Marxism and Melodrama by Bruno Bosteels

Morality is impotence in action. - Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Holy Family

With Los errores, Revueltas may have become the unwitting accomplice of contemporary nihilism, which consists precisely in defining the Good only negatively by way of the need to avoid Evil. "Evil is that from which the Good is derived, not the other way round," as Badiou writes in his diagnosis of the ethical turn. "Nietzsche demonstrated very neatly that humanity prefers to will nothingness rather than to will nothing at all. I will reserve the name nihilism for this will to nothingness, which is like a counterpart of blind necessity. "41 In particular, there are two aspects of the debate regarding dogmatism in Los errores that run the risk of contributing to this complicity: the theme of the ethical role attributed to the party and the metaphysical, or more properly post-metaphysical, speculation about "man" or "humanity" (el hombre) as an erroneous being. Both of these themes obviously are presented in the hope of serving as possible correctives to the reigning dogmatism of Stalinism, but they could easily bring the reader to the point of adopting an ideological position that lies at the opposite extreme of the one its author upheld until his death just over thirty years ago.