Power Wanting, but Wanting Power? Betraying Revolution (Again)

摘要

Considered here are both the fact of and the reasons for the current disappearance of revolutionary agency from leftist theory/practice. In the centenary year of the Russian revolution, this process of vanishing, not just of direct action designed to capture state power but also of socialism itself, is traced from the advocacy of evolution of and latterly resistance to - but not transcendence of - capitalism. This reformist trend is linked in turn to changes in academia, and in particular the rise there of the "new" populist postmodernism. The latter has resulted on the one hand in the championing both of peasant economy/culture and of non-class identities, thereby returning to earlier views held by revisionism; and on the other a consequent abandonment of class analysis, socialist politics, revolutionary agency, and allied concepts of progress, modernity and development.