The reason why the Communist movement cannot use expulsion proceedings is because it must bury its own. The obsequies of a particular idea or the corpse of a fallen comrade must be a Communist activity, because just as the Communist can never uphold a person because they have such and such a name, it cannot either forsake a name or uphold it, it can only eulogize it.
One example of a comrade who perpetually dug herself in deeper and sang the “The Lord Is My Shepherd” was Rosa Luxemburg; her text on the problems of Russian social democracy (more commonly known as Marxism or Leninism) was entombed when she wrote The Russian Revolution. While shortcomings in her thought most definitely persisted (no one is ever fully conscious), Rosa, as an agent of communism was not afraid to bury ideas she had developed when they were demonstrated to be wrong, and when that happened she did not become a defeatist but evermore a communist. The historical work of communism is partly to murder names like Marx, Lenin and Bordiga. ”The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” Names do not weigh heavily over 200 years of consolidated science. Look at Karl Marx’s Manifesto to the French Workers’ Party, Vladimir Lenin’s views on the united front, or Rosa Luxemburg’s views on the national question and imperialism.
It is not by the mechanical repetition of the texts of gurus, masters or giants that communism is kept alive; it is not by the recital of names and spells that we get a doctrine to set the toiler free; it is this broken record player that causing a confusion of communism with Marxism, Leninism or Bordigism.
We do not even have to mention at the funeral whose idea was whose, not one of us deserves credit for either failings or successes, we are instruments of communism, not of personalism. For the ideas that an individual set his heels to or wandered into like a bee into a pane of glass of, these ideas did not come from the mind of one person, they came as a result of decades of work, as a result of the relationship between the human mind and the substance outside it, the interplay between which creates the doctrine, not the individual per se. Man is part of the world and influences it within it, he acts through it, by and for it.
Eulogizing in this instance means by humility alone explaining what was this theory, position, party, faction or person; it is the humility of critically and carefully examining something as it appears, not rejecting a name, a book or vice versa. You can certainly find a spelling mistake in Capital! … and after which, you ought to correct it. A comrade’s job is to be part of the crowd of seamstresses who, with needle, thread, and ordinary ingenuity, can patch a pair of otherwise perfectly functioning jeans. Seamstress, neither academic, priest nor philosopher.
Neither Kautsky nor Bernstein needed to be expelled. They needed to be properly buried.
This should not be surprising to those communists who in their core already practice the funeral service in their theoretical practice, but to those sectarians who elevate organic centralism to a mystical thing, who proclaim that some historical names hold more value than other comrades, it is heresy; communism does not have heretics the way the church does, in the chamber of communism the presentation of works is to be judged separately from the comrade who presented them.
For we Communists would be happy to quote Ronald Reagan or Joseph Stalin if they made a good point
Framåt Barbarer 