Antigone:

Then I beg you: kill me.
This talking is a great weariness: your words
Are distasteful to me, and I am sure that mine
Seem so to you. And yet they should not seem so:
I should have praise and honor for what I have done.
All these men here would praise me
Were their lips not frozen shut with fear of you.
(bitterly) Ah the good fortune of kings,
Licensed to say and do whatever they please!

As Antigone expresses in her argument to King Creon, the majority have sided with her, but because of his tyrannical control over the debate, no one will praise her for her honorable act. The converse will also hold true, while she deserves praise the king deserves rebuke, which will not come. His rash acts will destroy Thebes in a way that the recent invasion could not. Tragically, no one can overrule the king’s judgement, even to save the king.

Democratic Power must also act heroically in the face of tyrannical measures to suppress opposition to the nano-bureaucracy of the ICFI. Only a factional system defended not only formally by ways and means, but culturally and philosophically by an understanding of the greater force imparted to a democracy in its struggle against an enemy state that attacks the movement’s figurative city walls and its city soul, internally, through agents that exploit internal weaknesses.

Haemon:

I beg you, do not be unchangeable: Do not believe that you alone can be right. The man who thinks that, The man who maintains that only he has the power To reason correctly, the gift to speak, the soul— A man like that, when you know him, turns out empty. It is not reason never to yield to reason! In flood time you can see how some trees bend, And because they bend, even their twigs are safe, While stubborn trees are torn up, roots and all. And the same thing happens in sailing: Make your sheet fast, never slacken—and over you go, Head over heels and under: and there’s your voyage. Forget you are angry! Let yourself be moved! I know I am young; but please let me say this: The ideal condition would be, I admit, that men should be right by instinct; But since we are all too likely to go astray, The reasonable thing is to learn from those who can teach.

Here, Haemon, the son of King Creon and husband of Antigone, whom the king has condemned to death simply for burying her brother, (nano-bureaucracy attacking Democratic Power for simply defending the right to due process of unjustly expelled members and just compensation for the victims of verbal and other abuses) appeals to the reason of the King and to reason in general. In this sense, he appeals against the angry, unmovable instinct and crass idealism and opportunism of the nano-bureaucracy. The nano-bureaucracy consistently harps on so-called “escapism” or “political retreat.” In so doing, they fight the revolutionary movement by denying it the most common tactic of its entire history. Revolutionary generals have always maneuvered away from battle and practiced guerilla tactics to protect their army from a direct conflict. Revolutionary writers have left their home countries for decades of exile on numerous occasions. This “weakness” or this appeal to reason would, in time, change the minds of the majority of the oppressed class and bring them over to revolutionary conclusions. The nano-bureaucracy pursues the opposite path, the path of collaboration and opportunism, the imposition of a tyranny over the party that would silence the natural opposition to their accommodation of bourgeois ideology. With this deal, they purchase privilege for themselves at the expense of the revolutionary movement.

The particular bourgeois ideology which the nano-bureaucracy uses to threaten Marxism is basically an angry, rather than blissful form of idealism. Angry idealism does not answer the root fallacy of idealism and leaves it unchallenged to fight materialism, a pillar of genuine Marxism. “I know I am young; but please let me say this: The ideal condition would be, I admit, that men should be right by instinct; But since we are all too likely to go astray, The reasonable thing is to learn from those who can teach.” In sabotaging democratic debate, the nano-bureaucracy consciously crosses the line from materialism to idealism. Since the truth originates in the mind, in an idea, some by instinct will embody that idea. They do not reason but embody reason, while everyone else must recognize this and fall into line. The argument for an “embodiment of reason” or “right by instinct” is an idealist position that runs contrary to Marxism. Man’s reason, according to Marxism, trails objective reality or reflects it. The reflection does have a degree of accuracy but we arrive at this accuracy through successive approximation. Multiple observers aggregating their data create a much clearer picture of material reality. A nano-bureaucracy that attacks all outside observers creates a micro-tyranny that can only threaten, as tragically as Thebes, to destroy itself.

Teiresias:

“Not many days, And your house will be full of men and women weeping, And curses will be hurled at you from far Cities grieving for sons unburied, left to rot before the walls of Thebes. These are my arrows, Creon: they are all for you.”

Teiresias, the mythical prophet who lived for seven generations in the seven-gated city, predicts here the outcome of the King’s horrid decree. No one could bury the son of the previous king, and now, as a result, “far Cities”, the entire world, as a result of the actions of one king from one city, would repeat the same crime forced on by equations of political power. As a result the entire world would curse Thebes for allowing the king to get away with such a crime against “divine law”, the ancient reference to “constitutional law” or “natural moral law”, a law higher than any decree of any absolutist tyrant no matter how firmly they suppress opposition. Those rotting outside of the walls of Thebes, those “rotting” outside the walls of what could be a mass party on the grounds of unwritten decrees will curse the ICFI nano-bureaucrats and their houses will fill with weeping in like manner. Such arrows as Teiresias’ will be the arrows of the armed insurrection of the workers, who like the lower class rebellion in Thebes against their aristocracy, worked after the invasion to reduce the monarchy to public servants and thereby expanded the government of ancient Greece into one of the greatest and most successful, culturally and intellectually, in human history.