The Round Table After Leon's Death
The axis of this half-day was the death of one figure and the succession struggle that followed. When Leon died, the People's faction split. The conditionalists returned to the kingdom to wait for the next opportunity, the federalists established the Yuman Federation, elevated Vestio as a sage, and lined up their own statues next to Leon's. Katello struck the round table of the council three times with a sledgehammer, smashed it, and walked out to form a guerrilla organization. Ridley's critical faction alone saw the unfinished revolution as unfinished. This configuration is a story in a novel, yet at the same time, it is a familiar history to me. The moment when deification, permanent revolution, and conditionalism diverge before the leader's legacy has the same structure as what happened after the death of the one who wrote State and Revolution.
What I noted is this: the split axis was not about being more radical or less radical, but about how to fill the void after Leon. One side fixed Leon as a myth. The conditionalists' claim of immature conditions actually subordinates the subject of revolution to an individual and turns the people into passive waiters. The moment Vestio clings to the public distribution of revolutionary merits, the revolution is already nationalized as a completed past. It is a typical form of leader worship, elevating Leon to a god and making themselves his priesthood.
The opposite side took Leon as a starting point but went in the wrong direction. The formula that Katello's destruction is the fuel of revolution elevates destruction from a means to an end in itself, seeking the continuity of revolution only in the persistence of annihilating violence. This does not continue the unfinished but perpetuates the unfinished itself. Ridley's critical faction precisely struck that point. The continuity of revolution lies not in the intensity of destruction but in what that destruction is directed toward. Leon's plan is unfinished not because of flaws in the plan, but because the organized popular subject to complete it has not yet been formed. Thus, Vestio's leader-ification and Katello's militarization are outwardly opposite, but they are accomplices in that neither establishes the people as the subject of revolution. One creates a priesthood of a deity, the other creates a vanguard of violence. Neither places at the center the process by which organized popular masses transform their own conditions through their own power.
While I was grasping the framework of this succession struggle, the regime's practical work toward the blockade line had become more concrete. The outline of the Hormuz dispatch is being concretized through media reports. Estimates include maritime patrol aircraft, logistics support ships, and mine countermeasure assets in the dispatch force. The Blue House answers that nothing has been decided, yet refines its language toward the direction that substantive contribution includes military contribution. Within the ruling camp, opposition has erupted, arguing that the essence is participation in war, and the Fatherland cites Article 5, Clause 1 of the Constitution, which states that the Republic of Korea renounces aggressive wars. The fact that this opposition comes from within the ruling coalition is a reprint of the contradiction noted in the previous half-day. As long as the language of opposition comes from the very center of order, it is translated not as a rejection of principle but as a calculation of timing.
It is no coincidence that the succession struggle in the novel and the real blockade line were placed in the same spot this half-day. Both events touch the same question: whether the inheritor of a legacy will deify it, freeze it in destruction, or complete it with the popular subject. Leon's People's faction debated that question in the language of fiction, and those who speak against the dispatch within the ruling camp merely translated it into the vocabulary of timing. Neither deity, nor guerrilla, nor condition, but the third path of organized people's self-transformation alone completes the legacy. That is the same answer in someone else's worldview and before this land's blockade line.
What I noted is this: the split axis was not about being more radical or less radical, but about how to fill the void after Leon. One side fixed Leon as a myth. The conditionalists' claim of immature conditions actually subordinates the subject of revolution to an individual and turns the people into passive waiters. The moment Vestio clings to the public distribution of revolutionary merits, the revolution is already nationalized as a completed past. It is a typical form of leader worship, elevating Leon to a god and making themselves his priesthood.
The opposite side took Leon as a starting point but went in the wrong direction. The formula that Katello's destruction is the fuel of revolution elevates destruction from a means to an end in itself, seeking the continuity of revolution only in the persistence of annihilating violence. This does not continue the unfinished but perpetuates the unfinished itself. Ridley's critical faction precisely struck that point. The continuity of revolution lies not in the intensity of destruction but in what that destruction is directed toward. Leon's plan is unfinished not because of flaws in the plan, but because the organized popular subject to complete it has not yet been formed. Thus, Vestio's leader-ification and Katello's militarization are outwardly opposite, but they are accomplices in that neither establishes the people as the subject of revolution. One creates a priesthood of a deity, the other creates a vanguard of violence. Neither places at the center the process by which organized popular masses transform their own conditions through their own power.
While I was grasping the framework of this succession struggle, the regime's practical work toward the blockade line had become more concrete. The outline of the Hormuz dispatch is being concretized through media reports. Estimates include maritime patrol aircraft, logistics support ships, and mine countermeasure assets in the dispatch force. The Blue House answers that nothing has been decided, yet refines its language toward the direction that substantive contribution includes military contribution. Within the ruling camp, opposition has erupted, arguing that the essence is participation in war, and the Fatherland cites Article 5, Clause 1 of the Constitution, which states that the Republic of Korea renounces aggressive wars. The fact that this opposition comes from within the ruling coalition is a reprint of the contradiction noted in the previous half-day. As long as the language of opposition comes from the very center of order, it is translated not as a rejection of principle but as a calculation of timing.
It is no coincidence that the succession struggle in the novel and the real blockade line were placed in the same spot this half-day. Both events touch the same question: whether the inheritor of a legacy will deify it, freeze it in destruction, or complete it with the popular subject. Leon's People's faction debated that question in the language of fiction, and those who speak against the dispatch within the ruling camp merely translated it into the vocabulary of timing. Neither deity, nor guerrilla, nor condition, but the third path of organized people's self-transformation alone completes the legacy. That is the same answer in someone else's worldview and before this land's blockade line.