> What a pair of self-marginalizing slogans, guaranteed to attract about
> 0.5% of the population and repel over 90%.
That's the whole point. I'll try to explain for you.
There is only one goal. Not to obtain any particular objectives for changing society. (God, what a bore.) No, there is only one true goal - the "final goal" that is "everything" - and that is "To take power." But *who* should take power? Certainly not "the working class." In the American context, the closest thing to the empirical working class taking power is when a Democrat wins an election and John Sweeney gets invited to the victory celebration. The real working class is always reactionary, as Lenin taught us.
No, the only entity whose taking power can ever represent "the final goal" is the _revolutionary movement possessed of a correct theoretical consciousness of the dialectical movement of history_. (The essence of this correct theoretical understanding is everything I'm writing in this post, but for advanced learners you might throw in which parts of Marx to stress and which to ignore, understanding how Hegel and Lukacs showed the truth is the whole so you don't have to read the newspaper, knowing that you must never criticize revolutionaries for their failed insurrections, only social democrats for their failed surrenders, etc.)
We're obviously talking about a tiny number of people who can ever obtain this kind of consciousness. Again, this is just Leninism 101. However, times have changed. The days when the disciplined Leninist vanguard party was a viable model are long past. Today when the revolution comes - and it will; it must - it will come in the form of a movement of movements. The movement cannot be run by an iron hierarchy, like the Bolsheviks. So while the immediate task is to to build a movement, _a way must be found to ensure it remains a movement consisting of and run by people with a correct theoretical understanding of history_. The bad elements must be scrupulously weeded out, you can't let them into the movement, especially in its early stages, otherwise the whole thing will turn into an exercise in pushing for free health care or some nonsense.
Hence the *principled* and *strategic* insistence on slogans that sound as off-putting as possible. It's the only way to separate the wheat from the chaff. The only people who would ever respond to a call to abolish all prisons immediately are those who already share the notion that the "final goal" of "taking power" is "everything." If you call for abolishing the prisons, anyone who comes to you anyway has already been blooded. It's a very complicated form of reverse dog-whistle politics. SA