“Failing Upwards” came about as the realization of political failures stretching over two years and the recognition that the usual “Marxist” way of analyzing those failures was essentially useless. I could only physically start writing it once I’d totally abandoned any idea of a formal summation, which meant I could entertain myself long enough to actually finish it and try to present ideas and experiences without having to relentlessly cross-check myself for ideological infidelity. At the same time, that also accounts for the wildly uneven tone and theoretical eclecticism, which don’t really do it any favors. Unlike “Pigheadism,” its Maoist counterpart, it didn’t even have the benefit of input, criticism, and proofing from editors, so it comes off as the longform shitpost it was intended to be.
At that point in time, I was a Leninist with no particular political allegiances. Through experience, I’d developed a sweeping contempt for the Marcyite parties as well as their political base, which had started referring to themselves, unironically, as “Dengists”. I had some remaining political faith in both the Marxist Center (now effectively dead) as well as the Red Guards (morons). Though, it was through the latter that I saw potential solutions for organizing and generalizing the kind of proletarian militancy that the Marcyites actively suppressed when they didn’t neglect it entirely.
Friendly and generally positive relations with contacts in the Red Guards had contributed to my sympathies, and therefore subjectivism, regarding their supposed political tact and general appeal. My mistake here was in forming my impressions directly out of observations and discussions from the height of their development. Theoretically, the Red Guards had a very skeletal form of party infrastructure that could facilitate and mediate internal struggles as a means of strengthening external, political struggles, all of which the Marcyites consciously dismissed. In reality, this infrastructure is so chronically misled and so dependent on an incoherent ideological outlook – which is driven to the point of zealotry – that it leaves them totally unequipped to deal with the real world in general, much less real political struggles.
While I idiotically assumed there was a logic and a kind of pragmatism informing their tactical and strategic outlook, I still believe that they’re one of the only Marxist groups who really emphasize the central importance of political conquest, ideological hegemony, and armed struggle. (Sad!, etc.) Ultimately, what I thought was contingent on their continued existence was a gradual rejection of political theater (what they call “armed propaganda”) and a more grounded and localized approach to Maoist politics – one that recognized that the first stage of the mass line consists in a large part of taking leadership from the masses themselves. This never actually happened and they’ve continued to elude political death. But you can read all about that in “Pigheadism”.
“Failing Upwards” wasn’t written with any structure in mind apart from establishing a handful of topics and trying to work my way around to focusing on the general problems they produce or express. This was all stream-of-consciousness, so both its style and arguments suffer as a result. Generally, I wanted to express the impossibility of the whole Marcyite approach to politics (which is, to some extent, the usual “Marxist” approach to politics) and its root in living contradictions, rather than on theoretical “questions of line.” Almost all of the issues in this are derived directly from practical experience, which have had existing analogues in the behavior of cadres in and around organizations like the PSL and WWP. While writing this, I strained to come up with any significant political solutions to the problems I wrote on. There’s no sophisticated “Marxist” solution to the basic, collective dysfunction within these organizations that doesn’t also demand a level of political and ideological education that the vast majority of Marxists simply aren’t willing to accept, especially from without.
That question of education and maturity is, in fact, becoming much harder to confront as internal cultures corrupt and compromise any question of politics, which is exacerbated by screen-damaged discourse and subcultural thinking. This is as true of the Marcyites as it is with the Maoists. This also extends into negative critique itself. Even the polemic tends to just flatter the significance of Marxists, since the tradition suggests a distinguishing mark of qualitative developments. By rendering organizational and methodological problems into monolithic theoretical struggles, they usually fail to do justice to the relative simplicity of practical issues. Hopefully, if nothing else, I managed to avoid doing that.
LORD’N’BONDSMAN IN THE BAR’N’GRILL
Like any organization attempting to build from top-to-bottom, for instance a pyramid scheme, the big parties effectively rely on recruiting the most vulnerable people to fill their ranks. There’s nothing really wrong with this, yet, since these are technically parties of oppressed and working people. However, the leadership of a nascent branch isn’t going to bring in the average cleaner or one of the few remaining factory workers, or student activists and intellectuals, but the people who are already embedded in communism in its subcultural form. This means people who are, primarily, extremely online and, secondly, passively invested in mostly aesthetic notions of communism itself.
Even as someone who was/is partially this type of person, I can say without a doubt that the average recruit plucked from this milieu is basically going to be fucked up in some way. This isn’t necessarily a problem in itself, just a general observation that anyone who’s half-self-aware is going to make, maybe a prejudice. The problem is that, invariably, that this subculture attracts and reproduces a reserve of usually nice, but ultimately credulous, nerds whose present political configuration consists of winning Facebook arguments at best.
Under conditions of intense atomization and imperialist decline, the collective drive for social-class organization is becoming more frantic as it becomes more necessary for identification and basic psychological well-being. The reality is we were left with no institutions, communities, or cultures to call our own, as working class and oppressed people. Essentially we have to search rather blindly for alternatives, or try to cobble together our own, or else we live and die alone as individuals or mere members of a family unit. This is a mass-psychological issue, in spite of its root cause in social alienation and imperialist complacency. The subcultural communist milieu, like a lot of online communities, is in the middle of this psychic tension between atomized personhood and communal life. Usually, members in leadership positions understand this completely.
As I’ve seen personally in a handful of cases, the party leadership will intervene on this kind of dilemma with a more or less ready-made alternative, which is its own internal life. The process of initiation into that life is, however, one of passive acceptance, and the exigencies of internal party life generally emulate the passive investment of time and energy into “Bro, we are Communist, problem?” memes, for example. At face value, this is boring, bog-standard organizational work but the real, practical activity of the party in this moment is, from a more critical perspective, an act of pity for a dying social order, engineered by a cabal of political hucksters flying red flags. The retention of these particular members, their trust, and their unwavering support for the party’s given status quo is basically guaranteed out of this original, conscious act of psychological wish-fulfillment.
The new members scuttle into this social organization, like a fan club, to fulfill a psychological necessity with no concrete way of rendering that necessity into political action nor subjectively transforming the party’s purely social character into an expressly political one. On their own, these people are obviously totally capable of independent and critical thought as individuals. However, this psychological relationship to the party, which is consciously bred by higher membership, and the basic ideological ignorance of collectivity and community, which is reproduced by imperialist mass-culture at large, has a disastrous tendency to strangle independent and critical thought as Marxists, within a self-described Marxist organization.
This, in turn, has a depressing effect on the internal democratic processes that are meant to take place within the party’s centralized body. Ironically, this produces a situation in which members can change any little aspect of the outside world that they choose, within reason, but they’ll never be able to change any little aspect of a party that’s supposed to change the world. Members will be relieved from one point of psychological tension, only to get twisted into another, perhaps worse, one. In real life, this subsequent contradiction is translated into emotional outbursts against external dissent (substantial or not), depression during periods of counterrevolution elsewhere in the world, despair when unexpected events on a world scale seem to deviate from generally optimistic party analyses, or legitimate terror when more pessimistic party analyses are vindicated.
In my mind, the whole point is not that there’s a growing population of atomized individuals coming into the communist movement who are joining these organizations to fulfill a need that imperialism neglects, or even actively destroys; the point isn’t even that the parties are conscious of this and maybe prey on people’s psyches to retain membership, which is politically justifiable; the point is that these parties are incapable of giving its members the power to think, criticize, and act as Marxists, especially within its own processes. Instead, politics is an uncontrollable lever that pulls itself, and two seconds later you watch helplessly as untold thousands die in pain. That’s a drastic failure of party leadership and an irresponsible, immoral misuse of the party itself.
If the party itself isn’t actionable, it can’t be political. If the party isn’t political, every member below a certain threshold is psychologically and intellectually disarmed. They’re essentially at the mercy of whatever “National” says and whatever local does.
Any fucking moron can compare these aforementioned issues to a cult, which we tend to hear all the time. With the exception of the RCP-USA, the parties are no more cultish than marketing teams, only the parties are a magnitude less successful than marketers are at their stated aims. Any organization of people can decompose into an oppressive husk from its original role and function in keeping them together. This is a process that occurs more or less organically when an organization has no demonstrable grounding, direction, or principles, which is a general problem any kind of organizer has to contend with.
The compounding problem with that is democratic centralism is supposed to solve that first, basic problem and it’s supposed to work at least most of the time, with constant activity, a degree of fungibility, and a clear margin of error that it derives from the political-economic realm of the working-class. Without politics in command, both the democratic and centralist aspects will fall away and ossify into a mostly static hierarchy of “some people” who claim to be important authorities, plus maybe a few people who handle the money. This was one fairly key aspect of the ideological crisis within the Soviet bloc, and the rot is clearly present in the big parties.
For the PSL, the constitution demands seven full members to officially start a branch. A candidate has to go through 13 courses of “political education” to become a full member. If you’re lucky and somewhat dedicated, it’ll take 13 weeks to become a PSL member; if not, it could take months due to the fact that you’ll have to attend virtual or physical classes lasting about an hour and a half to two hours on free weekends. While virtual classes are proctored by people from “National”, the physical ones are outlined, taught, and proctored by the locals. This is broadly considered a security measure but that’s just a silly idea for a lot of reasons; it’s basic ideological training stretched over 13 courses, with an emphasis on basic. Rather than its technical utility as a security measure, it’s more useful as a means of keeping membership low, inert, and sustainable. This is reasonable for bigger cities but, outside of them, emerging locals have to fight an uphill battle for recognition and regularized party support. Dues and donations usually go straight to the national treasury, most likely to service the big cities. Additionally, the incentive to actively bring the relatively large communist subculture into the realm of full-membership retention is evident in this situation, even if it’s not issued by directive.
I mean to point out, in part, that even the “big parties” with arguably the most clout are very, very small and they’re probably going to keep being that way. The movement in this country, between X number of disparate organizations, probably numbers about 200-300 active cadres altogether. Numerically, it’s extremely weak. Accordingly, it’s also insignificant as a political force. Ideologically, if cadres aren’t just mistaken for dying members of an obscure historical society, they’re generally going to be impressionable, especially as the movement gets younger over time. Finally, there’s a general consensus that the coming immolation of the planet, as well as a crisis of imperialism, will enable the movement to grow rapidly and exponentially over the next 15 years, in which time younger leadership will replace the old.
Now, certain special individuals will notice something, even if they don’t fully know it; which is that hegemony within the movement itself hasn’t been consolidated by a dominant communist tendency or organization and, relative to the movement’s size and net inexperience, a single person could potentially dominate that hegemonic force itself and develop the party, and the course of political conquest, in the “right” direction during a sweetspot in its growth. This is an opportunity open to everyone two brain cells to put together, obviously, but it has a little place in the minds of people who think they’re playing the long game. Those special individuals are called narcissists or careerists, or both. Unfortunately, they’re generally local leadership or prominent organizers rather than isolated rank-and-file party members.
They’re the cadres who, in the last instance, decide to make somewhat manipulative, and sometimes ethically challenging, decisions in the process of recruitment and internal politicking, as well as consistently draft and send reports to national-level leadership on basically everything that’s going on. These reports are taken as gospel without a contradicting account or complaint, but sometimes with them too. Sometimes a liaison from “National” swings by the local branch chair’s apartment for a few days and just goes home after that; if you’re lucky, they bring some books and make you pay for them.
These liaisons mainly look over the reports, check on local political activity, and tend to feel the room for the internal dynamics of the branch for about an hour. The best I can describe it, it’s like an inspection call from Child Protective Services when an abusive parent actually has their shit together. The ratio of real, institutional power between a national-level organizer, or a member of the Central Committee, and local leadership is so disproportionately small compared to the gap between the rank-and-file and local leadership, putting faith in the party’s own constitutional procedures and codes of discipline is basically just idiot logic for most of the people involved. The party can’t command actually existing trust or faith from its members without clearly earning it. Whether or not local leadership is taking advantage of a disciplinary code built on fucking pinky-promises is immaterial because it will definitely be felt by them, and more perceptive members will feel that, too. In my experience, it’s not great in either case.
As for those cadres as individuals, I haven’t met a single one who didn’t have an educated, professional background, and generally quite a bit older than the people they organized. I would understand a pragmatic decision to support and elevate leadership or solid organizers with business experience in lieu of political experience, in very isolated cases, but this particular demographic seems to be a countrywide phenomenon. To most people, they’re likely very adept organizers; dedicated, energetic, supportive, and whatever. However, if you’re young or look impressionable, they’ll try to trick you and lie to you, either because that’s all they know or they want to feel clever. These people know how to establish their presence in a room, flaunt their confidence, and casually put people down to whittle away at their visible insecurities. In these initial one-on-one meetings, if they aren’t simply ambitious then they’re selling a product dressed up as a Marxist party. This, again, would be fine insofar as the party held some ground for future cadres to build off of, and insofar as cadres had no ambitions or desires that could weather a communist platitude or two.
As for the younger, expanding section of the communist movement, who have essentially slipped into the psychological relationship with the party mentioned earlier, these cadres appear striking and magnetic. Their role and presence within a sufficiently small local is tantamount to the embodiment of the party. Among other things, this is a byproduct of a rote and fetishistic understanding of a party, or even authority at large, coming from a now deeply-rooted aesthetic and memetic process. They would be incapable of consummating this deliberately paternalistic relationship without a strong authority figure to represent and maintain it, even if it wasn’t party line. They then tend to be charmed and railroaded into an ideological, and sometimes intellectual, dependency on such leadership as a matter of the leadership’s personal preferences and attention-seeking, which quickly homogenizes the topic and trajectory of most, if not all, relevant discussions.
At this point, the party branch, as far as it’s developed, is simply a vessel for personalities rather than a tool for political action. It doesn’t act or progress in any direction. There’s a top and a bottom to the organization and it’s been established that they don’t move, or change. Everything is locked in place a mixture of pathological and social pressures. After gaining some supporters, local leadership like this thankfully won’t desire any more power over cadres. Their narrow individualism simply rejects the responsibility of leadership, for the image leadership commands in a social environment where people have very little freedom to do what that environment was designed for.
Every once in a while, we’re forced to respect the history of proletarian revolution, and especially its leaders within that history, before we try to strip it for parts without an ounce of sentimentality. Most people go the extra mile to miss the second part and decide deification is the same thing as respect. No matter what head people stick in a portrait frame, they’ll eulogize about the significance of that particular head and what it did when it was still, really, attached to a living human body. What’s frustrating about this isn’t that it’s some spectacular, ritualistic gesture; it’s frustrating because it’s a very standard ritualistic gesture usually deprived of the prescient and useful content of their ideas, or their application.
The sheer ideological damage of recasting leaders into celebrities, for ourselves and within what exists of an internal communist culture, has played a large part in contributing to fetishist conceptions of socialist power and reproducing a bourgeois outlook on leadership, which is reassembling itself in new organizers and leaders. New popular notions around communism – communists being, of course, flattered by an inkling of popularity without understanding the fucking notions – have turned bourgeois stereotypes inward, and this process has most likely managed to regress and corrupt even basic preconceptions of communist politics by vindicating and championing anti-communist myths as historic victories.
Last year I found out that cartoonish, arbitrary authoritarianism had simply become a part of a younger generation’s expectations of communism, as followers. New waves of opportunists and careerists can and will easily capitalize on this phenomenon, as leadership clearly cut out to live up to the whole range of expectations. They’re invariably the people who are already trying to start more branches of Marxist parties from the fucking Stone Age, that are neither ideologically nor technically equipped to educate members or investigate and discipline abusers. They’re very old party-forms that structurally, if not socially, enable their own periodic crises through arrogant, bureaucratic paper-shuffling and paranoid flailing. Additionally, I don’t think the older cadres can even imagine the world or the people around them getting substantially worse before they die. That’s sad.
As a result, the big parties are likely facing a future of collapse before any movement can hit its stride, but in the meantime, they’ll likely have half of their new branches established as a series of communist-themed master-slave dialectics mediated almost exclusively through Kim Jong Un memes. There is no resolution. Just a guarantee that Daddy Stalin jokes will simply become more real as time goes on.
“YOU KNOW, I THINK ALL I REALLY LEARNED ABOUT COMMUNISM IS IT’S OKAY TO SHOUT AT WOMEN (UNTIL THEY CRY)”
With Trump’s election, no one could fail to anticipate the rapid advance of women and oppressed people eager to explore more militant alternatives to a growing but passive social-democratic movement.
The parties, as well as the “pre-party formations”, hitherto emulating social-democracy in order to capitalize on its political gains, shifted to a melange of “radical” tokenism and revolutionary phrase-mongering. They were nonetheless still haunted by a backwards envy of social-democratic advances and catchphrases that popularized a zombified distortion of “socialism” in a matter of months. The failure of these opportunistic ploys wasn’t just rooted in political miscalculation. It was simply in their underestimation of these particular people – neglected and fetishized by the parties for years – who were probing for organizations that would make good use of their talents and facilitate the development of their political thought and activity, rather than trying to find reasons why social-democracy would fail to do so.
At the time, our organization was flailing for identity and definition; it made a good match for curious groups of newly-minted radical women, most of all. The vast majority of our supporters, as well as the people who claimed to be “members”, were women. This never really changed through the years. I imagine, in a few years from now, there’ll still be women claiming retribution against men in our name, or starting rumors of Communist conspiracies to wipe the bars, the scenes, and the streets clean with gangs of “Red Women.” The constant episodes of myth-making throughout our lifespan betrayed a violent desire for an organization begging to be brought to life, with a clarity of vision that we always lacked. All these things only made an impression on half of the organization at any given time. Being one part of that half, I became deeply preoccupied with trying to integrate women into leadership and membership in broader organizational units.
In nearly 3 years of political experience, I was never consumed so much with a single problem so consistently. Through that process of assembly and development, we eventually established the centrality of women’s oppression, and especially patriarchy at large, in our political outlook and activity. From our class location, our perspective, no other contradiction manifested itself so vividly and frequently, and none could be heightened or exposed with so little traction or resistance. This is where our political line and practice diverged from PSL dramatically.
To illustrate this division: we made an investigation into a founding member after a bout of suspicious activity and a tip from a former friend. Through a sufficient amount of digging and private talks, we discovered he was a serial rapist. Subsequent plans included quietly informing friends and relevant social circles, ambushing him and beating him with bats and pipes, and destroying all avenues for him to access any kind of social life by escalating the levels of exposure. Some stumbles occurred in this process, but within a year we managed to twist him into a half-broken shell of who he was. This was our political line, devised to avoid the pitfalls of Marxist parties that mire themselves in cover-ups instead. The solution was an ultimatum between confession or retaliation.
Now, the PSL isn’t an organization to insert chauvinism into its public image like the CPGB-ML, for example. Its surface is calculated to appeal to all oppressed people, though its “line” on their particular oppressions is rather weak and vacillating. Lacking strong, or even compelling, ideological leadership, its political line is essentially determined by cliques in local leadership and trends in the rank-and-file, whose influence and actions overwhelm whatever’s actually committed to official documents. As a member of a Marxist party, you’ll come to realize this leadership is holding together what’s mostly a paper organization. Long after realizing this myself, I discovered the depths of the disdain that its members had for women, when I was exposed to their humiliating and dehumanizing outbursts against them – cheered by weak minds and encouraged by newfound authority in another political circle. This was simply a feature of their lives, private or political, and, sadly, these outbursts worked to further silence potential challenges and establish a crude dominance over people around them. Thus, the bitches shut their mouths, the men gab to each other about their profound things, and the transaction of power for a stillborn political entity is completed.
What’s more, a very general phenomenon would manifest in their relations to partners, who are viewed and pressured to act as passive wells of empathy and caregiving. For the most part, they’re spared from abuse as not to jeopardize the men’s access to emotional and physical intimacy. While presenting themselves at political functions, they were never asked or encouraged to share their thoughts or speak for themselves. As a homosexual and an all-round “alien queer”, the extension of this uneasy, and pathetic, dynamic to the political sphere was particularly revealing. Even when involved, these women couldn’t be free to act as anything other than Mom 2.0, and this status will actively be reproduced by the same social mechanisms devised to establish political power and influence over others in a more violent fashion.
The purer and more demanding part of myself will ask: what’s Communism without women? What’s Communism without criticism or questions? Can anyone truly be a Communist if they sincerely believe the thread of gristle between their legs entitles them to authority? Within the internal life of the Marxist parties, but not exclusively them, the ideal is rendered meaningless by the idiotic seizures of power-hungry men.
While the Marxist parties might indulge in some gestures towards economistic explanations of women’s oppression, they’re engrossed in a basically virginal outlook. For them, there’s only a handful of palatable “Marxist feminist” theories which contradict each other to such an extent that they can’t form a comprehensive, analytical body that would complement Marxist critique or practice. Wages for housework; the expropriation of women’s property in primary accumulation; elimination of the gendered division of labor, etc., haven’t kept up with the movement of existing social relations and the productive forces, and instead they’ve shielded intellectuals and organizers alike from the challenge of social investigation or ideological transformation.
No one in these parties will concern themselves politically with problems of sex, which isn’t simply just about rape, assault, or abuse but a category encompassing social contradictions that run the risk of indicting the greater part of their membership if exposed. The Marxist party is designed to be a libidinally sterile environment in order to elude this level of exposure and prevent the development of ideas that might reveal, and therefore heighten, these contradictions. As a result, in theory, the party is celibate and encourages its members to mold themselves into bureaucratic monks, which is invariably a purely performative role. This is in sharp contrast to an outside world obsessed with fucking, with an ever-booming sex industry and new generations that have weaned themselves on its products. It’s inevitable that when these two worlds clash, leadership is at a loss to comprehend the basic issue at hand.
Bourgeois and petit-bourgeois organizations have presided over many high-profile “MeToo”-influenced purges with some success, while self-described “proletarian” organizations have failed to follow suit. It’s no surprise that, like any ecclesiastical body, parties have developed a legacy of cover-ups and member shuffling over numerous abuse and rape allegations. Leadership often undercuts attempts to organize and probe these failings, and organizers will sabotage attempts to organize women or, failing that, drag their feet in a petulant move to do so. While lacking a cohesive analysis of gender is a particular issue preventing the transformation of these people and their organizations, ironically it’s the inability of Marxists to clearly criticize their own class that comprises the general problem of developing that analysis in the first place.
Much like the prevailing attitude towards settlerism, superwages, and mass parasitism, patriarchy is often reduced to cheap, feminist sloganeering or ignored altogether. Attempts to develop a critique consistent with dialectical materialism is, as mentioned, discouraged so as to avoid self-indictment in practice. The prospect of any section of the party being equipped with programmatic ideas of any real depth inspires a kind of visceral fear in men, no different from a bourgeois, because it would threaten to expose their ideals as nothing more than a fucking pickup line or a ploy to catch the attention of weaker personalities and wield power over them. There’s nothing more humiliating to the “professional revolutionary” than the public revelation that his dick is occupying the greater part of his intellect. Cutting straight through this insecurity will likely liberate the development of Marxist feminism, by enabling it to turn inward.
Despite its depth, all existing theory on the subject betrays a mode of thought and poverty of practice burdened with layers upon layers of abstraction. Wittig’s essays on materialist feminism have been a recent point of controversy for broadly exposing the category of “woman” as a class formation, brought about by an antagonistic, exploitative relation to men; Fredrici’s theories have expanded on the gendered division of labor, and labor appropriation, into the ensemble of social reproduction; Ghandy’s proletarian feminism has been appropriated by the Maoists here as a broad alternative to “eclectic” feminisms and as more or less a convenient defense against the “antagonistic” character of the contradiction between men and women. The more academic schools of feminist, queer, and critical theory can also be useful for analysis, despite their subjectivism and idealism.
Any of these critiques can eventually prove to be acceptable to any political circle, in time, but a revolution in the dominant critique itself will never substitute for the practical achievement of organizing a circle capable of embodying the critique in the real world, and expanding upon it. This is evidently a dangerous and intimidating concept to a lot of people, not just men; which is all the more reason to appreciate and encourage it.
Fighting patriarchy, in sum, isn’t simply a matter of reacting to its excesses but actively penetrating its thoroughgoing parasitism. Women predominate what exists of the proletarian class in the imperialist nations. Typical patriarchal relations have progressed to a point in which they are the dominant wage-earners in their households, compounding extractive relationships to their partners. These proletarian women are increasingly being reduced to a subhuman status by political reaction, to say nothing of the mounting efforts to convert transwomen into corpses.
As is, working-class women will happily present a number of progressive-democratic demands to so-called revolutionary organizations, given the chance to speak. “A group where we can talk to each other”; “a way to defend ourselves”; “an outlet to broadcast our ideas”; “a way to circulate information quietly,” etc.. The dumb tragedy of it all is that the Marxist parties could easily provide for these demands but they can’t, because they never think to ask them in the first place.
VOMIT RUNNING DOWN MY JACKET SLEEVE; OR, DON’T TELL ANYONE I DON’T GIVE A FUCK ABOUT DENG XIAOPING
When I was thinking about how to structure this section, I wanted to establish how “Dengism” developed both as a term and, later, what became a small phenomenon. I realized that it was now taken for granted as a crude label for a prominent section of the “Marxist-Leninist” left. There was a time when it was just another piece of bad Maoist propaganda, and there was even a time when the conflict between Maoists and “Marcyites” was a pretty distant possibility, though I anticipated it happening sooner or later. Hilariously, this process spiraled out into a series of open confrontations, against the party, and political maneuvers on the part of party leadership, against the Maoists, that prefigured the ones our organization found itself on the receiving end of.
In the broad scheme of things, the development of this whole phenomenon was underwhelming and hard to take seriously, but it was something that perfectly encapsulated everything wrong with ideological struggle in the parties and broader movement. Back then, I thought it was something idiotic I’d been forced to take seriously but I later realized it belied greater ideological rifts than its Cultural Revolution-style stagedressing and inflated sense of self-importance implied. Given my experiences and the prevailing situation, I’d say that the “popular masses” will never take the movement seriously, but it isn’t their responsibility to do so; unfortunately, it’s the responsibility of Communists, ourselves, to address our stupidities self-consciously and realistically without dressing up our embarrassment in past glories.
Ideological struggle isn’t allowed to “work” in the same way that it was during the 20th century. The existence of any class organization implies an ideological line and a political one; the dominant idea clearly exercises an influence on political action, and subsequent political action informs the further development of that idea. At certain junctures, the advancement of the political requires the transcendence of the idea. Strategies have to be transformed in order to meet new tactics suitable to a higher stage of development. The activity of a bourgeois-democratic revolution can’t complete the tasks of a proletarian one, for example. Up until the Soviet Union crashed and burned, and the internet was popularized, these struggles progressed in a more or less linear fashion, with trends and ideas clearly represented by individuals or groups in the same organization or contending ones. This is the format we’ve come to expect, simply because it’s sensible, translatable, and adaptable.
The actual, non-linear, and rhizomatic network of shiftless discussions on social media, that form the contemporary basis for the development of ideas, are something entirely different from the paper-based exchanges that structured the debates of the past. While an argument might be formed and expressed clearly in an essay, calculating the constellation of data-points that form a broad consensus on a particular argument, among thousands of people, is beyond basic human comprehension. Greater factors, like algorithmic bubbles and self-reinforcement, also contribute to the conception of half-baked ideas by leaving them unchallenged. The rapid cycles of discussion will generally out-pace the average observer’s ability to process and reflect on them, and the idea can easily come into the ownership of cliques and in-crowds. By the time it’s generalized, the premises and definition of the idea aren’t intended to be questioned; they are simply understood.
This is a totally memetic process. Sometimes people will assert ideas without an argument behind them, sometimes an argument without ideas, even against their better judgment. They’re so insecure whenever they’re criticized or questioned on those points, since the sole compelling reason for how they came to those beliefs is, “Because we all agreed that it was established.” Even if it’s relatively easy to explain why an idea came about, attempting to understand how it came about is almost inconceivable.
The popular emergence of this phenonmenon is why Trump’s political successes hit the liberal commentariat like a rampaging dump truck in 2016; why there were attempts to indict Facebook, as if its code was anymore responsible for the election than Gutenberg was for the publication of Mein Kampf. “Trump won because White America is full of fascists”; “That day I noticed that everything was happening all at once.” Party leadership is bound to be in the same position soon. While the socialization of the technology that made these things possible is taken for granted, the reciprocal effect that technology has had on basic social processes isn’t taken into account whatsoever.
Nearly a decade ago, these were fundamental changes to social engagement and culture that no one could get off their minds. Nominal “left-libertarians” started lauding an emerging, consensus-based “mass democracy” with no leaders, hierarchies, or parties, derived from the apparent liberties and egalitarianism of social media; Facebook seemed to mobilize thousands of demonstrators on a dime to fight inequality and start revolutions; and, with the development of a globe-spanning social network that looked like it afforded all ideas equal value, big-tent strategies were implemented. Within a number of years, the intellectual leaders retired into “digital party” coalitions – collapsed or collapsing in on the weight of their contradictions – or the houseflipping business; the revolutionaries turned out to be fascists with State Department-funded PR teams; and the big-tents fragmented along political, class, national, and gender lines once everyone realized that they were living in a society. Today, their energetic, counter-cultural tech-optimism is the exclusive reserve of Taco Bell commercials and degenerate billionaires who pump their veins full of teenagers’ blood to live a little longer in their own paradise they’ve made everyone else’s hell. At the end of this episode, great humanity has come full circle to the horrifying conclusion that was only evident before our critical mass event: the internet is shit for despicable morons – please get the fuck out.
Recalling these events is crucial: on one hand, they provided me with far more reasons to appreciate the merit of Marxism-Leninism as a political theory, even as an anarchist, in spite of the reputation of the parties; on the other, they depict events that did, objectively, occur in the real world and I didn’t imagine them, even if I fail to demonstrate the influence of the period on political discourse and social exchange.
After over a decade of uninterrupted technological progress and social engineering, we are essentially data harvesters. Consumption of information, like Freire’s bank-deposit mode of education, is replacing what would be a process of study and reflection. We convince ourselves we can process this information faster than we actually can and we’re encouraged to respond to them, seriously and intellectually, as quickly as we can manage. With content mills churning out millions of videos and millions of images everyday, and millions of words spat out into thousands of discussions reproducing themselves every single hour, time seems to move slower but we only get clumsier and more impatient under this illusion. Any doubts that this internal culture would be any less homogenous and totalizing than the outer world’s have long passed. The pursuit of minor clout in small and carefully curated circles rewards speed and strength of opinion more than the content of ideas. For each of the many constellations of data-points comprising scores of consensuses, every data-point comprises a comment or suggestion each as inane and functionally worthless as the last; of every constellation, there is an idea that will eventually be crystallized; of every one thousand of those constellations, there is an idea that will pass on to a higher sequence of dialectics, transmitted upwards into the sensuous realm. Sometimes I overhear things so alien and baffling in the moment they briefly dropkick me into a dissociative state. This happened to me the first time I heard party members anxiously gushing over Deng Xiaoping.
The existence of a party is contingent on not only the maintenance of its ideological line, but its continuous advancement. Its ideological line is the core expression of its class character and the struggle for the proletarian line comprises the highest activity of a party’s intellectual life. No ideological struggle, no intellectual life; no intellectual life, no proletarian class character; no proletarian class character, shit party. From the highest levels to the lowest, the parties are intellectual deserts. They have no infrastructure to encourage, or even support, ideological struggle. Subsequently, their intellectual output and more critical arguments are exported to Facebook groups and Twitter.
This would just be a minor issue if the leadership understood and kept serious track of trends in the lower levels, while intervening to encourage study, debates, or discussions on those subjects. They don’t: criticism isn’t accepted at meetings, rarely between its levels, and, when it arises, debate is discouraged as a waste of time. The leadership is more interested in intervening to crush struggles over ideological line when they get tired of hearing about them.
Apart from a handful of mostly mediocre books written by senior figures and national leaders, their only intellectual prizes are their monthly newspapers, which feature accounts and analyses as decrepit and clunky as their medium. Even as I was distributing and dropping papers, I had no idea who these were for, apart from art school grads who I discovered liked them more as status symbols than anything else. They were never eye-catching enough to pick up, nor insightful enough to keep reading. I’m under the impression that the unactivated “masses” are generally intelligent and psychologically resistant to hokey bullshit, and they need more than an outdated format and a didactic headline hook like “What does North Korea really want?” to inspire any interest in socialism. I inspected them from every angle I could think of and they always seemed dry, unoffensive, and dull-edged.
When I used to wait for dive bars to open and set up for punk shows, I would hate-read copies of Slingshot I picked up on the street. Every section was a fucking outrage, each page as obnoxious and self-indulgent as the next, and the whole zine was a monument to an anarchism that had reduced itself to a lifestyle guide – something that inspired more rage in me at the time than fascism. Nevertheless, my eyes never left it until I was finished. From a propaganda standpoint, I think if a product of creative, intellectual work can’t manage to be either informative or inspiring it should at least be capable of pissing off the opposition. The worst thing I could say about a political piece meant for the outside world is that it wouldn’t provoke anything but indifference from people who already despise us.
The Red Guards, as much as they’re mocked and derided, seem to understand that editorial standards aren’t didactic principles; that the central goal of revolutionary press, no matter the medium, is primarily agitation. Their news articles are consist of embellishments, questionable narratives, intense rhetoric, and the occasional breakthrough of investigative journalism. The object is to present the people they organize and the Shining Light of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism as the protagonists of accounts and narratives that they command. They would have to rely on these articles to reflect reality to insofar as they serve as a practical measure of strength and influence, but they could otherwise embellish and twist reality against their opponents with a strong narrative that would be difficult to refute.
This was demonstrated during an episode in which the RGA staged a public confrontation with the PSL over their implied enrollment of McKinley Forbes as a party member. A year before, Forbes broke away from RATPAC-ATX, alleging they attempted to convert her to Maoism and ignored her nut allergy while she was on board for their emergency housing program. RATPAC-ATX then claimed she appropriated radical politics to serve her new career in the tech industry, which made her a gentrifier as well. Later on, the RGA revealed that an investigation, with some random but apparently established Hoxhaist party serving as impartial observers, validated the credibility of a series of leaks that implicated her in a handful of rapes and sexual assaults. A visit from Gloria LaRiva and some evidence of association with the party led the RGA to announce a picket against the PSL at one of their events.
In a fairly predictable turn of events, the picket was dumb; the Maoists were rambunctious and irritating, the PSL members were confused and scared. A table was flipped, or jarred, depending on who wants to tell the truth when. The PSL’s response was launched within an hour or two, filled with every possible cliché that a party’s ever launched against sectarians, as well as anyone accusing their members of sexual assault, since the late 70’s. The Red Guards’ following statement dressing down the PSL for their overreaction and cynical arsenal of cliches practically wrote itself. The bulk of Marxist-Leninists were appalled by what happened but the RGA had quickly and easily took command of the weak, prevailing narrative to appear more intimidating and graceful than they were, while presenting a stronger case for their own competence over the party’s, which was clearly what they were working towards. Anarchists and ultra-leftists thought it was hilarious, since the Red Guards did the work of breaking some unwritten rules of the organized “left” that were just waiting to be broken.
These actions imply a requisite level of ideological development that sometimes exceeds the parties’, and a constituent creative drive that’s derived from the active intellectual life of the collectives. As crude as they are, the Red Guards achieved a dynamic between their cells that enabled them to critique and build off of each other’s theoretical documents and summations. They engaged in internal debates that transformed their outlooks and political lines. They worked to turn their mass organizations into reserves for recruiting new cadres. They started an independent theoretical journal to expand upon open and closed struggles. Then they established a news service that clearly and concisely embodies their ideology and politics, broadcasting propaganda on almost a daily basis. In sum, the Maoists have built an independent, self-sufficient network of creative and intellectual output that the Marxist parties are fundamentally incapable of accomplishing.
All this allows the Maoists to advance their ideas and experiences, such as they are, in a more or less comprehensible, linear, and dialectical fashion. The presence of a strong, dominant idea uniting their collectives allows them to face opposition directly, even when dumb mistakes are made, and accomplish certain political goals using tactics they’ve developed themselves, no matter how much Gonzaloite dogma they believe they’re following. There is ideological leadership, ideological struggle, intellectual life, and continuous development constantly working within the collectives.
On the other hand, while there’s some natural presumption of a dominant idea, that party leadership seems to draw a lot of confidence from, leadership in fact has no consistent grip on ideological leadership. There’s a basic insecurity at the heart of the party’s political line due to this phenomenon. The party’s leading bodies can’t be challenged internally or externally, through criticism or total opposition. As was the case with the Maoists and a group of anarchists who ambushed a branch in ABQ a year or two earlier, even when it would be very easy to reasonably dismiss the ideas and actions coming from the opposition, they concluded that opposition could only be a COINTELPRO-inspired operation; a slew of women claiming to have been abused or assaulted by their members could only be wreckers; internal critics could only be splitters and also wreckers; and external critics are simply always wrong because the party’s ideological line is the party exists and the party is right.
This tends to be inversely reflected into the party’s Russian capitalist-subsidized radio show, where one party leader frequently shares airtime with hard-right “anti-imperialists,” which is sometimes characterized as evidence of an imaginary “red-brown alliance.” In fact, party leadership thinks they can embrace all the colors and hues of the fucking rainbow through their anti-war coalition, simply by existing and being right. Having airtime dedicated to suit-and-tie fascists and their “anti-war” bullshit is, legitimately, something they believe they’re doing to score points with the right, just like they do with liberals; the main problem is that a cheap rightist appearing on a nominally leftist podcast, calling himself “anti-war” or “anti-imperialist,” is a politician who knows how to take advantage of a failed Trotskyite book club. The leadership is being played for what little political capital they have and they’re actually that fucking stupid.
This stupidity and insolvency is ultimately a result of the dissonance in leadership that consequently pushes the development of ideas outward, only for those ideas to overwhelm party members and can potentially trigger a bottom-up sea change in the overall orientation and direction of the party, which would leave an idea completely maladapted to its circumstances. To this extent, party members can affect the party in some way, but it was because the strange case of Deng Xiaoping didn’t threaten the body politic with potential conflict or threaten short-term losses that national and local leadership didn’t tamper with its growth.
I attempted earlier to explain how Deng Xiaoping became the subject of adulation so quickly. Simply, it was an arbitrary process; the same way memes have usually formed, developed, and spread. It was only possible in our era. There was no reason to love Deng Xiaoping as an individual, no rational explanation for a movement that hasn’t received so much as a fucking box of free pamphlets from China since 1985. The party itself had no links to the CPC.
Deng Xiaoping was only ever remarkable for being a singularly talented, right-wing politician who rallied the support of bureaucrats, capitalists, and technicians, systematically dismantled the Cultural Revolution, and reintroduced capitalism through a series of rapid, dramatic reforms that was cheered on by the imperialist powers. Before now, he was simply an ambiguous figure to most of the Marxist-Leninist left. The reforms were seen as drastic and destructive but as a necessary concession to imperialism. The tremendous economic growth that followed was treated with caution, due to the poverty, oppression, and bloated capitalist class that erupted from it.
Within the party itself, existing documents stressed defending the “actually existing socialist” countries but also emphasized criticizing capitalist development. The only book in the PSL’s catalog about China rested its hopes on a nebulous “left-wing” of the CPC. Sam Marcy even criticized the arrest of the Gang of Four as an unprincipled crackdown on the left of the CPC. There was no continuity to these ideas, only the contradictions inherent in defending “actually existing socialism”.
In defending it so long, witnessing the rise of China and the perpetual decline of their own party, people had lost patience in a definition of socialism outside of its largest contemporary “proponent.” If China was socialist, socialism was China; nothing else had evidently succeeded. The Chinese revolution brought about a new stage of socialism by strategically implementing capitalism; and a new era by strategically implementing imperialism. China was a socialist state that had managed to produce a stable middle class and all those billionaires, who were even socialists, too. There was no incentive in advancing “Marxism-Leninism” without following its clearly most advanced, experienced practitioner. This proceeded from a simple, mechanical logic.
Deng Xiaoping became such a phenomenon because the actually existing leadership of the party was incapable of teaching its membership how to oppose and fight Maoism. Imperialist China became the model for the dictatorship of the proletariat because the leadership couldn’t articulate a compelling vision of socialism. The Chinese Communist Party became the sole inspiration for the membership because the stolid, worthless hierarchy produced by the leadership’s superfluity could no longer justify their elitism or inaction – which it even emulated down to its superficial Neoconfucian mantras. If they were accomplishing nothing, at least Xi Jinping was. To deepen and elaborate the paternalistic nature of their own party, they collectively looked to China’s apolitical, chauvinist state and found an opulent reflection.
When their real estate bubble bursts, and all its capitalist sectors erupt at once, the CPC will strike all Marxist lingo from its mindnumbing, meaningless rhetoric, replace the “Communist” in their name with “Chinese,” and remove “core socialist values” from its constitutional and theoretical documents as the last ideological buffer from becoming just another imperialist state with a nameless bureaucracy full of adjuncts, who do nothing and own considerably less than they do now. Every time a Chinese manager opens fire on Zambian miners, the dying light of a scorched industrial wasteland will fall on the withered face of a PSL member. “It’s happening, it’s just like Xi,” he’ll say, a single tear falling down his cheek. “They’re going to put ‘Communist’ back into the Chinese Party of China!”
I started studying the Cultural Revolution, up until the early years of Hu Jintao, just to figure out what I thought about Deng Xiaoping, shortly after the whole thing came to my attention. I split with the general consensus when I realized that if any number of people around me found themselves in leadership roles, they would be the first ones shot as traitors by the Shanghai Red Guards.
SCARY STORIES OF HEGEMONY TO TELL IN THE DARK
Harper’s columnist Donald Hughes recently reiterated one of Althusser’s points of comparison between Marx and Machiavelli: they had both observed that it was power that was the central, commanding force of the political realm. Hughes, an outspoken member of the “left” commentariat based in the Canadian social-fascist “New Democratic Party,” highlighted this comparison in order to demonstrate how bourgeois political supremacy, and its cultural hegemony, enabled its political establishment to not only incapacitate progressive, “socialist” states economically, but also to contrive and command a general narrative for the impossibility of socialist rule. Without this command, socialists could never successfully popularize the argument that the successes of socialism were being directly sabotaged by these kinds of economic regimes, or that the prevailing narratives to substantiate their “failures” were being engineered throughout the whole process.
Anyway, without the conquest for political power and the subsequent command of centralized power in the State, neither the rising bourgeoisie in Machiavelli’s time nor the proletariat in Marx’s could meet the challenge of ruling new societies and, especially, developing and spreading its ideas into the heights of cultural hegemony. The early Communist League was a vengeful, unscrupulous entity that intended to capitalize on a combination of Jacobin sentimentality, neglected bourgeois and petit-bourgeois demands, and proletarians’ intelligent militancy in order to command strategic positions in the inevitable uprisings of Western and Central Europe at the time. Though they were obviously out of their depth, the leadership of the Communist League, later the Communist Party, attempted to cast itself as the Machiavelli to the proletarian movement’s “Prince”. The legacy of this relationship, between the “vanguard” and the “mass element,” was so impressive to a man called Tony Gramsci that he converted it into an extended metaphor in The Modern Prince, a piece of work with a reputation that continues to elude its actual usefulness to this very day.
Marx and Engels’ work up to the publication of the Communist Manifesto reveals two angry, sarcastic young adults who are consumed with their own materialist outlooks and often violent frustrations with the socialist movement in Europe. To supporters and detractors at the time, Marx and Engels were both figures within the movement who consistently embodied their conclusion that the beginning and end of “all social sciences” would be “bloody struggle or extinction.” Even without the supposedly “dark” and “authoritarian” turn that some people (social-democratic idiots and academics) perceive in Marx’s later writings, “young Marx” was no less consumed with the seemingly obvious notion that the question of proletarian revolution was a question of raw, political power – rather than some fetishistic attachment to radical-democratic ideals, or something. The Communist League, later the Party, and even later the First International, all lived up in their historical identity and activity to one of Lenin’s old phrases: “Without power, all is illusory.”
What Machiavelli reveals to the “young prince” is that his ascent and rule is predicated on an understanding of a social-political apparatus that can only be navigated according to an outlook that will transcend his own particular sensibilities. Just because we’re right, doesn’t incline our rightness to power; just because we appear powerful or authoritative, doesn’t incline our power or authority to maintenance, reproduction, or expansion; just because our ideals are just, progressive, or kind, doesn’t incline their realization to just, progressive, or kind methods. In relation to Marx, what he anticipated, or simply contrived, was that the proletariat would resolve the underlying contradiction between the “young prince’s” practical rise and his sensibilities through materialist dialectics and, among other practices, criticism and self-criticism. This is a key component of what makes historical and dialectical materialism an important hypothesis, and one of the many hallmarks that its continued – scientific! – validity rests on.
This all might seem obvious and redundant, maybe even as weak and self-indulgent as Althusser’s little book on the subject. However, in the “sensuous realm of experience,” these fundamental concepts haven’t played out neatly or even according to their premises. Our ideologues, no matter the sect or tendency, still haven’t grasped the opening conceit of Machiavelli’s The Prince that even led to its interpretation as a satire, much less internalized the level of self-consciousness that Marx expressed and imparted onto the social-historical character of the “proletariat.” In essence, they’ve embodied a worse-case-scenario of “vanguardism,” as victims of their own propaganda.
One thing I want to emphasize is that no one takes themselves seriously, in this movement; no one takes each other seriously; and, from group to group, no political entity takes another seriously. Even if their sincerity is bluntly asserted, there will always be an excuse that serves to deflate this quality. This results in a kind of cross-pollination of mutual indifference and reinforcement. The Maoists thrash another “Marcyite” picket, and within a matter of days it’ll simultaneously be the biggest thing that happens to both of them and all the more reason to discount its significance. From the outside looking in, even the most agitating events are totally ridiculous and impertinent. At the beginning and end of these narrative arcs, we have to admit that the present situation is a total no man’s land to us and the movement. We’ve nullified each other into equal irrelevance on equal terms; consequently throwing our cultivated sense of urgency and self-importance into an irrevocable crisis.
When the general consensus on our relationship to reality, to the productive forces, is that there’s little to no place for us except on the margins of social-democratic discourse, there’s also the attendant realization that the political stakes are so low that experimentation and playing at petty power-politics is essentially acceptable. Everyone will find themselves doing this at some point, whether it takes form as overblown theatrics or as underhanded gestures in events-planning. When the whole internal culture of the movement is held together by something as invisible and tenuous as a social contract, it’s only inevitable that a search for new answers will start beyond its terms. For all our organization’s own transgressions against the organized “left,” all the threats that we were going to be isolated never actually came to pass, since the pillars of cheap, moralistic codes that the movement was allegedly built on never actually existed. For all the antipathy we inspired in the process, it never proved an obstacle to the practical work that we wanted to do. When basically nothing that holds on paper is true, then everything that holds in reality is possible. This kind of Nietzschean proposition is the point of departure for dogma and the beginning of relative freedom in the real, power-oriented political terrain.
Any organization’s identity, between classes, national formations, smaller social groupings, etc., is a direct expression of the dialectic between its self-consciousness and self-activity. Where “self-activity” is what it’s doing to itself, “self-consciousness” is the degree to which it can comprehend those actions and, ultimately, their effects. While origins of this dialectic are derived wholly from material conditions predating its existence as a corporate unity as well as its self-division, the internality of the contradiction is principal to forces lying outside of its internal life. In Hegel’s philosophy, this is a purely mental “notion” that develops self-consciousness in order to attain “Reason,” to resolve the hitherto mounting contradictions of its own self-generating, ontological problems; in Marx, it’s a class that develops consciousness of itself in order to struggle for itself politically, to resolve the contradictions of hitherto existing class societies.
In order to acquire any form of political power, an organization will have to formulate a number of demands for itself – in essence, to develop an identity distinct from other formations – and be able to literally fight for them. This basically enables a class, for example, to transform from a “class-in-itself,” an identifiable social phenomenon and category, into “class-for-itself,” a self-identifying phenomenon and social force. To really put this difference into perspective: the thing-in-itself would be totally extant, but an object in an object-based realm; while the thing-for-itself would comprehend and declare, in its words and actions, “I am both subject and object, affecting an object-based realm.” In the ideological and political spheres, this collective comprehension and declaration, in various forms, and its recognition in contradiction with the existence of other formations is the historical mark of a class and the demarcation of its class struggle.
All this philosophizing bullshit has to do with something that I’ve alluded to in previous sections but haven’t really elaborated on. The fact is that the contemporary “communist movement” isn’t best understood as a cohesive political movement with an established historical legacy; it isn’t even that helpful to think of it as a “vanguard” apart or attached to or from a “mass element”. The “movement” is more or less an attempt by sections of a predominately settler-based working class, and subsections of newer proletarians, to identify themselves with the nearest hope for social cohesion and political ascension. The types of people that communist organizations are absorbing are wildly different from their late 20th century counterparts, in that they’re largely concentrated in some of the lowest-paid sectors of the country’s labor market.
Unlike the emerging social-democrats, they’re rarely concerned with quietly reviving a “middle-class” standard of living they lived to see, because they never did. The imperialist gravy train typically had left a generation before them, rather than within the span of theirs. Instead of becoming students, the advance knowledge of student loan regimes have left them workers. Despite the best attempts of Soviet liberals, Browderites, and Chinese capitalists, Communism slowly crawled out of its grave mainly due to the shifting priorities of imperialism and the present generation’s inheritance of stagnant, apartheid-era labor infrastructure, or what little remains of it.
The new wave of Communism is primarily a cultural phenomenon, like the radical Anabaptists who preceded the Chartists. They’ve funneled themselves into nominally political organizations with preexisting cultures, political activities, and systematic demands, which have largely gone past their expiration date by at least two decades. Barring a few key examples, their late 20th century counterparts were generally students and professionals of middle-class stock who either aged out of working-class status, when this was still possible, or ascended into the growing, mass-consumerist bureaucracy during deindustrialization. They were the products of a more stable and successful imperialist state, which managed to both educate and secure them in a more or less rationalized social order that found ways of presenting ready-made futures for them to occupy – sometimes literally. In this way, rejecting imperialism was fresher, harder, and sometimes more dangerous at the time; it was a conscious, political move into a near-unknown. More than anything, they were new and confused by their own political footing, especially as the ground they were standing on eroded into an atmosphere of apathy, sabotage, and corruption. The “pale-face SDS motherfuckers” of that era were anything but a product borne of circumstance; today’s cynical “precariat” (what a fucking worthless term) and their subconscious drive towards militant politics, however, are nothing but products of the absence of an alternative.
As the “main ideologue,” or intellectual leadership, of our organization, I always struggled to express the central idea that we weren’t just “communists,” or simply cutting figures of Lenin or whoever, but mainly proletarians attempting to develop our political consciousness and assert our interests collectively. If anything, we were more “proletarians” actively occupying this class position than “communists” actively fulfilling a developed political program in a vanguard-type role. Alongside emphasizing the idea that we had a right to be more critical of the organized “left,” this was an attempt to put the responsibility of developing class consciousness on ourselves in a process that would be more consistent with contemporary experiences and conditions. Practice would proceed from its psychological and cultural moorings into political action more quickly and accurately than it would in a party. Most importantly, the question of our identity would be resolved at a basic level the moment we were working around any other organization. This was confirmed and demonstrated beautifully on exactly one occasion, which I desperately tried to grasp and articulate as everything went to five different kinds of shit.
Nevertheless, the elusive answer to the fundamental question of who the revolutionary class is, is “us.” After decades of neocolonialism and movementism, the national formations, communities, tribes, and smaller interest groups of the past have fractured along a more or less typical class lines. While still alive and kicking, settlerism provides a much more inclusive kind of garrison that isn’t immediately reducible to its old, raw sense of white supremacy. Taken altogether, the difference between the lower reaches of the petit-bourgeoisie and near-dead lumpenproletarians comprises the modern proletariat – new, old, half-made, or barely living – relinquished from the complicated ordeal of juggling “progressive national bourgeoisies,” even if the necessity for national liberation and decolonization has only intensified. In varying degrees of magnitude, this includes “us,” our Communist ideology, and the greater part of our movement, though its organizations are scarcely capable of representing us or fighting for our interests. This basic, political incapacitation points to the expressions of a class “in-itself” rather than a class “for itself.” We’ve just exchanged Anabaptist hymns on the universal equality of man for print-outs of Foundations of Leninism, indulging a more avowedly materialistic kind of mystification.
On the other hand, the more generous contradictions of imperialist decadence and mass parasitism have eroded the hitherto leading roles of petit-bourgeois intellectuals and their inharmonious, spiritual lag by introducing more accessible avenues for intellectual development – even discovery by happenstance, somewhat. The monopoly position of the 20th century political god-kings has been damaged beyond repair, which has had the effect of distinguishing this era from the last. Being accosted by the pathetic, dying morons manning the counter at the RCP-USA’s Harlem bookstore, trying to reel the absolutely destitute into their backroom to watch a 45-minute DVD presentation about Bob Avakian, is an object lesson in that decrepit regime and the functional impossibility of its emergence in the present day.
The elite groupthink of these organizations once dazzled their followers and hangers-on with their dimming achievements and pure, intellectual charm; even more dazzling was the promise of leading an imminent revolution. A handful of these groups managed to allure a selection of wannabe revolutionaries, boxing them into years of sustained, programmatic torture in order to mold them into lifelong servants of their megalomaniacal horseshit. Other groups were systematically attacked over questions of line by karate-wielding cadres, forced self-criticisms became cartoonish screaming matches, gays and lesbians were shut up in closets and beaten for “lifestyle reformism,” and their self-aggrandizements eventually jeopardized, then alienated, their remaining international contacts – essentially cutting themselves off from the outside world. Then the drugs wore off, or the dubious pride of not having done any did, and the aging remnants were forced to justify the sunken cost of a completely wasted life or throw the years away.
The present can’t afford the enthusiasm or optimism of the past that led to those narrow, violent mistakes. This is basically evident from a prevailing slogan like, “12 years to reverse climate change, or apocalypse,” over 1970-something’s “Learn about our Chairman, the most dangerous revolutionary and also most oppressed man in the country.” We have no independent political bodies of our own, no cultural institutions, and, at the end of the day, very little in the way of a historical legacy to base ourselves off of. The project of conquering political power is basically totalizing. In the twilight stage of capitalism, what galvanizes the revolutionary masses? What will lead them to march with their feet?
For one, it’s the self-identification with their class, in itself, through social organization and, secondly, the ability and extent to which social organization can represent and struggle for the aims and interests of their class, for itself. The social organization that’s able to meet conditions head-on, translate its ideas and practices into the language of its class, and generate the various organisms to provide for its class’s psychological, cultural, political, and social needs, is the organization that will lead a class into a new social rule. While the Marxist parties are rigidly political organizations, and their membership is largely attached to the psychological and cultural dimensions of the “proletarian party,” they’ll fail to live up to these expectations. If they only look outside of their apparatus for class consciousness, they’ll never account for their own self-consciousness as a class organization. As it is, they don’t do this and the class-identity of the Marxist parties is a fucking mess.
I previously mentioned that the parties kind of have a tendency to tail the social-democratic movement from the “left,” to present themselves as a militant palliative to growing reformist trends. This relies on appearing more intelligent, coherent, and progressive than petit-bourgeois left-reformists in public and in semi-private settings. Local arrays of politically-neutered NGOs provide an audience to win over from the left-liberals but, in my experience, these are consistently neutral organizations that will be appreciative of any help they can get, especially when there are a number of “politicals” competing to win the favor or support of their members and communities.
The few pitched political battles against their better-funded, petit-bourgeois opposition will occur in broader coalition work, which is one of a handful of opportunities to clearly expound their views or exercise any political influence on relevant actions outside of anti-war pickets. After a while, it’ll become apparent that the party is incapable of leveraging its way into any small position of authority without relying on the immediate presence of petit-bourgeois misleadership. Leadership intends to make these groups its foil and ends up becoming one of its appendages. This tactic is pretty much repeated endlessly, as if trying hard enough will somehow enable the leadership to fail upwards at some point. Their inability to represent themselves as an independent political force betrays a kind of strategic reality that they would have no fucking idea how to handle themselves if they achieved independence or dominance in the small arenas they find themselves relegated to. This is actually one of the many political buffers preventing nascent branches from going directly to people and speaking to them on their own terms.
With regard to more radical organizations comprised of working and oppressed people, the basic strategic plan is that they should be absorbed into the party. Unlike the stereotypical Trotskyite tactics of embedding members to occupy strategic points within smaller organizations, party constitutions support a programmatic conversion of the majority of the “mass organization” into party members, triggering a binding vote from above to establish it as a formal party organization. This acts more like a spreading virus than entryism, and it saves its leadership the difficult work of juggling members across the appropriate organizations and ensuring they make the right political decisions in their climb to the top. Since this process rests on the assumption that a mass org has no political line, and no real qualities as well-defined as the party’s, it’s hard to find fault in the party for essentially filling it all out with their own. Usually, at the point that this idea even comes up, the party and the mass org will probably have a good, close relationship, and it would be difficult in its own right to separate the members themselves. This is the position that The Red Nation found themselves in when they discovered that a member of the PSL sexually assaulted one of their members, which led to the justifiable impression that the party was attempting to take them over.
That process is a lot less of a smooth move when a member of a mass org is singled out by local leadership as a leading personality, consciously plucked out of a personal crisis to get drunk, and flattered relentlessly in an attempt to get them on board with the quiet transition of their self-described autonomous organization into the party’s national youth wing, without the knowledge or support of any of its other founding members. Because that was some fucking dumbass shit and they knew it. The main political objective behind this is basically to claim political work as their own, simply enveloping it under their banners; it’s less a matter of whether integrating these organizations into the party machinery would allow them to develop to their full potential, since the party barely even has the funds or the manpower to sustain itself.
The parties do, however, maintain a fairly untouched foothold on fast-response anti-war pickets, which are useful for approximating and, in the best of times, engaging with local people who might be anti-imperialists. The political impotence of these actions are pretty much clear at this point, and it isn’t due to the prominence of the pro-interventionist “left.” The realities of permanent warfare, of individual military actions encompassing only a single fabric in the rich, global tapestry of imperialist atrocities, guarantee their impotence. A strong anti-war movement might’ve kept the draft away, or helped flatten the popularity of ground invasions, but warfare is adaptable in ways that an anti-war movement can’t possibly be. Ever since million-strong pickets failed to carry Bush and Blair directly to the fucking Hague, the anti-war movement has been structurally incapable of keeping up with a new emphasis on aerial bombardment, active occupation, proxy forces, private military companies, military exercises, and any number of “soft power” tactics. The reactive nature of any protest against one act of aggression will seem arbitrary compared to any number of acts committed in the same hour, which tends to pressure the party to come up with reasons to explain why some particular victim of aggression demands support. This is also rooted in a general superstition that the anti-war movement itself will compel the vast military apparatus itself to collapse, like a Super Vietnam 2.0 scenario or something.
The reactive and purely defensive character of their anti-war outlook has the unfortunate habit of turning anti-imperialism on its head, in a way. They get so comfortable with the significance of defending countries against a seemingly unstoppable, imperialist war machine from the heart of imperialism itself that they’re incapable of anticipating any kind of scenario where Amerika might not find itself on top. This is one of the reasons a lot of people seem to think there’s no such thing as “inter-imperialist conflict”: their outlook precludes the failure of permanent warfare at a point when they’ve accomplished so little strategically, and it helps that they don’t see China or Russia as imperialist powers in their own right. All of that was put to the test when the DPRK threatened to test its new nuclear capacities on Amerika’s Pacific colonial fiefdoms.
To me, this episode seemed to draft its own propaganda: the DPRK, one of the most maligned and marginalized countries on the planet, was staring down u.s. imperialism with a supposed nuclear arsenal that, for all intents and purposes, could’ve been fabricated or embellished, never flinching or backing down – even after losing the leverage of Russian or Chinese veto power in the UN – and succeeding in securing the first steps to realizing Korean reunification. For a Marxist-Leninist, I would’ve thought the whole thing was a wet dream of self-determination, anti-imperialism, pragmatism, and geopolitical leverage. As small as it was, and for as short as it lasted, it was a world-historical defeat against the global hegemonic power. For others, it was a fucking nightmare where they felt they had to mentally prepare to see everything north of the DMZ bombed back into oblivion, and quickly passed over once the news cycle finished. To this day, no one has really emphasized the significance of those events or, really, internalized the anti-imperialist spirit that led the DPRK to a victory of that caliber, even if it was needed at that particular time.
(It’s funny that the only popular advancement into more sophisticated forms of warfare was undertaken by the New Right in the form of Benghazi, which was projected onto Clinton alone. While Clinton was partially responsible for the proliferation of the proxy militias that turned Libya into an open-air slave market carved up by indistinguishable factions, she was only peripherally responsible for the attack in Benghazi. The most extensive and intensive war-crime of the past decade, a veritable laboratory of imperialist meddling and destruction, was eclipsed by the moment a u.s.-supplied, rocket-propelled grenade slammed into the EVE-Online rig of some bald, shitty dragon tattoo-having, colonialism enthusiast, internet sex pervert, turning his likely equally terrible colleagues into human paste in the process of incinerating a small Amerikan embassy. And people were so upset by this they continued to haunt Clinton through demon-spawning, child-sex-dungeon, pizza parlor conspiracies. There isn’t anything profound about this; it’s just funny. Because it’s a fucking joke.)
In the last analysis, this more or less comprises the scope and potential of the parties’ entire operations – and I can basically conclude that it’s all stagnant and incapable of fulfilling even short-term strategic goals. In my time, both the PSL and WWP conspired to crack down on a concerted attempt to unofficially bridge the gap between their respective rank-and-file members, who have always thought their basic rift was incomprehensible and unnecessary. I thought this was a project of some potential, but this was interpreted as an intimidating move towards an actual merger. Both Marxist parties found some serious common ground in maintaining their arbitrary and unexplainable separation by intrigue. Everyone who played an active part in organizing that project was scrutinized and indicted in one way or another. When Gloria LaRiva laid down the fucking law in person, she also delivered the directive that put our organization on the PSL’s shitlist – to someone who had absolutely nothing to do with us.
This ensemble of stupidity, self-sabotage masquerading as pragmatism, is worth a thousand embarrassing Maoist theatrics in its absolute fucking worthlessness and insolence towards the movement and their own membership. While I can cringe at bad propaganda, a decapitated pig’s head menacingly nailed to the entrance of an otherwise innocent public library is nothing compared to the untold possibilities of untapped potential and wasted opportunities that aren’t just obvious, but generally benign. It’s like watching a hundred thousand dollars in quantifiable political capital going up in flames. Like, what the fuck are they thinking, and who the fuck do they think they are.
Lacking any kind of capacity to even discover the totalistic challenges of attaining an identity, acquiring political power, and exercising a hegemonic influence of and for the proletariat in coming class struggles, the parties are giving way to an alternative that – in theory – is deliberately contrived to resolve these issues systematically. The alternative didn’t need to be the Maoist party, by any means, but the Maoist party, insofar as it exists, already matches the absolute size of both parties put together and aggressively asserts its status as the alternative, in spite of everything. Sensitive souls, the weak of heart, and completely valid victims of internet-induced anxiety issues all clamored about the early Red Guards’ intrusive recruitment tactics. They had set up a botnet to cruise social media sites for new recruits and spit out automated, private messages when certain keywords had been tripped, which was reasonably misconstrued as targeted harassment.
Beyond my two official liaisons (one of whom was encouraging and fun to hang out with; the other is now facing overblown federal charges and evidently needs to be freed), I managed to trip three different Maoist bots on three separate occasions. As I was told, I urgently need to sweep away all revisionist lies and join the Red Guards in their concentric construction of the three instruments. While I don’t know the Maoist party quite as intimately as the Marxist parties, I’ve studied the development of the collectives very closely, “struggled” on questions of line, looked into myths and rumors, etc., and I’ve more or less grasped the primary sources of frustration, confusion, and outrage that plague the Marxist-Leninist left, as well as the non-RG Maoist collectives settled in the bigger coastal cities. Now, I turn to the enigmatic machinations of the third and highest stage of Marxism: Marxism-Leninism-Maoism – principally Maoism – in the u.$. of ameriKKKa.
While I’d contend that the Maoist party is by far the closest embodiment of a revolutionary-proletarian organization in existence, it’s obviously infantile in all its practical aspects and ideas. It’s infantile because it’s young, and the RG’s are generally younger, and certainly more energetic, than the common Marxist party stock. Its political strategy and tactics are undeniably bad and wrong, but these qualities haven’t become obstacles to their effectiveness. This political approach is an essentially destructive and alienating force, but only against their perceived enemies. Their propagandistic theatrics are ludicrous and grating to the vast majority of the organized “left,” but they’ve entertained and indulged groups to the left of themselves.
The RG’s rely on organizing those people to the left of them, and far to the left of the Marxist parties, as well as hitherto unorganized workers from the “grassroots” in their areas of influence, partly in order to recoup from substantial risks to their political capital. They leverage a collective command of their internal processes and an unwavering belief in their ideological line, up to and including its own adaptability, against a fundamental need for experimentation and transformation. This allows for a relative degree of freedom and flexibility in their pursuit of an uncompromising implementation of Protracted People’s War, a politico-military strategy specifically devised for semi-feudal, semi-colonial countries, and the construction of the New Power, which isn’t necessarily as bad and awkward of an idea on its own.
For the Maoists, the People’s War is already in its preparatory stages, undertaking the militarization of its cells and anticipating a formal declaration of war against the imperialist state with the collectives’ official merger into a national, Maoist Communist Party. First thing: this might seem silly but the militias of the New Right and the military have been pursuing similar strategies and counter-strategies, on and off, for the past two or three decades. Second one: the reason I haven’t examined long-term strategies until now is that the Marxist parties’ counterparts are basically just shitty, stick-people cartoons of the Storming of the Winter Palace scrawled on a couple of torn-up napkins. Lastly: the guiding, strategic vision of Protracted People’s War is more than just a daydream of hurling sticks of dynamite into police stations; it’s a systematic guideline to the development of a revolutionary organization that’s intended to inform strategic and tactical decisions at the lowest conceivable levels to the highest, at each developmental stage, until the seizure of political power.
Whether or not Protracted People’s War is “universally valid” is basically irrelevant; that it can be applied in more political than military contexts, or more military than political contexts, means it’s ultimately flexible enough to potentially transcend the conditions in which it was conceived. Sustained armed struggle in the imperialist nations might not even remotely resemble a “people’s war” after the necessary adaptations to the PPW theory, derived from an organization’s experiences and analyses. As the Communist Party of Peru explosively, then haltingly, demonstrated, Protracted People’s War might not even have its “protracted” character. In either case, Gonzalo emphasized that this strategy could be implemented even without arms to wage an actual war with.
In the early days of the Shining Path, Gonzalo himself demonstrated how the same grating and seemingly incomprehensible theatrics that the Maoist party employs today were a necessary prelude to future victories. The aggressive and disconcerting propaganda tactics of the nascent Communist Party of Peru against the Apristas and the revisionist parties in Ayacucho weren’t insane directives from an intensely weird man, though both the center-left and the hard left were convinced that was the case; they were the initial rehearsals of what would later typify Gonzalo’s unique, politico-military leadership – staging political actions as military operations, emphasizing political leadership in command of military actions. The Maoist party, as collective body, understands with a degree of historical certainty that its political actions are the primary aspect of its military approach; with that degree of historical certainty comes a level of predictability from its political opponents. These political actions might have value as propaganda but that isn’t their real worth, which is measured more in terms of practical experience from the rank-and-file to the leadership.
The Maoist party is a totalizing entity and its broad strategic tasks include revolutions in the cultural and psychological fields, buttressed by the construction of a new, parallel state-formations in its base areas. The theory of the New Power expands on Lenin’s “dual power” by insisting on the development of a new, embryonic state concomitant to the advances of the Protracted People’s War; rather than a temporal equilibrium between two warring class dictatorships, the New Power is a continuous revolutionary dictatorship established in base areas conquered from a decrepit state machine. By design, this theory betrays a very schematic and territorial mentality, because it was conceived and applied in conjunction with extremely fucking violent revolutionary warfare. The Maoist party, like Gonzalo, innovates these politico-military theories into, principally, political activities in order to lay the ground for future military developments.
The blocky and regimented suburban sprawls that the RG’s typically work in can easily be reduced from the county level, to the district level, and, finally, the neighborhood level. It’s easy to commit this physical terrain to memory, and relatively intuitive to track areas of influence, social issues, class compositions, etc., on a mental map. I mentioned earlier how the RG’s own propaganda served as a quantitative measure of power and influence in their respective areas of work. Their adaptation of the New Power has been scaled properly to the terrain, social investigation, data collection, and their experiences; this is an educational activity. Areas of influence, rather than base areas, are won on a small scale first by clearing the place of fascists, then by establishing political hegemony by any means necessary, and maintaining this hegemony primarily through force. This process presides over both the expansion of their political footholds and the practical exercise of necessary war games. Critics of this phenomenon typically accuse the Maoist party of engaging in “turf wars,” and they’re right; but not because this is inconsistent with the party’s ideas or revolutionary political practice in general. Plus, it provides a convenient pretext to throw hands at revisionists when the fascists have all been routed.
One important perspective that the Maoist party inundates in its members is the basic observation that the organized “left” isn’t made of the “masses.” They are outliers who hold no significant position within the political realm, and they typically don’t build political power, they submit to it. Once their moralism and sentimental allegiances are disregarded, there’s nothing that can stop a supposedly marginalized force from conducting necessary political work or rising to prominence. However, the cheap veneer of mystique that the RG’s try to enshroud themselves in, from time to time, reeks of a need to impress. Their internet-tough-guy bullshit is only more infuriating when it actually manages to work. I get the impression that they feel way more clever than they deserve for conjuring their propagandistic antics and needlessly trying to twist their self-mythology to intimidate assholes, and I’m getting so old that I’m sick of even experiencing these things vicariously. It’s all just symptomatic of their infantilism – their rambunctious and irritating horseshit.
The crucial thing for the Maoist party, if it manages to defy another year with its existence, is self-consciousness. They ought to keep in mind that the party isn’t a vehicle for their glorification, but an instrument to drag them down into the pavement, deeper and deeper, until they break from their romantic illusions and face reality in a truly pitiless way, in order to bring their ideal into a qualitatively new one. For a party that does all the wrong shit with the right tools for the right reasons, organizing mainly in the dessicated, soulless suburbs of the Rust Belt and the Bible Belt puts them in key positions to open up new political possibilities, stress-test their theories and preconceptions, and experiment with the construction of new institutions. The RG’s are primarily drawn from these places: the deindustrialized, neglected, drug-ridden, fume-choked, flat-plain fucking suburban boneyards. They ought to recognize themselves in it.
WHY THE ACTING CHAIRMAN REPLACED HIS BMW’S DRIVER-SIDE WINDOW
Amerika has a somewhat fraught relationship with violence. This is in spite of it being the largest purveyor of violence in the world, and the world-capital of weekly, “spontaneous” killing sprees. Here, guns are cheap, common retail items: one of the most propitious strategic conditions in this country is the existence of armories, in the form of pawn shops, gun stores, or even supermarkets, marking almost every square mile of developed land.
Our particular philosophy of private property, rooted in a history of sustained, settler-colonial annexation, extermination, and occupation, is inexorably tied to the right to bear arms. Every property owner is almost by definition a gun hoarder. Every victory in the development of u.s. imperialism has openly, and most often proudly, been won by violence. On one hand, this has contributed to a mass culture preoccupied with a very personalized and alienated form of violence, a zero-sum game of machismo-boosting antics. On the other hand, it’s produced a strong ideological aversion to any kind of violence with a political content, exercised in a political context. As a result of this contradiction, almost all violence that’s really committed seems to be violence in service of the state, whether this violence is either sanctioned or punished by its apparatuses.
The basic contradiction between Amerika’s violent mass culture and the application of political violence has given the organized “left” a moral prejudice that characterizes all violence as necessarily self-destructive, partially due to an accurate reading of prevailing conditions. There is no longer a “periphery” or a real counter-culture within imperialist society from which to launch assault a “center,” with any social or ideological basis. It seems that, beyond a reasonable doubt, nearly all acts of violence can easily be folded into the state’s totalizing counter-insurgency prerogatives. However, this is mechanically concluded under the blanket assumption that the state wields a “monopoly of force,” which is in reality not a monopoly but simply an overwhelming advantage.
When it comes to a political struggle, given a good standing on internal security, this overriding “political” concern reveals itself to be a purely moral one. In my experience, the most violent “focoists” turned into the biggest purveyors of “nonviolence” as soon as they found out that our organization actually dabbled in self-defense and reprisals. Rumors of terrorism didn’t make us respectable or amenable to the organized “left,” but it did have the effect of massively boosting our popularity and political leverage for a time. While this phenomenon doesn’t suggest that violence is consistently constructive, it does prove that it isn’t necessarily self-destructive. It also opens up the possibility that the ideological effects of imperialism’s repressive state apparatuses are slowly being reversed; consequently, there’s the idea that this reversal is emerging from a social base with a qualitatively new outlook.
Before the late 70’s and early 80’s, imperialism had very few programmatic ideas of how to suppress or contain radical politics, of which illegality and political violence were given components. Given the contemporary logic and prerogatives of bourgeois democracy, it’s almost inconceivable to think about the activities of the KPD in Weimar Germany or the Bolsheviks in Tsarist Russia co-existing with their legal and parliamentary movements. Even the Socialist-Revolutionary party in Russia followed a movement called “Land and Freedom,” which operated a number of underground terrorist cells comprised of “disorganizers,” and ran parallel to a number of assassinations and bombings as they were gaining a foothold in the new State Duma. These extraparliamentary activities were just part of a strategic path to power, operating on the periphery of the state’s control if not its surveillance.
The imperialist ruling classes faced a fairly intractable obstacle in pervasive revolutionary activity like this. The systematic extermination and oppression of colonial movements couldn’t be easily imported to restive conditions between the bourgeoisie and proletariat in the core. The raw, armed suppression of 19th century revolts seemed to produce its own worse jumble of contradictions, exemplified everywhere by a nagging fear of a new “Paris Commune.” The most innovative political police tried to manufacture alternatives, whether through the wholesale fabrication of “radical” labor unions or the legalization of “lesser evil” ideological texts, and penetrate the existing movements; but even when they succeeded in the short-term, they found themselves outwitted in the long-term by leadership that had learned to anticipate and account for their presence and maneuvers. The integration of social-democratic parties into a more or less formal mode of legal representation seemed to tame sections of the movement, especially with the redistribution of imperialist plunder and the development of the mass market; but then the Communist parties only went “deeper into the masses” and emerged with a cogent opposition movement to depose them.
At the time of its emergence, fascism was a fresh, attractive alternative to the dilemma posed by a recently redivided continent: between maintaining a parliamentary system or facing the emergence of a proletarian dictatorship that seemed to be eclipsing it in Russia. To forward-looking bourgeois and monopolists, the former was the ultimate capitulation to the latter. The development of the fascist system seemed to completely nullify the class question, in sum, and reduce the broader dimensions of society into well-oiled mechanisms of an all-encompassing, national party-state. Its more intensive functions included hyper-charging imperial conquest and exploitation, and adapting systems of colonial oppression to work inward, concomitant to increased expansion through Europe and the Pacific. It was a systematic failure because it had the unfortunate effect of dissolving the body-politic of the nascent global bourgeoisie and reveling in atrocities that set almost the entire periphery of Europe against it.
Fascism seemed to negate the class question but ended up its victim. The post-war order of imperialism was, then, concerned with adapting certain key components of fascist innovations to a new constitutional framework for parliamentary democracy, which would also better serve as a standard to arbitrate global and internecine conflicts. When this conjuncture came to pass, the Red Army Faction and the Red Brigades emerged as the first real products, then subjects, of the contemporary police state.
In Italy, the victory of partisan guerrillas, represented by Communists, liberals, and reactionaries, integrated into a new bourgeois republic, along new constitutional lines, somewhat harmoniously. The Communists demobilized their armed units and quickly integrated into parliament with all its union ties intact. Recalcitrant Communist guerrillas in the country’s periphery were quietly put down over their objections that the party was disarming the movement. The active, militant anti-fascism of the war became a “constitutionalized” anti-fascism of tradition, by virtue of the new state’s mythology.
Italy largely missed out on the economic benefits of the Marshall Plan or the stability and growth afforded to West Germany. At the end of the war, it was left in a “sub-imperialist” condition, with a stagnant peasantry, relatively high levels of exploitation and inequalities between industries, and a corrupt and largely incompetent series of administrations. It was neither geographically vulnerable nor generally at risk of being subsumed by the Soviet bloc, but the militancy of its labor movement, the volatility of its class struggles, and the popularity of the Italian Communist Party made it an attractive laboratory for NATO’s continuous political interference. Another result of these conditions was that its intense and largely coherent working-class movement developed more solid ties with the late 60’s student upsurge, culminating in a strong, extraparliamentary movement of communists and autonomists.
The intellectual leaders of “Operaismo” ultimately failed to capitalize on the bridges they’d built with the labor movement or even prove themselves capable of advancing workers’ demands, despite their more “radical” approach to leveraging and organizing in disputes with unions or employers. Among other groups, the Red Brigades emerged to expose their political limitations by attempting to organize themselves into the “armed wing” of the proletarian movement.
They initially presided over a series of kidnappings, assassinations, bombings, and arsons against targets related to grievances in the factories, usually accompanying strikes and collective actions on the floors, as well as killing a number of neofascists. The Red Brigades organized autonomous cells inside and outside major manufacturing plants, compiled grievances and demands, then vote and act on an armed action or two. Their intention was to form the nucleus of a revolutionary party through these cells and directly organize an armed proletarian movement at the point of production. Later, their strategy was fleshed out and their orientation became more explicitly political, by which point they gained the attention of the state security apparatus and NATO.
In West Germany, the Red Army Faction had developed a broader political strategy from the beginning. The establishment of the RAF and each of its subsequent cells would preside over the formation of new politico-military leadership that would interpenetrate attempts to build a revolutionary party. Its actions and extensive communiques would also heighten the contradictions between the bourgeois state and revolutionary forces, and hasten the emergence of both the fascist character of the state and the development of the vanguard party. The Red Army Faction placed responsibility on first-world revolutionaries to destroy imperialism from the inside out and anticipating world-revolution by initiating “armed struggle in the metropole.” In an international context, the victory of third-world revolutionary movements would be more quickly assured with the resumption of class warfare in the imperialist center.
They carried out a series of bombings against u.s. military bases, monopolies, and news corporation offices, funded by armed bank expropriations and aided by Palestinian revolutionary groups. Unlike their contemporaries, as with the more “proletarian” 2nd of June Movement or the Revolutionary Cells, they self-identified largely as students, professionals, and intellectuals. While they never had direct links to the working-class movement, they maintained ties with the student movement, which still aided strikes and conducted anti-imperialist support work, and the anti-psychiatric movement, represented almost exclusively by the SPK. It might go without saying that they were always deemed insufferable to the numerous, party-building “K-groups” at the time.
The RAF first emerged a few years after the original wave of armed struggle groups, like the “Roaming Hash Rebels” and the “Tupamaros-West Berlin,” subsequently absorbing their disillusioned members after it was apparent that those groups had no real political direction. Those groups themselves had been a part of a student movement with no concrete programs and no direct relationship to the working-class movement. They had inherited moribund party organizations like the youth wing of the Social-Democratic Party, or caught onto flurries of activity on the margins of the twice-banned KPD. In the end, the movement surged at the height of the anti-war effort, briefly promoted a “long march through the institutions,” then, realistically, tended to drop out into communal flats in attempts to start their own counter-culture. To anarchists and Marxist-Leninists, the failure of this movement to produce any political results was plainly demonstrated in broad daylight, when a young fascist shot the anti-imperialist student leader Rudy Dutschke in the face.
When the country was liberated and divided in half by the Allied powers, its “democratic” capitalist half was closely groomed by Amerikan and British intelligence, its constitution was pored over by domestic and foreign liberal legal analysts, and its economic foundations were built from the ground up by the new global, post-war capitalist order. Politically, its parliament was rebuilt as a boilerplate model for a new age of global governance; nazis and Communists were both barred from participation. With a state-monopoly partnership to account for its new economic growth and a retrograde parliament, the careful administration of its managerial state machine was put in the experienced hands of former Waffen-SS officers and Nazi party bureaucrats who risked being shot or imprisoned for life in the Soviet bloc. Both the police and the secret police were well-armed, well-funded, and dignified with a degree of institutional power to match their Amerikan counterparts. West Germany’s model status and exceptional strategic position in Europe made it a fantastic parking lot for a litany of u.s. military bases and contracts. In that time, West Germany seemed to have “neutralized” a potentially militant working-class movement, beyond the actually exploited class of guest-workers, but its contradictions nonetheless produced a radical politics with a hardline, anti-imperialist bent.
The Red Army Faction launched itself to the forefront of the anti-imperialist movement with their highly-publicized actions and the West German state’s counter-terrorist responses. After the first few actions, the state moved quickly to identify all of their members, running a series of aggressive public campaigns to expose them with wanted posters and appeals for information. Though the RAF hadn’t even surpassed the activity of previous armed groups, they had presented a far more coherent political line and analysis, challenging the anti-imperialist movement to attack the state directly. Legislation was passed enabling policemen to carry automatic machine guns and grenades; road checkpoints were implemented on and off in some areas; the state security services started relying on then-new computational matrices to narrow down suspects and sympathizers for future surveillance. One by one, the first nucleus of the Red Army Faction were isolated, entrapped, and captured while the remaining cells still held their ground.
The state’s first public-relations gambit was to characterize the Red Army Faction as criminals and emphasize the role of their armed robberies: this was the origin of the term, “the Baader-Meinhof gang.” They had hoped it would work to depoliticize their actions and legitimize the “rule of law”; really, the Springer Corporation did a better job just by spinning tabloid-level bullshit throughout their lifespan. Another tactic was to muddle their political message with false flag attacks, fabricated or conducted by neofascist groups attached to West German intelligence, which was also employed liberally against the Red Brigades in Italy at the time. The RAF tended to respond to the false flags very quickly and started anticipating them after a while, leading me to believe that they weren’t that successful. The last, and probably most characteristic, tactic was to convert the trial of the most prominent four members into a winding public debate on the “soul” of the Federal Republic. This was at the point where the state couldn’t broadly paint the RAF as an explicitly criminal organization – it had spent too much money, time, and effort – and intended to establish its legitimacy, authority, and humanity in court; which, on the other hand, provided the four members with an ideal platform to represent themselves, expound their views, and defend them.
To be honest, this last tactic was a stroke of brilliance on the part of the state. It was a part of a long-run strategy to beautify their treatment of the RAF prisoners who, in their previous confinement, managed to organize a large network of prisoner support groups on the outside. The four of them were at first lodged in sensory-depriving “white rooms” in almost total isolation. The RAF had successfully argued that the conditions were the product of an “extermination campaign” to kill them before they went to trial, and subsequently gained access to joint lodging, books, and visitation in a new complex. (This complex was actually built from the ground up to house them and stage their trial, which flattened the whole “criminalized” angle of the state’s narrative.) The state, eager to demonstrate that they weren’t the Nazis they were being accused of, attempted to put a human face on their efforts by framing the trial as a Nuremburg-esque morality play. This would’ve muddled the past few years of intense terrorist/counter-terrorist activity with navel-gazing, middlebrow horseshit – swaying liberals and boring everyone else into exasperation – and, most importantly, exonerated the state for establishing historically unprecedented violations of privacy as constitutional law. For the four members of the RAF, it would be an excellent opportunity to demonstrate that everything they were saying was right and everything they did was completely legitimate. With mounting support from the RAF’s legal team and prisoner support network, the trial seemed to produce a strategic equilibrium between the two.
During a campaign of two assassinations and one botched hijacking, the president of a prominent employer’s association was kidnapped by an RAF cell demanding the release of all their imprisoned members. The state refused to negotiate or back down from the trial, and after a number of days he was executed. Following the German Autumn, and particularly the successful GSG-9 operation against the Lufthansa hijackers, the state wouldn’t indulge the humanity that a trial would dignify the RAF members; there’d be no trial because the members would all be found dead in suspicious “suicides,” except for one who managed to outlive nearly a dozen stab wounds in her chest and dispute that narrative. Independent investigations into their cadavers later found that some of their brains had been harvested. No longer criminals, radicals, or human beings, the Red Army Faction were “the terrorists,” and the popular notions of their actions turned from crimes or propaganda into more of an obscure moral evil. This marked a dramatic shift in the state’s approach to political violence: it refused to concede anything to “the terrorists.”
Unlike the Red Army Faction, the Red Brigades frequently suffered from infiltrators and informants. They were plagued by the numerous false flags, imitators, and conspiracy theories that only Italy really excels at. They were more often weaponized against the Communist Party and “Operaismo” by politicians and the press, which made them despise the Red Brigades from very early on. The Red Brigades later found that the Italian state was adopting more or less the same hard line as the West Germans during the kidnapping of Aldo Moro.
A few years on in their development, the Red Brigades conceived of a general theory and strategy similar to the Red Army Faction’s attempts to play off the growing “fascist drift” in the West German state with the party-building tendency in the Communist movement. At this point they alleged that the Italian ruling classes were conspiring to develop a “neo-Gaullist” regime, which would embrace authoritarianism, centralism, and neutralize the political wings of parliament in order to codify itself as a global imperialist power. Predictably, this empowered the urgency of a revolutionary proletarian movement led by the Red Brigades. At the time, the Communist Party of Italy and the Christian Democrats were preparing a vote of confidence for a new coalition government. The situation of the Red Brigades wasn’t so dire as the Red Army Faction’s to liberate only a handful of imprisoned leaders; the kidnapping and later execution of Aldo Moro, as leader of the Christian Democrats, was a conscious strike against parliamentary cretinism intended to derail motions for a government that could’ve potentially neutralized all of their political gains under a purely managerial regime.
Like the hijacking of the Lufthansa during the German Autumn, the execution of Aldo Moro was roundly questioned by the Red Brigade’s supporters and former leaders. First of all, it was a public-relations disaster considering Aldo Moro wasn’t a figure of popular hatred. Secondly, the murder of a man who, for all intents and purposes, simply intended to introduce a level of stability into the ruling government would be their first, and last, attempt to effect any political change in the highest levels of the state, which would thwart the success and support of future strategic plays. On one hand, the action was morally appalling to the public; on the other, the Red Brigades were at a loss to advance their strategic goals with their waning support or achieve any future political actions of the same magnitude. The Lufthansa hijacking, and its failure, seemed to contradict the Red Army Faction’s close regard for human life and the historical success of their armed tactics, which placed them in the same political position in relation to West Germany.
If both the German Autumn and the execution of Aldo Moro shocked even the supporters of the Red Army Faction and the Red Brigades, they also served to publicly justify the underlying systems of repression that had been developed in their time and rationalize the conversion of the “guerrillas” into subhuman terrorists. Retroactively, these episodes have been retooled into inscrutable moral tragedies rather than explainable political phenomena. The state’s innovation in this regard was to convert a direct struggle for political power, which betrayed a crisis of legitimacy, into sentimental mythmaking. This ideological process overtook the real progress of sophisticated repressive technologies: the modern imperialist state would no longer meet terrorists on their own terms, therefore they weren’t responsible for what the terrorists might do if their demands weren’t met; when the demands weren’t met and something terrible happened, this was unavoidable and the moral onus of the “tragedy” lied on the terrorists themselves. Publicly, the modern imperialist state quickly turned itself into a moral arbiter tersely regulating the real dimensions of the whole political realm.
This was symptomatic of a nascent political regime that prized technocratic management over conflict and conflict resolution: neoliberalism. With the consecration of its hegemony, the social-political “periphery” that enabled both grassroots and radical organizations to launch political attacks into the “core” of the state disappeared into a matrix of political procedure and counter-insurgency measures. Class society was reconfigured into a split between the “haves” and “have-nots” of a bloated mass-consumer market. The state’s “social” character degenerated under the new rationality of global monopoly finance-capital, transforming a “democratic” obligation into a commodity sold by private companies. This was all permeated with the promise of personal wealth at the expense of political power, to substitute political power, which was a fleeting reality as literally every institution of the moribund labor movement in Europe was devoured and digested by the ruling classes and a new middle-class buoyed by the rise of the financial service industries. Ultimately, the development of this regime subverted the basis of recognition that the entire extraparliamentary movement relied on to force its demands onto the political class. This movement was left with no viable avenues other than integration into legal, moribund parliaments or otherwise left to rot among the grassroots.
The Red Army Faction and the Red Brigades both attempted to confront the more or less fascist character of imperialism’s transitional regime and failed. They failed because they never quite realized the extent to which they were actually fighting a war of attrition against the narrowing terrain of class struggle and imperialist complacency at large. Neither attempted to organize a social base outside of their throng of supporters because they assumed it already existed, waiting for a vanguard to initiate the continuation of the revolutionary process in Europe. As their bank-robbing, third-worldist contemporaries, the Blekingegade Group, correctly asserted, the modern imperialist nations were “parasite states” that had fractured the continuity of former class struggles and this social base was more amenable to the command of the superexploiting, mass-parasitical consumer market than anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist struggle. While the RAF and the Red Brigades subsisted well into the late 80’s, they could never politically overcome the German Autumn or Aldo Moro, in large part due to the fact that radicals themselves could no longer give a fuck about dedicating their lives to sustaining dying “underground” resistance movements.
In Amerika, the reconfiguration of the bourgeois political realm to fit the state’s new counter-terrorist imperatives anticipated the brief episode in which direct, armed actions predominated. The state, with its own historical basis in settler-colonialism, undertook a similar process with a number of unique tactics at its disposal:
1. The separation of the white, settler middle-class from support networks attached to the Black Panther Party and the New Afrikan liberation movement. This was relatively easy to achieve, not because of the FBI’s intense counter-propaganda efforts but mainly due to the status-privilege of white students and intellectuals that were quickly alienated from the Party and their social base.
2. Smear campaigns against the Party’s icons disseminated through the mass media. One of the unfortunate aspects of the Panthers’ strategy was a stringent application of “aboveground” vanguardism, which had the effect of casting its leaders as media personalities and celebrities. Rumor campaigns were devised to damage their reputations and alienate both their white and Black support bases. In general, this had the effect of casting the Party as a political sideshow.
3. Infiltration of the Party’s internal security and military apparatuses. The Party was consciously pursuing armed struggle as a key strategic goal; it intended to learn how to wage war and defend itself against internal threats. The clumsy implementation of this process led to an over-reliance on Vietnam vets and hard motherfuckers from the ghettos they organized in. Really, they were drawing their sensitive talents directly from the most volatile sections of the lumpenproletariat and populating key positions in the Party with a number of opportunistic sadists. The Party’s torturers and military experts proved to be an excellent pool for informants and saboteurs, who spearheaded the arrests and assassinations of leading Party figures.
4. The organization and promotion of “pseudo-Panther” groups. The Panthers’ original Oakland branch had been organized due to the failure of federal poverty relief efforts, which the Panthers later adapted to a revolutionary program. The state was attracted to the idea of subverting this phenomenon into a form of social-political containment. Street gangs, hitherto pitted against the Party in state-fabricated beefs, were promoted by a network of wealthy liberals and state subsidies to take command of the disintegrating programs produced by the “War on Poverty,” and politically enfranchised to serve as “community leaders”. The new political pull went to service militating popular agitation in the ghettos, and the new cashflows financed the booming heroin trade.
5. Revamping neocolonialism. Bourgeois and petit-bourgeois cultural nationalists were afforded more space in the white political establishment, concomitant to the development of a new Black middle class and intelligentsia. The establishment of a new Black “center” in prevailing social-political organizations and the organization of increasingly “non-political,” “grassroots” initiatives hedged out the more radical elements while their popular influence waned.
The demise of the handful of armed struggle groups that followed the Panthers’ slow and tumultuous breakdown is perfectly assessed in False Nationalism, False Internationalism, which I won’t even try to emulate. In FNFI, the development and fall of the armed struggle is correctly analyzed from an expressly political perspective, riding on the freshness of the Revolutionary Armed Task Force/May 19th Organization’s collapse. The political character of the armed opportunism that predominated at that point, and the state’s ability to adapt and overcome, has subsequently been lost in the movement’s internal mythology. The political and ideological dimensions of developments during that period have been reduced to moral fables – parables – against “military adventurism,” but really, against political violence as a whole.
What was first an inherent aspect of political action has been converted into an overriding “question” that the life and death of any revolutionary organization rests upon. The “question” of political violence presents itself less as a question of strategy and tactics, and more as a ride-or-die dilemma – either skate down the path of legal pragmatism or degenerate into anarchic illegalism. This mentality owes as much to the legacy of revisionism as it does to the internalization of the state’s extensive ideological apparatus. As a result, discussions about the application of violence or – god forbid – military strategy are roundly stifled in the Marxist parties. So, what follows is an ideological exodus from the parties to rearguard organizations or groups that serve as a dumping ground for crippled paramilitary fantasies. For a time, our organization’s meetings degenerated into these idiotic brainstorming sessions.
Aimless fantasizing about running to the hills and arming embryonic guerrilla cells to generate a “focoist,” insurrectionary force degenerates, in practice, into our mass-cultural default: a particularly malignant strain of macho bullshit. In lieu of a mature and militant perspective on political action, a stupidly competitive and individualistic outlook predominates. Instead of developing a dialectical understanding of coercion and nonviolent pragmatism, what we end up with is cliquish bullying and self-aggrandizing spectacle.
This became astonishingly clear during the first major upsurge of antifascist street-fighting during and following the 2016 election cycle. For a time, political violence became a mainstream topic. The brawls between antifascist grouplets and neofascist organizations were, at the time, completely necessary but ultimately limited by their reliance on media spectacle. Suddenly, newly-politicized social-democrats and anarchists, most of all, were thrown into a largely ideological, rather than political, arena mediated by fistfights. Their confrontations required extensive media coverage, self-glorifying propaganda, and garish costumes, rather than clearly articulated political visions – something that enabled the neofascists to outflank the antifascists at certain points.
The antifascist upsurge was necessary to establish a newer and more flexible political climate for “illegal” tactics, as well as putting enough blunt pressure on the neofascists to demoralize them. On the other hand, this also produced and reinforced an ideal of political violence rooted in brute physical force and celebrity. Spectacular propaganda actions were touted as “battles” and the subjects of these battles started to describe themselves as “veterans.” This was a uniquely Amerikan phenomenon. Where the Europeans had managed to organize actual political bases in their endless cycles of street-fighting, Amerikans had created a pool of “talent,” of half-famous figureheads who, while mostly evading the public eye, tended to try to mold themselves into prime movers within the organized “left.” Unfortunately, our locale had a guy who embodied this political abortion to its absolute extreme.
When Trump was elected, he had immediately jumped into the new “antifa” fad and attempted to opportunistically coast on local efforts to establish a DSA branch there. Basically his pattern was that he would go to almost every anti-fascist demo, dash to the front lines, and try to slug a fascist at the first chance he got. This was totally acceptable at first since that movement was itself on par with that level of political maturity. One of our comrades had essentially done the same thing. However, while our comrade was 16 years old, this guy was in his early 30’s, bipolar, and a notorious alcoholic. After he had established himself politically through relentless self-promotion, which had become a key component of his musical career at that point, he would then glorify the ground that he covered during his manic episodes and binders, rolling it into his own political mythology.
He had a tendency for jumping on Facebook and antagonizing fascists openly and, at first, with his real name attached. At some point he decided to challenge them to come down to his house and fight, doxxing himself in the process. Another episode saw him trying to rally a bunch of fascists to follow him through town and start a brawl at a show our organization put together. (Before it fell apart for other idiotic reasons, we planned to arm ourselves to the teeth and, barring the arrival of a fascist caravan, beat the fucker senseless if he showed up.) This all culminated in a spectacular “confrontation” with the nascent Proud Boys chapter, where guns were allegedly drawn and solidarity reached an all-time high when the fascists were kicked out of the venue! Which turned out to be total bullshit, but only after we had simply taken it at face value and tried to milk it for all the political capital it was worth to push a self-defense platform.
His “antifa” theatrics finally paid off after he went to Charlottesville and came back with a nice little news clip of him decking a neo-nazi in the face. After “Unite the Right” ballooned into a massive media spectacle on the dramatic weight of the sporadic, attempted lynchings and Heather Heyer’s murder, he went gold as a local political personality. His ego was so inflated by association that he would try to declare himself “Point Commander,” or whatever, at every subsequent antifascist demo he attended. The local Trotskyite sect immediately tailed, and tried to court, him as a growing political leader as he churned out bizarre, “radical chic” trap music on his Bandcamp. As a new center of gravity for the local organized “left,” his mere presence tended to pull the suburban, fascist pond scum into his immediate orbit and activate the more mindless and narcissistic instincts of the opportunists.
At the time, this behavior was normalized and even glorified by the organized “left”: a nodal point for “meeting the masses where they were at.” In reality, this presented a slew of practical issues and laid bare a core contradiction in the normative conception of political violence. In a truly Leninist turn, this new militant “antifascism” produced a more imminent and complex threat than the fascists themselves by endangering the lives of real activists and organizers and, to a large extent, deflating efforts to build credibility and support outside of that small locale. Really, this was violence disarticulated from proletarian politics, reassembled to serve individual whims and the systematic parasitism of “revolutionary” (a.k.a,, petit-bourgeois) organizations. To a lesser extent, there was a lot of resignation in maintaining the new status-quo, since this was the new standard for political militancy. The various organizations themselves would indulge it vicariously, while sticking to the same, compartmentalized forms of passive aggression between themselves or, in rare cases, against reactionaries outside of their cultivated political bubbles.
Ultimately, what really intimidated him and these organizations was the idea that political violence, militancy, and spectacle could be wielded to strategic ends, informing distinct tactical steps in practical work beyond antifascism. Rather, there’s a certain amount of value in manipulating the political terrain and extorting clear demands out of class enemies in a militant way. What’s often lost on the organized “left” is that nonviolent methods are usually only possible through establishing the ability to use violent means. The blunt brutality of the antifascist upsurge served two very particular purposes – enabling a greater degree of flexibility in tactics and suppressing the neofascists – but it couldn’t be expanded upon, or extended into other areas, without a broader strategic view. Altogether, without this political direction, it ended up encapsulating the same petit-bourgeois, macho mentality that tanked the early armed struggle groups in practice. What seemed dangerous and active on the ground for a time devolved into something as passive as doing nothing at all, or as detrimental as giving ground to opportunism and individualism.
What distinguishes a political strategy from pure tactics is a protracted and two-sided perspective on political practice. While a bout of classic Communist thuggery might appear appalling to any petit-bourgeois observer, in reality it has more strategic value than is assumed in supplicating future political advances that might be accomplished through more peaceful means. Sustained militant agitation may seem like unconscious posturing but this may be a ploy to soften up political opposition and stimulate the more radical elements, retain them, and introduce them to more shrewd and circumspect avenues to accomplish their aims. Jumping from one demo to the next or relegating the realm of action to a single nodal point is a narrow application of tactics; to practically mold the realm of action and the terrain to your liking and embrace a diversity of tactics necessitates strategic guidance that “walks on two legs.”
In any case, violence on the organized “left” doesn’t come easily or naturally. Again, this is partially due to a valid assessment of prevailing conditions and partially due to a mystified adherence to legalism. Outside of it, however, the “pacifist pathology” that looms over its historical failures are roundly, sometimes wantonly, disregarded. Activists and ideologues who have molded a large part of their productive lives around the movement itself tend to view the outside world through an “objective” lens colored by naivete and seemingly expansive – in reality, reductive – notions of how social lives are constructed. The minutes of an oppressive and hostile environment bearing down on the class are rounded out more by ideology than incisive critique and insight. Partially, this is a product of new forms of atomization that Marxist theory hasn’t quite caught up with; on the other hand, it’s a concession to the various forms of academic and activist discourse that followed the disarmament of the movement.
The “postmodern” thought that typically proliferates in activist circles, community organizations, and NGOs isn’t necessarily an aberration that lies on the shoulders of a handful of CIA-funded Parisian intellectuals, as some Marxists like to argue. Postmodernism presents a perspective that presupposes an absolute regime of control and power, mediated primarily through discourse that places the intellectual above the practical. It’s an ideological formation with deep roots in essentially every aspect of “progressive” politics, with its own popular appeal and political direction, which presents a fairly compelling articulation of “power” and oppression in lieu of clear ideas of leadership or social relations. Essentially, while the practical activity of human beings, along with social relations, doesn’t change, its discursive dimensions are continually rearticulated to fashion particular regimes of power to justify the unchangeable. In this sense, the postmodern conception of history is almost nonexistent outside of discursive regimes of power; likewise, exerting power is simply an attempt to refashion the immutable discursively.
The proliferation of the theory itself is predicated on three things: the disarmament of not only the Communist movement but all social movements; the replacement of social institutions with academic institutions ultimately governed by the state; and intellectual leadership produced by the neocolonial relations of these institutions. This intellectual production propagates a prevailing worldview of innumerable oppressions bearing down on the individual, immovable by any kind of intellectual or practical critique. In the first instance, postmodern thought has the ability to elaborate every form of violence, humiliation, dread, and terrible minute of social existence; in the latter, it presupposes that all are absolute or innate to the corporal presence of social groups, on an almost biological level. The object of postmodernism isn’t to really understand or challenge these oppressions but to study them. This is so appealing to a good number of disarmed and neocolonized movements, even rank-and-file, as an accurate reflection of their political and social position; it also provides a kind of ideological catharsis – like picking a scab.
Postmodernism serves as a substitute for independent cultural and intellectual life within various social movements as well as the proletarian class. It presents a concession to the distinct powerlessness of those movements in contemporary life, and a psychological attachment to the vast superstructure of modern imperialism. This is obvious to a lot of people outside of the political “in-groups” of the left, who associate those groups with consistent political failures and inaction even if their source isn’t really known. The ideological and practical disarmament of the movement hasn’t necessarily pacified people by pacification itself, but by frustration.
The average exploited worker, rather than being propped up and calmed by some amount of institutional leverage and cushioning, will now generally concede that revolution is necessary to change society for the better but lacking any serious methods for achieving that, it appears impossible and therefore not worth daydreaming about. Nonetheless, when forced by circumstance to enter the political realm, the tension between the desire for freedom and the necessity of action in the absence of guidance or organization explodes into uprisings governed by intense class hatred, which is generally wasted without any strategic or tactical considerations.
While this hatred points to a revived sense of political consciousness among all social movements, hatred is only a sentiment; that is, without political development it’s only a manifestation of mass psychology. It’s easy for this sentimental violence to become personalized and, to a certain extent, mentally totalizing. All kinds of religious movements have basically subsisted on this raw emotionalism for centuries, with more or less success from a tactical standpoint. However, real political leadership requires an expansion, articulation, and understanding of that hatred and the ability to transform its fruits into effective political action, and into the broadening of the social and ideological base of proletarian class-consciousness. The real development of revolutionary political consciousness is a violent process, driven internally by a combination of violent thoughts and concrete interests.
In the best of cases, Marxism can present a relatively comprehensive grasp of political violence and its uses. On the other hand, Communists have failed to appreciate the catastrophic levels of social dysfunction stemming from a twilight-stage capitalism that has given rise to the renewed relevance of “revolutionary violence” in the first place. The sheer disintegration at work in the majority of social bodies populated by exploited and oppressed people – deprived of healthcare, community, and development on nearly every level, while sometimes literally being hunted in the process – doesn’t seem to have had much of an effect on the early imperialist-era theories and practices we’ve inherited. In some cases, communist organizations can produce a relationship to their bases from outside the “in-groups” similar to the one the Marxist parties form with those within them; only, where the parties supplement the absence of social organization with paternalism, these organizations do so with emotionalism.
The necessity for revolutionary violence as the principal means for establishing power, in itself, overtakes the demands of constructing a social base for establishing that power, sustaining and expanding it. The willingness and ability to do violence doesn’t enable the construction of a social and ideological base to wage war on the imperialist center; the construction of a social and ideological base enables a willingness and develops an ability to do violence, and wage war, on the imperialist center. Whether this construction is initially conceived violently or nonviolently makes no difference, the “revolutionary” character of that violence can only be measured by the extent to which it can develop a new, parallel state and society on social, political, ideological, and even psychological grounds. Otherwise, it’s a suicidal fantasy.
No amount of platitudes about “the people’s army” can escape the fact that there’s no “army” to attribute to “the people” if they don’t comprise a cohesive social body capable of holding ground in the class struggle, or avoid breaking down as a collective entity entirely. What “the people” have been robbed of by imperialism, leadership will have to organize and develop on “the people’s” terms before they can collectively defend or expand upon it in any politico-military dimensions. That was the harsh lesson that the old revolutionary movement had to learn after the defeat of the armed struggle movement. Their solidarity and community now seems completely natural only after several decades of relentless struggles that are now almost forgotten, largely bound together by long-running campaigns to free political prisoners.
The “vanguard” and “mass” elements are now basically unified by a deranged class society without the means to diagnose its derangement, much less any methods to treat its effects. In a lot of cases, Communists will probably be surprised to find that the rising proletariat and oppressed people are at least as fucked up as they are, and everyone will generally become more fucked up over time. On the basis of this recognition, political self-consciousness first tends to grow but rarely extends to collective efforts to build social poles that are less fucked up and make more sense. Violence can either serve those purposes or make them drastically worse, especially with no political considerations. Nevertheless, without a full range of movement in the matter, no experiment or investigation can really advance any serious attempts to produce new analyses and critiques of modern imperialism or build social and ideological alternatives to it.
After nearly 30 years of organized pacification, it’s difficult to imagine that the slow resuscitation of revolutionary violence will develop neatly or logically. Any “communists” who believe otherwise are unfortunate victims of their own propaganda.
Selected Writings of the Late Fifi Nono 