Cosmonaut reeks of Leninist vanguardism and is just more of the same M-L crap in a new disguise. I can guarantee the writers at Cosmonaut do not think the working class can move beyond “trade union consciousness” on there own. Why do I guess this? Look at the article on “Why We Need A Program”, which assumes that a party will fight for state power and that this has anything to do with real revolution, the workers seizing the means of production to abolish the value form. The article on the Bavarian Revolution shows a deep contempt for the masses capacity to self-organization, essentially a rant against the idea of “all power to the Soviets”. The obsession is not the workers in the factories who were organizing workers committees and councils to actually change their condition of wage slavery, but the politics of parties and intellectuals. The lesson of the Bavarian Rev seems to not be the necessity of councils spreading, but the lack of a ‘proper leadership’. As if the masses can’t lead themselves! This is reflected in the most recent article which suggests the Paris Commune would maybe go differently with the leadership of Blanqui. This rumination of great leaders changing history shows the typical Leninist obsession with a petty-bourgeois intelligentsia introducing class consciousness onto the proletariat “from without” as Lenin himself says when quoting Kautsky. Cosmonaut seems to be advocating not for libertarian communism but just tepid state-socialism, while also offering high minded justifications of the Red Terror based on the “material conditions” meme-like response to whenever Leninists are confronted with the reality of their terror against the working class like in Donald Parkinson’s article. I’m sure we’ll get to hear more critiques of Communization and rants about “electoral strategy” in the future from this guy. In their mission statement, the editors mock Bakunin for emphasizing direct action over intellectualism and claim to want to revive ‘scientific socialism’, as if such an idea could be anything other than a perfection of domination by a totalitarian merging of state and capital. Let us never forget that Leninists are the aspiring state-capitalist class, trying to force workers to meet their ideals as intellectuals and dreaming of using the state to do this. They want to rationalize capitalism, not end the economy. I think Cosmonaut are merely wannabe vanguardists who have grad degrees and want power and it shows in their writing.
– Paul Duke
