"Which is the worse spectacle, leftwingers berating the working class for their lack of enthusiasm for leftwing politics or leftwingers berating the working class for their lack of enthusiasm for war? The most repulsive attribute of the left is that first they have to blah blah blah about how radical they are and then they have to blah blah blah about their conversion to the the right. They never shut up. It is possible to perceive a common driving force in apparent adversaries: behind the rhetoric of political left and right is the orchestrating interest of the owning class. So, when we talk about consciousness and, in response, others look for quotes in the collected works of Lenin, we seem them as being in retreat, both refusing to engage with our ideas and refusing to engage with the failure to achieve the purpose of their groups. We see in the retreat to Lenin a revelation of many authoritarian characteristics in small group life, the dominant motive of which is a search for a means to shut us up. This is one source of our anti-consciousness position: consciousness, and the owners of consciousness, cannot be trusted because, quite rightly, under pressure ‘beliefs’ will be dropped in favor of underlying class interest. Middle class radicals will always revert to class affiliation, no matter the political content of their values. The reality of the world is that of defending the class-interests created by capitalism, the only way to get beyond ‘interests’ is the collapse of its determining frame."
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