JF

This is what happens when people refuse to recognize their dependence on the past. Speaking of 'mass, working class party' is to try and emulate the past, without the labor of concrete analysis of concrete conditions that was actually responsible for it.

The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot take its poetry from the past but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped away all superstition about the past. The former revolutions required recollections of past world history in order to

smother their own content. The revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead in order to arrive at its own content. There the phrase went beyond the content – here the content goes beyond the phrase.

If this was true for Marx and Engels, imagine how much more immediate the task is today.

Let the dead bury the dead is exactly right. It doesn't mean we should abandon and forget the past, but we should recognize what belongs to it. We can only truly realize the unity that had belonged to the past by fully accepting the wilderness of the present.

But sadly 'mass, working class party' is even outdated by the standards of the past - it was already sublated by the mass party of the alliance of worker's and peasants. This, in turn too was subject to further qualification. That is how sorry our situation is today.

Specifically, we should say the contemporary working class dissolves, in the present tense. Ever more it is flung either into bourgeois ideology or into stultifying particularity, often both. Which maims it, but fails to resolve its contention with and demands on the real.

We should see the past in the same way a detective looks through the evidence that led up to some horrible crime. Except that crime is the very present. If we truly appreciate the past in its entirety, this can only awaken us to the morning of the present. This is why most soci