A short note on the case of the missing radical functionary

The left historically is a project based upon an alliance of intellectuals and the poor that seeks to transform the society fundamentally, and depends for this task largely on extra-governmental tactics of social protest accompanied in a mostly unplanned way by many related endeavors in the worlds of the arts and ideas. 'Liberal' (in the American sense) or progressive politics is a strategy of professionals and state officials targeting the poor as objects of social progress and improvement. The former is dependent on class conflict, the latter on class domination. (In Russia and elsewhere, this produced a dictatorship over the proletariat exercised by the professional and managerial class in its name.). A revolution may or may not be televised, but cannot be managed as a project of administrative governance. If there is some appearance to the contrary, it is rhetorical, and the rhetoric is betrayed by the functions, if not purposes, of what is done.