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I'm not a Marxist, much less a Marxist Leninist or a Trotskyist. I wouldn't know what to do in a condition of Democratic Control of the Means of Production. Head for the hills, probably.
But I've found a few ideas of value in the course of grappling with the writings of Karl Marx.
One if them is the notion of Praxis- the point where the ruled lose both their illusions about the system under which they live, and the cynical alienation that prevents them from recovering their own autonomous power from those who order their lives, and charting a more positive course.
When enough people in a polity do that- then you can have a revolution.
That is the revolution, as far as I'm concerned. Not a matter of political or economic ideology- more like a mass graduation onto personal empowerment and responsibility, within a moral and ethical framework that refuses to tolerate the criminality of the powerful within institutions any more than it tolerates criminality on the street.
But Praxis requires the dropping of "false consciousness." Seeing the facts for the facts, and the truths they point toward. That's a critical precondition. And this country ain't there yet.
So, if there is a Revolution out there, it's obviously still at the "consciousness-raising" stage.
Not much more to say right now than that, other than that I think there are effective ways to raise consciousness, and ineffective ways, and the revolutionists need to sort themselves out about which is which.
What works is a tricky question.
What doesn't work is more clear to me. Harangues, for one thing. Manipulations, for another. And there's a difference between actually finding opportunities to raise consciousness, as contrasted with opportunism- a difference that's typically lost on anyone who's an ideologue, of any sort.
