12-Step Young Hegelian Recovery Therapy

1. Recognize your addiction to ideas for their own sake and unattached to
meaningful action. Therapy can only work for those who wish to be cured.

2. Give up your daytime job, if you've been getting paid to have
"original" ideas at the expense of a relationship to reality AND the
ability to change that reality.

3. Examine the Marxist pharmaceutical lab. Pick the "Holy Family" cure.

4. Re-read and try really hard to figure out why Marx said:

"Ideas can never lead beyond an old-world system but only beyond the ideas
of the old-world system. Ideas cannot carry anything out at all. In order
to carry out ideas men are needed who dispose of a certain practical
force." ("The French Revolution" *The Holy Family* David McLellan ed.,
Karl Marx: Selected Writings (Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 147.)

5. Now figure out if Marx thought "Absolute Criticism" was a good thing
or not and why not:

"Absolute Criticism has declared the 'mass' to be the true enemy of the
spirit. This it develops as follows:

"'The spirit now knows where to look for its only adversary--in the
self-deception and the pithlessness of the mass.' [Go forward five
steps if you can figure out if Marx was for the overuse of the concept
of false consciousness or not.]

"Absolute Criticism proceeds from the dogma of the absolute competency of
the 'spirit'. Furthermore, it proceeds from the dogma of the extramundane
existence of the spirit, i.e. of its existence outside the mass of
humanity. Finally it transforms 'the spirit', 'progress', on the one
hand, and the 'mass', on the other, into fixed beings, into concepts,
and relates them one to the other in that form as given invariable
extremes. It does not occur to Absolute Criticism to investigate the
'spirit' itself, to find out whether it is not its own spiritualistic
nature, its airy pretensions that justify 'the phrase', 'self-deception'
and 'pithlessness'. The spirit, on the contrary, is absolute, but
unfortunately at the same time it continually falls into spiritlessness;
it continually calculates without the master, hence it must necessarily
have an adversary that intrigues against it. That adversary is the mass."

("The Idealist View of History," *The Holy Family* David McLellan ed.,
Karl Marx: Selected Writings (Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 142.)

6. Realize you must give up your misanthropic intellectualism and now
defend existing or historically existing social movements.

7. Did you just say Trotsky in 1917? If all you can say is Trotsky in
1917, then welcome to the movement for socialism in one and only one
country. Deposit your internationalist credentials in the nearest outdoor
latrine. Mr. Zhironovsky will escort you out of this program for a more
suitable one.

8. If you were a Trotskyist once, and if you only picked one more country
that happens to be led by another great speech-maker, military leader
and otherwise lucky devil who made it to power without painstaking
party-building, go forward one step for picking Castro anyway. (We know
it was a lot of work for you to pick TWO countries' revolutions existing
in reality that you actually have something positive to say about.)

9. Ask yourself why you are now defending social-democratic, bourgeois
religious and other watery movements if you are still criticizing all
the original "Stalinist" movements in China, Korea, Vietnam, Kampuchea,
Albania, World War II Yugoslavia, Peru, the Philippines etc. Choose
between bourgeois pragmatism and Marxist materialism. Exit therapy
immediately if you realize you no longer wish to be a Marxist, if for
instance you don't think revolutions are necessary. Side effects of this
program may be hazardous to the health of social-democrats.

10. If your name is Proyect or Dumain, return to step 1.  [These names
in reference to participants on the "Marxism Space."]

11. We can reach a peaceful world, classlessness and economic harmony
without violence!

12. Go back to step 1 if you believed number 11.

13. Did you just say we promised only 12 steps? We could have done it in
11? Go back to step 1 with the other baby-kissing opportunist campaigners
who speak "of 'truths which are understood of themselves from the start.'"

("The Idealist View of History," *The Holy Family* David McLellan ed.,
Karl Marx: Selected Writings (Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 139.)