«Revolutionary Ideology» and its Metamorphoses

Antonis Lavrantonis’s Revolutionary Ideology and its Metamorphoses delineates the process through which the so-called revolutionary ideology is ‘absorbed’ by the ideology of the dominant class, showing the subtlety by which moral ideas and desiderata are modified from forces of progression to forces of interception. The author’s provocative argument is that revolutionary is only the historical action of the exploited and oppressed masses, when it breaks the barriers and frameworks of the social system, while the “revolutionary ideology” is an epiphenomenon of defeat, retreat and adjustment. Lavrantonis’s text outlines concrete stages of the process by which the revolutionary ideology’s essential quest of “universal human liberation”, when crushed into the unsurpassable wall of insufficient objective conditions, is disconnected from social praxis, thereafter becoming ideationalized until ‘appropriated’ by the ideology of the dominant class.