Every religion’s theology tends to progress to the point where a significant number of its proponents must make a deliberate decision in favour of the continuance of the practices of belief and in spite of their own personal atheism. The conclusion they arrive at has always followed the same path of argumentation, ‘open disbelief, in the form of disengagement, is a less preferable outcome than continuing to acquiesce before a more or less acknowledged lie.’ Some of these proponents, amongst their complacently lapsing peers, even come to see their atheism as the only truly authentic (and also highest) relation to the object of religion. The atheist theologian of this type, even where working within established religions, is not so rare a beast as might be anticipated.
As above, so below: Nihilist Communism is the more or less arbitrary term for the acknowledged impossibility of communism as this conclusion occurs at the level of individual communist consciousness. Within the designated field Nihilist Communism, the condition of those communists who continue to refer their activities towards that which they realise is objectively improbable, is subjectively recognised and processed as such.
We can assume that these individuals have actively decided to continue with their self-description as communists in the full knowledge that communism is a lie which they tell to themselves, and for their own good purpose. Alternatively, in the form of a differential model, the same individuals might also conclude that communism remains possible but that disbelief is still a preferable relation to it. That is to say, within this differential model, the communists’ decision to refuse communism is considered to be more revealing of meaningful practice than holding on to ‘Real Movement’ orthodoxy. Along both pathways opened up by Nihilist Communism, the active decision against a positive formulation of communism is grounded in the consolatory field of other possibilities, which that act of refusal has disclosed.
