‌Today, some 70 years after the dawn of the consumerist era, ushered in with great noise to serve as the ultimate deterrent to meaningful social action, these skills have been successfully unlearnt. People today nourish their conflicts and build their identities on them, in the absence of any other conceivable identity, which condemns them to stunted growth, for which movement is substituted -aimless, flighty movement from one place to another, from one idea to another, from one workplace to another, from one relationship to another, a movement which endlessly and invariably replicates the same dissatisfactory experiences- and which ultimately produces a mental universe in which all things are reduced to their shallowest aspects. Critical moral thought (I prefer referring to it as ethical thought so as not to shock people) is replaced by

self-indulgence (called by enticing and and fanciful names) and the reality of our situation, our living conditions and historical experiences are traded for an a-historic Neverland in which all responsibilities are disclaimed. 

Nourished on this brew, one is no longer capable of conceiving of things transcending the bounds of the individual self and its real, imagined or conditioned needs, identities and manipulations, of things existing outside of it, existing parallel to it or having nothing to do with it. The ego then becomes a self-originating child whose thought processes create the world in order to gratify his every whim. How immense the frustration when it fails to do so! How righteous the anger of such an ego if these are the premises on which its world is build and if that world then refuses to function in accordance with them! Relationships then must break, children be abandoned, lives be destroyed, wars of attrition fought, responsibilities denied, drugs consumed, rights disregarded, loyalties betrayed. For such an ego the notion of giving and taking is intolerable, as are obligations towards others or the existence of rules of engagement, common sense boundaries, natural limits, discipline, patience, determination, consistency, persistence and the like. 

What existed before it is meaningless to such an ego, as is that which will come after it. What it said yesterday has no bearing on what it is saying today and what it is saying today has no bearing on what it is going to say tomorrow. Its ultimate mirror is, of course, the digital world in which profundity is replaced by speed and reflection by projection. It is an infantile ego that is cultivated in this way, and its rebelliousness is the sum total of its infantile tantrums. Nothing will come of it.

 

But who are we in reality? And what would true and meaningful revolutionary action be?

We are, I venture, the sum total of a) the entirety of the historical processes that prompted our existence, in their contradictions as well as in their aspirations, which are responses aimed at their resolution, b) the sum total of our social relations, obligations and current historic framework and c) the sum total of all dialectical contradictions accruing from these characteristics as well as the individual and collective responses elicited by them. 

Meaningful revolutionary action then is action which proceeds from these premises and constructively responds to all aspects of the reality entailed in this, addressing and integrating them in their full complexity and universal range. It is an action that flows from the essence of things in themselves, rather than seeking to impose on them a character that lies outside of their nature, taking into account the dialectical relationship between essence, attribute and circumstantial manifestation. It is the action of a social force that sees itself as the conscious executor of processes inherent in the dynamic of reality itself and prompted by its objective nature and needs at the given point in time. 

It is, ultimately, the replacement of mask by actuality, straight forward, sharp, accurate and undiluted, inviolate and critically self-aware.