perswasion that a thing is so, make it so?'
He replied: 'All poets believe that it does, & in ages of imagination this firm perswasion removed mountains; but many are not capable of a firm perswasion of any thing.'"

I saw a man from Egypt on the television news. He said his mother said he had to fight because she wanted him a hero. The interviewer did not ask why his mother wasn’t at the square and why he had not stayed at home to scrub the step.

In a 30 second snapshot we are reintroduced to Marx’s unfinished examination of the problem known historically as the ‘Russian road to socialism’. The objective historical role of capital has been to disconnect populations from their culture and introduce representative abstractions (cyphers for Value) in their place. The dis-attachment of populations from their specific history becomes an objective condition for their pliant reorientation towards different, perhaps, communist values.

The question of the ‘Russian Road’ asks whether a society may reach a communist consciousness without their pre-modern cultural practices having first been deconstructed by the process of capitalist re-valuation. Clearly, Marx did not get to the bottom of this question and the subsequent efforts of anti-imperialism and national liberation have been signally unsuccessful in everything but the further mystification of the capitalist productive relation. There are no proletarian states.

In the case of the days of rage in Egypt of January/february 2011, we see a ‘modern’ social revolution defined entirely by its unreconstructed bourgeois aspirations. There are mass prayers. There are national flags. There is a hated personified oppressor. There is an externalised enemy. There are calls for democracy and constitutional government. There is ‘self-organisation’ around the defence of property. There is the continuation of traditional roles between men and women.

In a situation such as Egypt where the question of communism is raised as a possible outcome, communism itself must take on the role of a corrective consciousness and do the work which otherwise would have been undertaken on the unconscious of the population by capital. It occurs to me, that Freud’s structural model is appropriate here... in this scenario, communist consciousness becomes the nagging superego, perpetually illuminating the shortcomings of the proletarian/popular ego as it attempts to realise objects from the tensions within the specificity/objectivity of its unconscious.

Where communism does not take this corrective role, (and who could suppose it could ever have a positive outcome except in conditions of complete economic breakdown?), bourgeois categories of national liberation will continue to be generated, and even within the pro-revolutionary milieu:

"Suez has a special value in every Egyptian heart. It was the centre for resistance against the Zionists in 1956 and 1967, in the same district. It fought Sharon's troops back in the Egyptian-Israeli wars."
Nidal Tahrir, from Black Flag, a small group of Anarcho-Communists in Egypt

Up to the point of writing this, communists have not dared to revile the fetish-object of the hero’s spilt blood from which the romance of bourgeois revolution is generated. They have defined themselves in terms of involvement in rather than separation from received historico-cultural conventions. But a communist revolution is defined precisely by its generation of new terms, of new roles; by a great flourishing of gestures and extended innovatory logics, the transformation of the entirety of conditions and lives. A revolution cannot be reduced back to the atavistic romance of red guards against white guards.

We are presented then, in the absence of such a flourishing, with the task of manifesting negative thought... of separating ourselves from enthusiasm and irrationality, from received and barbaric practices. Intelligence is defined by critically diagnosing conditions and identifying what is absent, it is not an accident that Marx talked of communism in terms of ‘criticism after dinner’. The communist role is essentially therapeutic, it coolly observes and quietly questions ongoing processes which it can neither initiate nor halt. People involved in struggle (i.e. the entirety of the human race) must process the vast accumulation of their inheritances, they must revalue their preconceptions and they must work through their history in order that they might escape from it. The communist is society’s therapist, he supplies, in the objective absence of spontaneous new forms and new relations, continued opportunities for transference in terms of provocations, doubts, telling criticisms.

The forms of struggle developed by the proletariat (e.g. its self-organisation) must be criticised not supported and must be criticised until it criticises them itself, until it abolishes its forms itself. Up to this point in the Egyptian events, pro-revolutionaries have been beholden to twitter feeds and 24 hour news coverage. Their thirst for contingent facts has completely obscured their critical faculties. The absence of innovatory thought, the failure in the character of their response, which has not yet got beyond a sluggish affirmational sentimentality and the mystification of solidarity, is the substantial proof that there is no prospect of communist revolution. Until communists are prepared to think for, and before, the Other... until they are able to think critically against their own prescriptions, and find a therapeutic path, they will not be able to escape their own dogmas.

I like the daily mail crossword. I like suduko. I do jigsaw puzzles. My shirts come from Marks and Spencer, my socks are cotton rich. My tie is made of acrylic-ah.

"I also asked Isaiah what made him go naked and barefoot three years? he answer'd, 'the same that made our friend Diogenes the Grecian.'
I then asked Ezekiel why he eat dung, & lay so long on his right & left side? he answer'd, 'the desire of raising other men into a perception of the infinite; this the North American tribes practise, & is he honest who resists his genius or conscience, only for the sake of present ease or gratification?'"