“The challenge in working in politics, particularly if you're working for a political party, is that everyone's a messenger..”
Frank Luntz
“The worst thing you can do to a Juggalo is not know about their weird subculture.”
Anders Holm
Marginality and Madness
The communist ‘movement’ lives on the periphery of American politics. And this is the case only if it can even qualify as a ‘movement’ in the first place. Fellow Geese editor P.K. Gandakin called the very idea of a communist ‘movement’ an “absurd abstraction” in his essay from last year, Good for the Gander. First and foremost, I believe there is a communist movement, but more so as a matter of conceptual convenience and expedience. I only disagree with Gandakin in a personal and practical sense so I will echo his criticism here. The marginality of American communism is so thorough, our lack of presence so appallingly manifest, that Gandakin is functionally correct that it doesn’t seem like the term ‘movement’ really captures what is essentially a subculture.
It is baffling, almost admirable, how communists can cope with this situation of perpetual disregard from the vast majority of Americans. Perhaps, through a genetic miracle and a stroke of pure luck, communists are born with a cognitive mechanism that protects them, or more aptly put, protects their faith, from truly internalizing and processing our extremely demotivating position of marginality. Either that or they lack a brain altogether…
Either way, communists walk the tightrope between denial and faith. Denial is a commitment to avoiding the fact of political marginality by any means, and faith is a head-on confrontation with this fact. Both are equally dangerous for the communist organization. In fact, after close inspection, we realize that faith is also a kind of denial, as it avoids the problem by pretending to face it head-on, through public declarations of this faith, which take various discursive forms. However, charging headfirst into a burning building is no more or less courageous than simply walking away from it, as both acts lead to the same outcome: the building burns to the ground. Communists cannot resolve the issue of faith alone, through exaggerated displays of moralism that barely conceal a political narcissism anyway. This narcissism lies at the heart of articulations that function, subconsciously, as virtue signals and reaffirmations for the articulator. Such declarations are echoed loudly and brazenly over speakerphones at protests or expressed in the disciplinary, guilt-inducing ‘struggle sessions’ that occur within communist organizations. Denial must be rejected as well: we cannot humbly ‘put our heads down’ and immerse ourselves in political work. If we continue to focus on our isolated little concerns, tucked away in our little corner of the political sphere, the result will be nothing less than political suicide.
Instead of going through the motions of activist-organizational pseudo-praxis, communists must reinvigorate the spirit of ruthless criticism that Marx is usually associated with. We must violently drag the entire movement, kicking and screaming, out of its distant fringe zones and into the center of mainstream relevance. The only ways this can be achieved are by becoming a ruthless critic and, more importantly, activating a critical stance in other communists, thus producing more protagonists for this new critical phase of socialism—protagonists which I will call critical communists.
We need a new cohort of critical communists. First and foremost, it must transcend the bounds of any specific organization, unifying as a loosely connected network of intellectuals who share the same critical stance. The first task of this new cohort will be to find more communists that qualify as ‘diamonds in the rough’. They are those who are few and far between, who are open-minded rather than dogmatic, and who are dedicated not to any specific organization (or worse, dedicated to the subculture of American communism) but to immersing themselves in effective or ‘correct’ political praxis, no matter where that actuality might be located. However, we should also be cautious about being in a state of perpetual window shopping for an organization. It could lead to political vagabondism, where the communist, after abandoning the marginal organization and losing her grip on political reality, resigns to becoming a traveling social activist in search of a new home that she will never find. Opposed to this resignation, we have the critical communist, who, since a critical stance doesn’t just spontaneously appear like a golden ticket to a mythical chocolate factory, must have experienced some semblance of ‘organizational disillusionment’ as well. Either they were explicitly ‘recruited’ into the critical cohort, or there was a single, conflicting event in the organization driving their frustrations and critiques—a disagreement, rift, or general misalignment.
Disillusionment emerges individually, first among the critical communists, and then, through social osmosis, it spreads across the entire organization. This is how the decline of the organization starts. The critical communist arrives at their disillusionment only after a moment of clarity, a moment made inevitable by the decline of the organization, which is proven when its structure and spirit begin to show cracks. However, after the moment of clarity, the critical communist gains a new sense of transparency, and this clear-headedness produces a sober gaze that the critical communist uses to examine the entire political landscape, beyond the epistemological and ideological bounds set by the failing communist formation. This is the moment for the critical communists where, for the first time, they are truly internalizing and processing our real position of marginality. Behold, this communist has a brain! The organizational disillusionment has effectively ended all traces of a dogmatic honeymoon phase that could cloud the judgment of the critical communist.
This newfound critical cohort is only possible thanks to the organization’s failures and misconnections between the critical communist and the organization, which effectively shatter the cult-like grip it once had over the steadfast faithfulness of its naive yet hardworking members. After a communist rinses their eyes of the grey painted on them by the ideology of thoughtless organizational dogma, the world can be seen in all its radiant and alluring colors, i.e., how it actually is. Each existing and active political force is apprehended by the critical communist not behind the dogmatic lens of a failed (or soon to fail) ‘formational’ perspective, a perspective dictated by the same organization that disillusioned them in the first place, but instead through a looking glass that allows them to see everything clearly for the very first time. After a panoramic scan of the actual political world beyond the walls of isolation, the critical communist needs only to glance disdainfully back at the outermost edge of the landscape to spot their pitiful, marginal ‘comrades’—the last members of a communist formation in its twilight. But all is not lost! It is now a task of the critical communist to make a critical return to that dying organization and activate the same critical stance in others that was activated in them. Either that, or the critical communist can write articles for Geese Magazine!
In communist organizations that are wrapped up in the dialectic of denial and faith, any proposed tactic or strategy assumes a degree of relevance that does not recognize the fact that American communists occupy a relatively paltry political position. When internalized, this sobering realization can be traumatic, hence the fight-or-flight response, as identified earlier as denial or faith. Admittedly, the situation of marginality is bleak. After the moment of clarity and the critical return, pessimism still raises its ugly head and tries to sow seeds of doubt in the communist future. However, to be a communist is to engage in the problem of politics, without regard to the level of marginality or relevance faced by the movement. We must imagine ourselves in an even worse scenario than the current situation, where there are only a handful of communists, say, fewer than ten, in the entire United States. Again, the low number of communists here would alter our problem, not eliminate it. Therefore, we must ward off pessimism and keep it at bay, or we risk sacrificing the entire movement to “doomerism.”
The good news is that, over time, traumas tend to heal, although the vestiges of the wound always remain. Once the trauma of acknowledging the marginality of American communism wears off, we can welcome newfound feelings of excitement, even if the vestiges of anxiety remain. A rare feeling of satisfaction comes with starting a major project from scratch. The American communist movement is at an exciting ground state, especially in the context of our new general task of building a critical cohort, which we can also view as the realization of the ‘cadre’ that the Communist Party is supposed to embody. There is a real opportunity to make history ‘as one pleases’—a practical refutation of the famous quip by Marx. The marginality of the communist movement opens up a limitless field of revolutionary creativity (see the discussion of the ‘creative endeavor’ at the end of my other essay, Tutorial Marxism for more on this). Our generation, and the future generation of radicals, are not the worker ants of an ossified and isolated political ideology, but the architects of a new culture and bearers of novel forms of life.
The problem of marginality in American communism, then, is essentially an attempt to answer a question: how does the communist movement overcome its marginal position? How does communism become a real political force, where communists are active political agents, on all levels (national, state, local)? This is a profoundly complex question, and the real “answer” lies not in abstract argumentation but in the revolutionary activity of the working class, and as a corollary, in the practical activity of communist revolutionaries, which conditions the political successes of the working class. This is because an “answer” to this question is a solution to the problem of communist politics, which is partially a matter of ‘correct’ political action by communists and not a matter of philosophical reflection and debate. However, theoretical critique and analysis bring a conscious, corrective, directive dimension to this practice, even if it is not the “answer.” In my opinion, there are many “productive” theoretical perspectives to the problem of communist politics, although not as many as there are erroneous perspectives. In my limited capacities as a human being (and not an encyclopedia, sadly), I can only offer a finite number of these perspectives, the few I just happen to agree with. I will provide a heretical perspective in the next section, one that, in common communist parlance, disqualifies me from being a real communist.
It’s a Party in the U-S-A!
Hands in the air indeed! First, to be a political force, the movement has to engage in the real site of politics. We must engage with politics at its real, concrete level. We have to “go where the wind blows” or “follow the money.” Too often, American communists are displaced or displace themselves, whether it be that they are physically in areas of little political importance or engaging in activities that are isolated from any real political determinations. The former issue is not only due to no fault of the communist, but it is far less destructive than the latter. Admittedly, communists, in their capacity as organizers, are pretty decent at being present at some political scenes. However, their economistic abstention from engaging with the political world keeps communists in their marginal position.
The West champions representative democracy as the best and most modern form of governance. It is typically divided between a parliamentary system (as in the United Kingdom), a presidential system (as in the United States), or a hybrid combination of the two (as in Canada). The development of Western governments is constituted by a system of political parties, which, ideally, are the concrete expressions of a particular political ideology. As a consequence of our historical materialist perspective, this ideology is also that of a particular class. The political party is therefore the expression of that given class, ideally, its instrument. The representative government style and the party organizational form are not eternal features of human society. They are historical and contingent; therefore, the vanguardist model of Leninist political strategy for American communism is, pragmatically speaking, a political convenience or expedience. It simply matches and encourages praxis at the real site of political activity. The Leninist model would be inappropriate if the American political form revolved around, say, a high court of samurai warriors. It is only because the United States, as a Western project, has ‘chosen’ the party form as its preferred major (albeit not the only) method of political organization, that I find Leninism suitable for American communism. Any other justification for vanguardism would reify the party form and Leninism, treating these as the eternal strategy for communist revolution.
The problem of American communism is how the communist movement can overcome its marginality, and the vehicle at the center of this overcoming is the Communist Party. This begs an immediate question: Which party? My answer would be, to the frustration of some readers, a non-answer: all of the parties and also none of them! This is because marginal political approaches transcend political organization. It also serves to create the critical cohort I discussed in the previous section. I would even say it transcends tendency, as all the anti-capitalist left seems to occupy an isolated political position in America for the same reasons as communists in particular—their marginal approach to politics. It isn’t as though the anarchist movement is a great political force while the communists exist in the corners alone. Until a communist or socialist organization rises that fully orients itself towards real political struggle, the question of which party is irrelevant. It is more critical and effective for communists and socialists to transform the organizations they are currently members of, or the ones they decide to join after making other considerations. There is no American communist party that grapples with the problem of marginality to the degree that I can exclusively endorse them over any other one. Unfortunately, at this stage, the critique must be internalized at the individual level, with the hope that like-minded communists can start to turn the wheels of anti-marginal politics within their organizations—in other words, to become critical communists with attitudes that transcend the dismal dialectic of denial and faith.
America has a two-party system. Third parties exist but are virtually powerless, especially at the national level. Laws and policies, congressional seats, courts, bureaucratic projects, budgets, armed forces, economic reserves, territorial jurisdiction, and regulatory codes are all political objects that are determined and dominated by either Democrats or Republicans. The communist, the anarchist, the socialist, the nationalist, the libertarian, the monarchist—if any of these types actually hold a political office (they rarely do), if they happen to determine any of the real political objects listed above, they do so not as members of the party that express their ideology but instead as Democrats or Republicans as well. I would go even further and say they do so ideologically as liberal or conservative, even if they identify as “extremists,” since none of their actual ideologies actually manifest in their political decisions. Indeed, the problem of marginality extends beyond communism to all “extreme” political ideologies, as this is really just an expression of the domination of the American liberal-conservative dialectic.
We don’t have a choice; our hands are tied. The actual sites of political activity in America lie squarely on the table of the two major parties, no matter how wicked, corrupt, or untenable these parties have become. This is key: for the revolutionary, the existing political forms are far too regressive to take seriously; they must be abolished. Be patient; all will come in due time! This is my main point: the marginality of American communism renders the necessary abolition of the two major parties a fantasy at the moment, and ironically, a condition of bringing this fantasy into reality is working through the major parties, not outside of them. The emergence of the Communist Party, if the word ‘emergence’ has any real, active meaning, depends on creating a power bloc within the major party apparatus, with the ultimate aim of replacing that party.
This is, again, due to the marginal status of communism and nothing else. As it stands, communism has no footing. To gain this footing is to rise and disrupt the current dominant figure from within, as it lacks the political power to do so from outside. Communists believe that, over time, their marginal and subcultural political activity and articulations will coalesce to organize the working class, enabling the Communist Party to surpass one or both of the major parties. I find some Disney movie plots more realistic than this hope. And like Disney movies, our desires and dreams are wrapped up in this prospect of state revolution. They have all the characteristics of a Pixar feature film: the perfect protagonist (the communists), an reductively amoral villain (the ruling class), the damsel in distress (the oppressed), the ‘deus ex machina’ solutions (spontaneous revolution). After all, I secretly want it to be this way, too. I fall for the imago of the brave revolutionary to some degree. If I could have it my way, communism would sidestep the major parties and heroically defeat them by bringing together a working class so far advanced beyond the two-party system that they do more than merely complain about it, they actually participate in a third party. I would love for this process to be external to the party form. However, it is unrealistic or unfeasible due to a real difference in hegemony—the hegemony that the revolutionary class lacks, which communism needs to condition. The power (not hegemony, as this can only be held by a class) to replace one of the two major parties externally is the same power that an infant needs to kill a titan. It just isn’t happening.
The Democrat Party, and not the Republican Party, is the location of the future communist power bloc only in that it is the immediate location of the socialist power bloc. We can treat the construction of the socialist power bloc as a lower stage in the creation of the communist power bloc. But the communist power bloc does not exist as a faction within the Democrat Party. It is manifested only in the emergence of a vanguardist Communist Party. I argue that this revolutionary emergence can only occur after the defeat of the Democrat Party, which necessitates the emergence of the socialist power bloc. The Republican Party is the reactionary party of the ruling class. It embodies elite capital. The Democratic Party is also a bourgeois party, but its base is much more progressive. Its essential characteristic is to try to check capital, even if that check is admittedly weak and insufficient. To build a socialist power bloc in the Republican Party would be foolish, not to mention impossible—the party is thoroughly anti-communist and anti-socialist. Any class reductionist types, those that are anti-progressive, that believe that American communism can be structured by engaging with this party or with conservatism in general, should be met with ridicule.
I anticipate the charge that I’m not a real communist, because no real communist would commit such an egregious cardinal sin as to involve the noble movement of communism with the evil Democratic Party and the reformism of socialism. However, keep in mind that no general has a choice in the battlefield's location—once the war conditions determine the place, the army must show up and fight. We can expect nothing but marginality if we remain in a position without adjacency to the central powers shaping our political world—the major parties. I don’t like the Democratic Party. I only find it necessary for communists to engage with it, but for this engagement to be independent and in the service of the immediate socialist power bloc.
I have been purposely vague in what I mean by “engagement” with the party. This is to avoid being dogmatic over the particular types of activity this could entail. It could mean any of the following: supporting socialist candidates or policies, running communists and socialists as Democrats, debating with Democrats, or taking positions within the Democratic Party's internal apparatus, etc. Our communist principles do not disqualify any of these actions or any particular action because, regarding overcoming marginality and political advancement in general, the ends justify the means. In this internal manner, I argue that party politics serve as a means to communist political advancement, which may be another point of disagreement with socialists who reject the party form as a revolutionary strategy in the first place. This would include anarchists and libertarian socialists, for example. But that is an entirely different debate: for those socialists and communists that do accept party politics, I claim that the socialist or communist party rises insofar as it “engages” with the current major national party, specifically in the American context.
I have to reemphasize that this isn’t to strengthen the Democrat Party, to advance liberalism, nor to defeat the Republican Party. This is all to bolster the position of the American communist movement. During this engagement, the communists must become an effective left-wing opposition within the Democratic Party, but remain contained within the socialist power bloc. At every turn, we should be chastising the Democrats, highlighting their failures and passivity in the face of rising fascism. This isn’t to say we should let Republicans, the party antagonistic to everything we stand for, off the hook. As communists, our anti-Democratic Party stance must never verge towards conservative reaction. We should also be chastising socialists, too, but this is trickier since we are actively trying to advance socialists against the Democrat Party, in the service of its eventual destruction. We should constantly remind the masses that this party has smugly ignored their cries for sensible progressive policy, that the Democrat establishment has put bipartisanship and respectability politics above the lives of marginalized communities. We should intensify the crisis within the Democratic Party between the party establishment and the dissatisfied base. Communists should be like those so-called “barbarian” tribes that appeared at the end of the Roman Empire, which soon became quasi-nation states in the Dark Ages. Amid fires, at the site of ruins, the Communists have the opportunity to seize power. To further the Roman analogy: we should go, see, and conquer.
What A Weird Subculture!
A subculture is exactly what it sounds like—a minor community within the context of the “normal” culture, the more dominant set of norms, values, and customs. The subculture constructs itself around these norms, values, and customs. Subcultures revolve around a central object—skateboarding subculture revolves around skateboarding, hunting subculture around hunting, queer subculture around being queer, and flat earth subculture around the belief that the world is flat. The central object structures all the “particularities” that, as a condition of subcultural membership, constitute the members' experience. People, places, activities, events, rituals, symbols, histories, fashion, philosophies are all subcultural phenomena. Being part of a subculture is an epistemological affair, in that there is an expectation of knowledge (in the form of a chain of various kinds of ‘know-how’ data involving the subculture) about these objects, the possession of which is recognized by the subcultural community. In this sense, initiation into the subculture never truly ends, as membership must continually be reaffirmed through active participation in the subculture. Without this, suspicion arises as to whether an idle member is actually in the subculture, both from the community and within the guilty inner conscience of the member. Subcultural activity is a constant proving of oneself.
The communist movement suffers deeply from this subculturalism. This is a form of political abstention—communists hyperfixate on saying and doing things that involve ‘objects’ that only other communist “subculturists” would know of. This is to some extent inevitable for the apparent reason that to participate in something particular requires distinct “engagements”—a firefighter is a firefighter insofar as she does something that other people don’t, therefore some of the things she says and does belong to a class of things that other people do not know. But communists exceed this necessary subculturalism. They evade the political world by endlessly concerning themselves with subcultural reality. If our firefighter acted like communists do, she would spend one half of her day debating with other firefighters over the origins of firefighting and the other half going to arcades, telling people about the dangers of electric fires caused by the game machines. She would spend none of her day fighting fires, as the city burned to the ground all around her.
I hate to admit this, but the internet is my evidence for subculturalism on the discursive level. But beyond stupid tweets, subcultural concerns bleed into real life, affirmed by my time spent in leftist organizations and spaces. I’ve been in many meetings derailed by a distracting debate over something that had the veneer of being a highly relevant, hot topic, but in reality, no one in the real world cared about it. I’ve wasted time and energy, pouring each into useless ‘propaganda’ and ‘education’ over dogmatic, “need-to-know,” obscurities. I’ve been a member of the subculture long enough to know that it has pacified the communist movement.
We have to recognize and call out subculturalism when it arises. It’s the only way to correct our course continually. Subculturalism keeps the communist head on a swivel; to expose it is to turn the communist head back straight and keep it there. Engaging in the subculture serves as a form of coping with political weakness and marginalization. We don’t have to think about the hard problem of why we’re failing if we can busy ourselves with irrelevant issues that only we care about seeing solved. Again, the disease of subculturalism goes beyond any particular tendency or organization. Some groups could be more subcultural than others, but this is besides the point. Wherever we are as communists, we have to challenge our tendency to fall into the esoteric realities that we build around ourselves.
The communist can be described as two types of different yet closely related political actors—the ‘activist’ and the ‘organizer.’ An organizer coordinates the movement's activities; it is a matter of methodology. Activism stresses the advocacy aspect—an activist can work towards social change beyond organizing with others. Nonetheless, the communist is an activist and an organizer. Activism and organizing have become ends in and of themselves, rather than means to a real political movement. They have replaced the role of communist ideology as the guiding force of communist practice. Activism and organizing define the movement, as the communist strives to become a stellar activist and an efficient organizer to gain political power for the working class. The activity loses its political characteristic, as the activist-organizer hopes that enough activism and organizing will lead to socialism and communism.
This is partly a consequence of an implicit post-Marxist ideology. I do not mean “post-Marxist” in the specific sense as it is identified with the Marxism of theorists Laclau and Mouffe, but instead in a temporal sense, as all such strains of Marxist thinking beyond Marx and Engels themselves. The American socialist doesn’t enter the movement through a party. They become radicals largely through learning about ideology online and in isolation. Leninism emphasizes the party, so the socialist who veers towards Leninism learns that to be a communist is to be in a Marxist-Leninist party. However, Leninism is out of fashion, and the socialist who adopts another tendency becomes an individualist radical. They float from one organization to another. Without the core unity of a communist party, this radical becomes an expert activist-organizer, but never a proper political actor. They select a topic (for example, the labor and union struggle) for advocacy—usually, Marxism, socialism, and communism lie in the background of this topic, as they are assumed to be ideologies. They then hone their mobilization skills and networking abilities. I don’t mean to bash activism and organizing, but if they aren’t directed in a united, cohesive, explicitly political way, they can never overcome marginality. The Communist Party, ideally speaking, directs the activist-organizational tendency towards political projects. The situation is clear: members of communist parties have a marginal and subcultural attitude and approach to politics, while those “free agent” socialists are activist-organizers without a homeland. Both the “homeland” and its potential inhabitants are politically inert. A bleak picture indeed.
Dreams of the Communist Future
Freedom and alienation—this is the spiritual contradiction that characterizes life under capitalism. Marx understood alienation as a condition of the estrangement realized in the processes of commodity production. Alienation paints a dreary picture of the world, confronting the worker's own life and sense of being as an ‘alien power’, in Marx’s terms. This is because, according to Marx, material production isn’t just the creation of useful things, but it is also the production and reproduction of human life itself. This production serves as the source of our species-being, which is our consciousness of ourselves as fundamentally social beings. In a fascinating yet nonsensical dialectical maneuver, Marx identifies this consciousness of our social ontology as our human nature, our essence. But that essence reveals itself contingently, configured by the current stage of society. Marx has an essential nature of man, but this nature is determined by history, not asserted by philosophers or scientists, but is instead conceived as the activity of humankind.
Under capitalism, we are robbed of this ‘produced life’ when the capitalist confiscates the product of our labor as a consequence of the process of commodification. And so, with capitalism’s expansion, the increasing commodification of reality thwarts every aspect of social life, which is also developing in a way that is independent of commodity production. Unless we’re fortunate enough to be wealthy, everywhere we turn, money determines and restrains all activity. The proletariat, the great victims of capitalist society, whose class oppression has anointed it with a historical destiny, carries the seeds of a new, liberated society—the next stage in world history—on its work-weary backs: the emancipated new world we call communism. In the simplest and most common definition, furnished most famously by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto, ‘communism’ is the world order in which no classes, money, or state powers exist. This definition serves as a building block on which other communist world visions can be constructed. Therefore, I will refer to it as the base definition of communism, or simply the base definition for short.
From this initial negative description of the new emancipated society, communists come to understand this future as having certain social features—the end of wage-labor, the common ownership of all resources, the abolition both of social constructs like gender as well as oppressive social institutions like prisons and mental facilities, the end of concrete nations and borders, the end of war and armed conflict, etc. The communists that include particular features do so, partially, because they perceive such features as logically necessary given the base definition. These features are not inherent to the universally accepted picture of the communist future because no widely accepted picture of the communist future even exists in the first place. Instead, communists and communist organizations attribute specific characteristics to their particular version of the communist future, which they believe must exist as a logical consequence of the basic definition of communism. Notice that the expression of this future vision is socially and linguistically determined. A communist can only truly embody and express their place in the world, using the concepts, phrases, grammar, and syntax at their immediate disposal. And so, atop the foundation of the negatively defined base definition, communists articulate a subjective vision of the future—a world of emancipation, adorned with features chosen and justified by the communists themselves.
For example, suppose two communists were having a riveting discussion articulating their versions of what they think the communist future will be like. Again, they are both intellectualizing over this. Still, they are also purely speculating on which social features are necessary in a communist society, considering that neither of them owns a crystal ball. Suppose that one of these communists is American and the other is Indian, but specifically, they are a member of the Hijra community in South Asia. Historically speaking, hijra people are known for their complicated notion of gender. I won’t attempt to simplify the complex social dynamic by explaining it here. All we need for our scenario is the fact that the Hijra communist certainly exists and experiences life outside the Western, heteronormative conception of gender. Now, suppose that the American describes communism as a world where gender has finally been abolished once and for all. Hooray, we did it!
The problem here is universalism—the blind and oftentimes unconscious assumption that certain social constructs are a given, that they are universally understood and accepted across various cultural, national, and geographic boundaries. The American, just like the typical Western subject, is aloof to the fact that a contingent understanding of gender still restrains their vision for the future world. This contingency is obscured by the position of preponderant power that the West occupies in the global world order, and specifically in this case, in the order of knowledge. The Western understanding constitutes the ‘legitimate’ globally dominant epistemology, enforced and reinforced through a hegemonic order. Regardless of all the grand displays of Western power, its preeminence and hegemonic status does not imply that its system of thinking is objective, let alone that the West has the ‘most objective’ form of thinking there is. It never actually achieves its aim of surveying the world from a neutral, absolute, transcendent gaze, by which every phenomenon can be viewed and apprehended.
Universalism, when mentioned alongside concepts such as law, healthcare, and human rights, assumes the veneer of innocence and goodwill. The American communist presents a vision of the world that the Hijra communist cannot immediately understand. It would be absurd to claim that this awkward cultural difference opens an unbridgeable chasm between the two communists. But the problem of universalism: We could expect the Hijra communists to subscribe to a vision of the future in which gender is abolished, despite their existence outside the gender binary. Nothing bars a cultural exchange of this kind. But this vision would be alien to the Hijra communist if they perceive, understand, and experience the classification of peoples in a way that renders gender and thus gender abolition incoherent. And so, gender abolition would not emerge in the future-world articulations of communists that do not share the social understanding of gender in the first place. The primary objective here is to illustrate the historical and cultural determinism inherent in any purported communist world vision. This applies to the base definition as well: it doesn’t transcend its historical determination either, for their ‘Germanness’ and their ‘nineteenth-centuryness’ of Marx and Engels did determine how they professed their vision for communist society.
Historical materialism, contingency, and generalized social determinism lead us straight to a situation that wears the unsettling mask of a self-referential paradox. By historical materialism’s admission, a historical materialist worldview belongs to the same set of concepts that must be ruptured in the necessary revolution against our dominant epistemology. We resolve this paradox as dialecticians. We assert that the communist world vision is ordered by and therefore does reflect bourgeois epistemology; this much is true. However, this does not disqualify such a vision as being unable to think beyond the boundaries of its constitution. Ironically, the fact that the vision belongs to the bourgeois order affirms that it can achieve a rupture from it. This is due to the ontology of bourgeois society, which is its fundamental mode of being. Another way I think of ontology, which is in no way ‘proper’ or logically equivalent to the definition just given, is that, for a thing X, there are some conditions, call them C, that are so profoundly ubiquitous to everything that has involved, currently involves and will possibly involve X, that it would be an absurdity to not consider C as being fundamental to the nature of X’s being.
Ontologically, our society is characterized by an interpenetration of its opposite. Its opposite appears everywhere, making it a condition so ubiquitous that I identify it with the ontology of bourgeois society. The opposite of bourgeois class society is the classless communist society. The expansive and creative negativity gained in the emancipatory character of communist society contradicts the insufficient positivity expressed in bourgeois society. The ruling class presents its whole body of knowledge, its religion, its sciences, etc., to try and universalize itself beyond being a class but as being merely a bare social group that, although holds an objective position in society, is only doing so in a way that reflects the natural way in which the world is supposed to be. It strikes and hides its hands—it tries to wash these hands of any responsibility by denying their role in constructing and reproducing that society. This denial of the bourgeois manifests as the politics and culture of anti-communism, anti-socialism, and anti-Marxism. However, all these forms are essentially how the bourgeoisie copes with its failure to fulfill its universal promises to society, its inability to meet the demands of human needs.
This interpenetration is a result of the bourgeois class's inability to perpetuate the very historical destiny it constructed and draped itself in on its journey towards class supremacy and revolution. This destiny embodies the primary slogan of the French Revolution: to establish a society founded on the free pursuit of liberty, equality, and fraternity. As we all know, the entire aim and structure of capitalist society is to guarantee that the bourgeois and ruling classes never actually realize this promise, and that these days they consider the call of the French Revolution a historical artifact, perhaps a politico-mythological reference point for modern political struggles, and not a living demand that they are categorically unable to meet.
Class society generates a contradiction between the ruling class's oppression, which is required to reproduce the capitalist social formation, and the moral norms, ideals, and values professed by this oppressive ruling class. Furthermore, these same notions are imposed on the rest of society. The bourgeois create morality, contradict it with class oppression, and then force the rest of humankind to follow it. So fundamentally, class society obliterates the promise it made at the moment it was made. And so all concepts born out of this society also express this interpenetration, by containing the very essential features of that opposite as latent potential within the concept itself. Since this potential includes in itself the essence of the interpenetrating opposite, it follows that this potential is for the possibility of transforming our current thinking into the kind necessary for the realization of the interpenetration of opposites. We showed earlier the communist future. This means we can rescue our communist world vision, and even the visions of Marx and Engels, from self-referential hell, since it will always have a small glimpse of the world that lies beyond its constitution. Or put simply: quell your fears of paradox because bourgeois society follows the old dialectical cliche: it contains the seeds of its destruction anyway!
The communists claim that some set of social characteristics will be necessary features of communism. Some of these features are identified through reasoning about the implications of the base definition. However, most of these features are reflections of the social relations that constitute whoever is making from an evolving yet personal narrative. This leads us to a problem: what, if anything, unifies the communist vision if it varies so greatly across subjects? The base definition partially resolves this problem: it is a fixture on top of which communists can and do construct differing visions of the communist world. It is considered legitimate in the global communist movement for historical reasons: Marxism, despite its failure to aid in the realization of the communist future, remains the default theoretical starting point for most left-wing social revolutionary movements, even if these movements diverge from it quickly. This is also a result of bourgeois canonization, as Marxism is considered the accepted form of revolutionary thought. Recall Lenin’s conclusion about reactionary canonization and our revolutionary heroes on the very first page of The State and Revolution.
Despite the historical legitimacy granted to Marxism, the subjective vision of a single communist is entered into the global communist discourse when that vision is publicly declared, at a political demonstration, speech, organizational meeting, or on the internet, etc. This declaration has the effect of collectivizing and transforming the vision. The vision, although individually articulated, becomes a collective expression when it enters public discourse, under the evaluation and scrutiny of a community of inquirers. Inquirers can be thought of as acting on or against the publicly professed communist vision—endorsing it, rejecting it, correcting it, “incorrecting” it, modifying it, elaborating on it, extending it, and so on. What survives as the result of this process is a transformed and collectivized version of the original vision. This version, ideally, is one that the entire community of inquirers endorses as correct and thus affirms its approval. However, because the notion is too abstract, a community of inquirers cannot have aims other than obviously to inquire about something. Again, the community of inquirers in our case is either the communist ‘movement’ or the vanguardist party when it emerges.
Again, a communist vision for a future world isn’t necessarily individual and thus can avoid the pitfalls of being overly relative or eclectic, as it can be sufficiently expressed by organizations as well, which are the critical community of inquirers that can help develop the professed vision. However, visions emerge outside of particular communist organizations only as a consequence of the ultra-distributive medium by which these visions are presented to the world. They are expressed and spread on the primary hyper-dispersive means and systems of communication that exist and order all other communication in our modern world: the internet. In other words, the communist vision itself continues to evolve. It does so more rapidly than ever before in history, thanks to the birth of the internet and the subsequent advent of the internet age, which we have to include here since with the age comes the whole totality of ‘mechanisms’, scientific-technological or otherwise, which support the internet’s existence and reproduction.
The number of people able to participate in mass communication today is unprecedented. The birth of the internet has ushered in a new age in which all visions of new communication can be introduced through the cheap movement of a few bytes of binary data. This data can be presented to anyone in the world in a matter of milliseconds. As a result, unprecedented swaths of the world population are being introduced to a range of communist world visions, and a significant, albeit small, minority of self-identifying communists are formulating and publicly declaring their versions of the world vision. These articulations are, again, ways of enriching the base definition with specific social characteristics. However, these social characteristics are part of the general system of theory within which the communist operates. If these communists are truly historical materialists, and if they practice historical materialist analysis ‘correctly,’ then their theory, and consequently the social characteristics of their worldview, are both born out of the particular social context they belong to. I can only say what proper historical materialism does not look like rather than what it directly entails. The creative endeavor of constructing a vision that aligns with the responsibilities that come with committing to historical materialism cannot be described without or even before a particular social context in which to apply it. This is because to retain true creativity, such an endeavor must be open to possibilities that are eradicated if proper historical materialism is identified with a standard methodology abstracted from its social context. Regardless, we still launch judgments against the attempts at the historical materialism of fellow communists as a process not only of collective correction but also of productive theoretical development and transformation in general.
The collective vision for the future communist world can be considered, conceptually speaking, the complex relational aggregate of all currently existing visions in the minds of communists. This conceptual consideration becomes useful only when confined to a concrete national context—in this case, to the surprise of no one, we are dealing with the American context. This world vision is continually being shaped and transformed by the practices of American society, but more closely and immediately by the praxis of communist revolutionaries, as these radical intellectuals are the ones crafting the details of the very vision in question. This is why I chose to consider the vision an aggregate of only communists. But it isn’t the only reason for my choice. Another perspective is that, as noted earlier in the individual case, the collective vision coincides with general communist theory and philosophy. Communists actively develop such theory and philosophy, so my framing of the collective vision is really to centralize a concern, not necessarily to apprehend the objectivity of a phenomenon or to construct a useful concept. Either way, the collective communist world vision must fulfill the ideological-articulative requirements of all communist theory anyway: it must represent, organize, and direct the revolutionary aims and sentiments of the working-class movement.
These revolutionaries actively contribute to a multitude of subjective (individual, organizational, or digitally dispersed) visions, each with its particular necessary features. However, the process of identifying and even revising these features is socially and historically determined. These visions are rapidly spreading across our global consciousness thanks to the technologies of mass communication ordered by the internet. And when they are professed to a community of inquirers, in this case to other communists in public, these visions enter into a collective apparatus which develops them. In this case, the community of inquirers ought to be a democratic centralist communist formation or party, since the organizational method of democratic centralism, when implemented correctly, encourages productive engagement with the varying views that exist within a communist organization.
The Chase Continues…
The communist activist-organizer must become a communist politician. A communist politician can only emerge within a Communist Party. The politician, however, doesn’t come out of thin air in the Communist Party. Now we introduce the role of intellectuals (I and other writers for this publication have written extensively elsewhere about intellectuals, so I’ll briefly describe their role here). The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci places a strong emphasis on the role of intellectuals in the communist revolution. For him, the social function of intellectuals is to organize and direct the collective will (briefly defined as the power and influence) of a particular class. Working-class intellectuals organize and direct the power and influence of the proletariat. Therefore, the Communist Party, serving as the vehicle for revolution on behalf of this class, is an organization that does this.
The communist intellectual prefigures the communist politician. The sympathizer who becomes a communist becomes one as an intellectual endeavor. It is not as though they are in the middle of doing something and suddenly they are a communist, like hatching from an egg or shedding skin. There is a moment when one must reflect on the world to arrive at the communist worldview explicitly. As an intellectual, I believe the early praxis of the communist revolutionary is “articulative” and educative. Articulative in the sense that the intellectual has to use their formal knowledge of the world to adequately express the political desires and goals of the working class. Educative, in that the communist intellectual must educate society and be educated by it, as Gramsci employs the phrase. However, this activity should always condition the eventual communist politician. The intellectual activity of the Communist Party is primarily manifested in the actual political activities it directs. Without this dimension, the party stagnates, becomes a subcultural hub, loses touch with the working class, and ultimately succumbs to perpetual marginality.