this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2026
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If a party isn't doing anything, then it's a book club. Revolutionary parties focus on educational outreach, building up internal discipline, creating organs for logistics of protests, all of which serve as prerequisites for revolution. Random assassinations are not revolutionary.
But if it builds the structure and doesn't carry out anything, you have the prerequisites, but not the action. So without tangible action outside of the group that actively opposes the existing regime, it is no more revolutionary than a sanctioned university course.
This is why you need to study theory. You don't trigger a revolution, you steer one. Otherwise you separate yourself from the masses.
If you steer a group towards nothing actually visible but the outside world, then you should not be able to say that you carried out revolutionary action. The preparation might be necessary, the coordination, too. It might even be indispensable to profit from the action, but without it, it is nothing but wishing.
There have been many times in history where gathering or talking have been revolutionary actions by themselves, as they were expressly forbidden and acted upon, but nowadays it is, as a general rule, not in the western countries.
You're talking about how a revolutionary org can be bad. This is not the same as saying random assassination is revolutionary.
I didn't say bad, I said not carry out any revolutionary act. For the second point I said that a specific assassination by a random person can be a revolutionary act.
If there's opportunity for a revolutionary org to advance the revolutionary struggle and they miss it, this is a mistake. It doesn't mean that random adventurism is revolutionary.
There are many reasons why a group might fail to act and fizzle out. I am just saying that without that action, the existence of the group and the discussions are not revolutionary.
The creation of an org that can and will act when needed is revolutionary. An org that does not live up to those standards is not revolutionary, nor is random assassination, nor is building up such a failure of an org.
So you can only define the organization as revolutionary after something else has happened? The creation and organization of two identical groups can be revolutionary or not depending on if they down the line act on something?
You are getting lost in technicalities to try to make it seem like adventurism is revolutionary. Stop playing word games and engage with the point.
I am engaging with the point, you are the one focusing on the least important part. Your words right before estate that only organizing a group that acts is a revolutionary act, while organizing a group that doesn't is not. This makes it clear that the organization part, from your words, is only revolutionary if it acts at a later date. Part of my point is that it is the action itself that is revolutionary and not the organizing up at least until the point where the action happens. And therefore ,if the action itself is what counts, it doesn't necessarily matter who carries it out.
How is the central point, that you said random assassination is revolutionary while organizing is not, the least important part? Organizing work alone isn't sufficient for it to be revolutionary, it must contribute to advancing the revolutionary movement. This means advancing a correct political line, engaging with the broader working class, etc. You are getting overly focused on classification and are entirely missing the essence of the point, that abstract violence detached from organizing work does nothing to weaken the capitalist state nor to prepare the working classes for revolution. It's just an outlet for one person to express their rage at the system.
The least important part of my original comment, but I accept that is your main contention.
Going just by this last comment: "abstract violence detached from organizing work does nothing to weaken the capitalist state nor to prepare the working classes for revolution. It’s just an outlet for one person to express their rage at the system."
There I keep trying to get you to tell me if the same action carried out by a member of an organization vs. a lone person can be considered differently. I posit that it can't. Now, if a specific action is revolutionary, that's the next topic.
If there is no organization, then how can it be revolutionary? Actions do not exist without context. Again, returning to Luigi, there was no revolutionary reason to kill the CEO. I won't condemn Luigi, but he did not move the movement forward.
Returning to Luigi, he definitely didn't move the general movement forward. As I said, he can only be considered within the context of privatized healthcare and even then as a failed spark. But failing is not the same as not existing, that's where we disagree.
I never said Luigi did not exist. I said he was not revolutionary.
I meant the act. I don't consider him a revolutionary either.
The act wasn't revolutionary either.
For the greater movement no. If a second CEO had been murdered, do you think that there would have been no changes at all in any sense?
Revolution isn't any change, change is constant. I don't think a second random assassination would improve worker positioning and organizing for revolution, nor weaken the bourgeois state.
Again, revolutionary within the scope of health care in the US. There is more than one kind of revolution possible. And if you don't think that a system that's causing the death of thousand of people and uncountable amount of pain due to lack of care improves the lives of workers then that's a different discussion.