Chapter 05 / Communism in the post-MAGA Age

(Mis)understanding ‘MAGA Communism:’

The vast majority of founders and active members of the MAGA Communist tendency came directly out of the Communist, Socialist, and progressive movements. They were more often supporters than leaders, and when they did lead, they led profoundly marginal groups. They were union stewards and rank-and-file members. They participated in mutual aid, marched with Black Lives Matter, and occupied Wall Street. They were founders and members of tiny DSA chapters, DSA factions, and the handful of Communist micro-parties that dot the American landscape. Some are academics in history, politics, and even hold degrees in Marxism itself. Some fought against the seizure of Native American land for oil pipelines, and against the oil industry generally. Some were volunteers in overseas socialist military organizations. Some worked on independent socialist or left-progressive political campaigns and ran as candidates themselves, usually for offices they had little chance of winning.

Well, credit where credit is due for being honest enough to acknowledge this. I just wonder if, in the middle of your ‘autopsy,’ the ‘corpse’ began moving a little bit, you’d be less forthcoming about admitting such basic facts?

While the MAGA Communist tendency did not attract very many people, it did draw from diverse strata of the Communist movement. It was able to do so because it was, in part, an expression of more widely felt disillusionment with this movement—its chronic marginality, its organizational impotence, its inability to offer any credible political power to the masses, its myopia. Every Communist in this country has shared these grievances to some extent. The MAGA Communists were people who were part of our movement, had seen the results, and concluded that the movement itself was a dead end–and opted to go a different direction.

A slight correction. You are referring to the followers of the Infrared movement, which began in 2021. The majority of “MAGA Communists” drew this conclusion before ‘MAGA Communism’ became a thing.

MAGA Communism developed in embryo during the first Trump administration. It was a convergence of the growing influencer economy with the deep political disorientation of the left after the failure of the Bernie Sanders campaign, which the vast majority of the MAGA Communists once counted themselves as supporters of.

No?

What influencer economy? Is this a reference to ‘Chapo’ and the ‘dirtbag left’ or something?

Faced with the collapse of the Sanders campaign, most of the left responded by turning toward the progressive working class—building new organizations, new cadres, new strategies, new infrastructure aimed at developing the masses Sanders had demonstrated were reachable into a political movement.

Ah, and where did that lead “most of the left” and its so-called “progressive working class” (by ‘progressive’ I imagine Gigi does not mean in the Marxist sense, but in the sense of having yard signs that say, ‘In this House, We Believe in Science’)?

It has been over a decade. Where are the results and where is the political movement?

MAGA Communists have offered, at varying points, contradictory self-definitions. In 2024, Al-Din attempted to clarify his philosophy in “MAGA Communism — A Response to Critics”:

“First of all, MAGA Communism is not a ‘new’ or ‘syncretic’ ideology. It is a slogan coined by American Marxist-Leninists. This slogan reflects a very specific appraisal and analysis of the current historical situation in America from an Orthodox Marxist-Leninist perspective. In no way does it amount to combining Marxism with American Right-Wing ideology.” [4]

For Al-Din, then, MAGA Communism was nothing more than a “slogan.” And, when attacked, this was what the MAGA Communists frequently retreated to: “it is just a slogan, don’t take it too seriously”. But Al-Din contradicts himself:

“MAGA Communism is a historical and strategic perspective, which amounts to the following: The rise of MAGA in 2015-2016 marks an irreversible point in the rise of a new form of popular sovereignty in America — which American Communist politics will be rebuilt out of.”

Instantly, MAGA Communism is promoted from a slogan to a theory of history! Al-Din then asserts that MAGA permanently altered American politics and that a new politics must be rebuilt on its foundation.

Gigi detects a contradiction. But if we simply phrase the aforementioned relation as:

MAGA Communism is a slogan that reflects a new historical and strategic perspective about our current situation.

Suddenly this fatal, damning ‘contradiction’ disappears entirely. Imagine that, the wonders of appraising distinct forms of information in good faith!

Such incredible leaps and bounds! I write: MAGA Communism is a slogan, a slogan that “reflects a very specific appraisal and analysis of the current historical situation in America from an Orthodox Marxist–Leninist perspective.”

According to Gigi, there is something about this description that insinuates or somehow implies that I do not mean for it to be taken seriously. According to Gigi, this means that it is ‘nothing more’ than a slogan, despite directly quoting me write that it, in fact, reflects something quite more than “nothing.”

Gigi, are you sure you aren’t a groyper? You leap around as a frog does.

I am quoted as saying: “MAGA Communism is a historical and strategic perspective, which amounts to the following: The rise of MAGA in 2015-2016 marks an irreversible point in the rise of a new form of popular sovereignty in America — which American Communist politics will be rebuilt out of.”

You then claim:

MAGA Communism is promoted from a slogan to a theory of history!

Gigi is confused. A historical and strategic perspective is not the same thing as a ‘theory of history.’ Moreover, the basic idea is that MAGA Communism is a slogan that reflects or, rather, implies this perspective, not that it itself entails the special ‘theory’ behind the perspective itself!

Al-Din then asserts that MAGA permanently altered American politics and that a new politics must be rebuilt on its foundation.

But where is the contradiction? MAGA did indeed permanently alter American politics. How does this contradict MAGA Communism being a slogan? The logic doesn’t add up.

If I argue that Communist politics must be rebuilt out of a new form of popular sovereignty, and I identified MAGA with that new form, doesn’t that justify MAGA Communism as a slogan, rather than contradict it?

You commit a very basic logical error. You are attempting to demonstrate that I ‘simultaneously regard MAGA Communism as a mere slogan, while also being something far more than that.’ But in the example of ‘far more,’ you can only reference me observing the exceptional significance of MAGA itself, not MAGA Communism. For strictly logical purposes here, according to your own logic, that ‘MAGA’ is very significant materially does not contradict MAGA Communism being ‘nothing more’ than a slogan.

This is a sloppy and disappointing failure to track basic logic on your part.

MAGA Communists believe that the MAGA movement, through “cybernetic relationships”, i.e., social media engagement, achieved something closer to the expression of the general will than the American democratic system ever had.

No, once again, this is an illogical leap in terms of interpreting the material you quoted. Nowhere was it claimed that this was closer to the ‘general will’ than ‘the American democratic system’ was ever able to express, just that it was closer to expressing the ‘general will’ than ‘democratic political institutions’ were, present tense, [currently] able to express.

I am not being pedantic. I purposefully put ‘democratic political institutions’ in sarcastic brackets because I am of course referencing the false veneer of strictly institutional, Disney-fied American ‘democracy’ that is nothing more than a specifically neoliberal aesthetic regime. These institutions are far from democratic in any real historical sense of the word: They are not enumerated in any democratic constitution or even formal bourgeois democracy itself. The so-called ‘fourth estate,’ the mainstream media, academic institutions, the ‘open society:’ All of these are more or less directly controlled by the CIA, the imperialist bourgeoisie, etc. and form a dictatorial hegemony. They are not, even in the classical, bourgeois sense of the word, democratic.

It’s pure opportunism to conflate this with conventional ‘bourgeois dictatorship:’ Since the hegemony is more or less an implicit formal dictatorship and not simply a dictatorship in content. Anyway, it was Lenin himself who clarified this distinction over a century ago in comprehending the anti-democratic nature of imperialism!

This fibbing about ‘democracy’ reminds me, once again, of Shaykh Lenin regarding the real distinction between democracy, even in its true, original bourgeois revolutionary sense, and the already sanitized, institutionalized sense of Cadet ‘democracy’ around the turn of the century:

The Young Turks are praised for their moderation and restraint, i.e., the Turkish revolution is being praised because it is weak, because it is not rousing the popular masses to really independent action, because it is hostile to the proletarian struggle beginning in the Ottoman Empire—and at the same time the plunder of Turkey continues

Lenin would later write in the State and Revolution, undoubtedly recalling his earlier analysis:

If we take the revolutions of the 20th century as examples we shall, of course, have to admit that the Portuguese and the Turkish revolutions are both bourgeois revolutions. Neither of them, however, is a “people’s” revolution, since in neither does the mass of the people, their vast majority, come out actively, independently, with their own economic and political demands to any noticeable degree. By contrast, although the Russian bourgeois revolution of 1905–07 displayed no such “brilliant” successes as at time fell to the Portuguese and Turkish revolutions, it was undoubtedly a “real people’s” revolution, since the mass of the people, their majority, the very lowest social groups, crushed by oppression and exploitation, rose independently and stamped on the entire course of the revolution the imprint of their own demands, their attempt to build in their own way a new society in place of the old society that was being destroyed.

What of this curious distinction, between bourgeois revolutions and people’s revolutions? Regarding the role of people’s revolution in democracy, drawing upon the alliance proposed by Marx in 1871 to smash the bureaucratic state machine:

To smash this machine, to break it up, is truly in the interest of the “people”, of their majority, of the workers and most of the peasants, is “the precondition” for a free alliance of the poor peasant and the proletarians, whereas without such an alliance democracy is unstable and socialist transformation is impossible.

No people’s revolution, no democracy, according to Lenin! Lenin goes further:

From the peasants, as from other sections of the petty bourgeoisie, only an insignificant few “rise to the top”, “get on in the world” in the bourgeois sense, i.e., become either well-to-do, bourgeois, or officials in secure and privileged positions. In every capitalist country where there are peasants (as there are in most capitalist countries), the vast majority of them are oppressed by the government and long for its overthrow, long for “cheap” government. This can be achieved only by the proletariat; and by achieving it, the proletariat at the same time takes a step towards the socialist reorganization of the state.

Lenin regards democracy to be in the material interests of a people’s alliance — between the proletariat, peasantry, and sections of the petty bourgeoisie. Democracy, for Lenin, means ‘cheap government’ and the radical simplification of the powers of the old state. That is quite distinct from neoliberal ‘democracy’ and its ‘open society’ whose fundamental tendency is the complete institutionalization of all facets of society.

It’s necessary to remember Lenin’s contrasting of the Turkish/Portuguese revolutions versus the Russians: The former ‘revolutions’ were basically the equivalent of shitlib ‘No Kings’ color revolution protests, the latter was a genuine, ‘toxic’ uprising of the ‘deplorable’, rough-hewn masses, in all their ‘problematic-ness.’

Regarding the reduction of the idea of ‘cybernetic popular sovereignty’ to ‘social media engagement,’ the problem is that though social media plays an indispensable role in the outmoding of older forms of media, the cybernetic forms of popular expression are by no means confined to it but are expressed in nearly every aspect of civilization. Social media is only the simplest manifestation of the basic cybernetic relationship based on feedback and control which has acquired near-universal scale in the age of ‘big data.’

In any case, the new form of popular sovereignty has evidently disrupted and become misaligned with traditional, formal expressions of popular sovereignty. The basic breakdown of trust in elections and government more generally is the most obvious proof of this fact.

This new sovereignty “lacked a correspondingly new political authority and organization — such as a new party” — a party, naturally, that Al-Din and his collaborators would supply.

The wording here implies that we somehow had the expectation that we would become the preeminent and leading political force in the nation before Gigi claims I declared MAGA Communism “dead.” This implication is nowhere justified by anything we have ever said or done.

A more honest reading would simply conclude that this vacuum imposes upon Communists the task of attempting to ‘supply’ this Party, but where does this mean that “naturally” I or anyone else would supply it? Is it so difficult to simply say that we would, earnestly and in good faith, at least attempt to explore this possibility with a profoundly realistic understanding of our objective limitations? Or at least, in principle, imply that this possibility should be explored by Communists?

The MAGA Communists never articulated a functional theory for what this new “cybernetic party” actually is. How does it operate? How does it recruit, educate, and develop leaders? How does it grow beyond digital metrics and translate into material power?

If we haven’t articulated a functional theory for how such a Party operates — how it recruits, educates, develops leaders, and grows beyond mere digital metrics and translates into material power — then certainly someone should have some explaining to do. Given the fact that our Party does in fact operate, recruit, educate, and develop leaders, while growing beyond mere digital metrics and translating its reach into material (infinitesimally modest, as should be expected from any Communist Party right now but nevertheless material) forms of power.

Crucially, this theory necessarily gauges differentiation within the masses. Not all tendencies are equal; some point beyond the existing capitalist order, while others are regressive, binding their adherents to the reactionary past. The task of the party is not to collapse this distinction in the name of a hollow, “cybernetic” populism, but to clarify, organize, and develop it. It is by consolidating the most advanced elements into a force capable of organically leading the rest that the Communist Party form manifests.

But a “cybernetic theory” of popular sovereignty would precisely explain the distinct tendencies within the masses with better explanatory precision than the profoundly idealist paradigm Gigi presumably works with, which evaluates the quality of various different ‘tendencies’ not on the basis of their objective relationship to the existing capitalist order but on the basis of how directly they recite the form of theory. In other words, according to Gigi’s ‘revolutionary intelligence’ (i.e., the basic ability to discriminate according to which tendencies are most revolutionary), the classification of tendencies on the basis of ‘advanced,’ ‘backward’ — the masses more similar to bourgeois intelligentsia are advanced while those distinct from bourgeois intelligentsia are backward.

This has nothing to do with revolutionary consciousness. It is a vulgar reflection of the parochial and narrow prejudices of… Bourgeois intelligentsia. Classifying the masses on the basis of how similar they look and talk alike nerds is not revolutionary intelligence. It fundamentally misunderstands the indirect and mediated relationship between revolutionary theory and revolutionary consciousness, committing the basic error of collapsing the distinction between revolutionary cadre and revolutionary masses.

By contrast, a “cybernetic” comprehension of the masses would be guided by the basic maxim: Know them by their fruits. It would evaluate the various tendencies among the masses on the basis of to what degree, objectively, these tendencies functionally reinforce dis-alignment or alignment with the hegemony. There are, of course, ways of measuring disalignment beyond mere social media metrics: All kinds of data can help guide Communists comprehend which tendencies correspond to what outcomes.

In this way, the tendencies of the masses can be evaluated not on the basis of what they say but what they are actually doing.

Because liberal democracy is a facade for bourgeois dictatorship, Al-Din reasons, any form that supersedes it must represent an advance. Fascism also superseded liberal democracy in Italy and Germany—does Al-Din propose that Mussolini’s corporate state represented a progressive development?

Fascism did not “supersede” liberalism, it was simply the very same liberal state in its state of exception or emergency. Fascism was even more attached to classical liberal ‘civilization’ than the New Deal or social democracy was. At no point did it even re-fashion or replace the majority of liberal institutions or laws with new systems; it simply gave an added layer of open gangsterism and savage, lawless violence atop what already existed.

This is quite different than what I describe as post-liberalism, which has genuinely sublated liberalism by subordinating it to an objectively new logic of politics and statehood. And for the record, the exemplary post-liberal state is the People’s Republic of China, whose whole-process democracy is profoundly “cybernetic.”

The criterion for historical progress in Marxist thought is not the novelty of “material form” but the class content of that form—which class wields power, and toward what end.

This sentence betrays a very basic lack of dialectics, a basic confusion of form and content in this context.

By “content” what I referred to is the “ideological content” characterized by the appearance of specific forms of consciousness, ideas, phrases, rhetoric, etc. Naturally, the bourgeois ideologist confuses “ideological content” with “class content.” You see “ideological content” and somehow think that is the same as ‘class content?’

Let me make it simple for you: In this representation of the dialectic of form and content, a novel material form of politics would correspond to the supremacy of a new class in material content (in terms of what class has become dominant according to the logic of production itself). Forms cannot themselves engender novel forms, only contradictions by way of content can do that. The superficial “ideological content” of politics would, by comparison, correspond to empty and hollow forms with respect to their actual class content. It’s profoundly easy for the class/material content of the imperialist or bourgeois position to take on hollow and superficial “socialist” or even “communist” ideological content. Just look at the bitch AOC or the smiling scammer Zohran.

Though the proletariat has not acquired political power, though it is not dominant in terms of controlling the wealth of society, according to the logic of production it, in a sense, acquires supremacy from the strict perspective of civil society: Removing the artificial fetters of bourgeois superstructural dictatorship would entail the real dictatorship of the proletariat.

This absence of class analysis is characteristic of MAGA communist theory.

No, it is characteristic of the very limited extent to which you are familiar with our writings. You read one tweet by me and now consider yourself an expert regarding “MAGA Communist theory.”

Al-Din’s “cybernetic sovereignty” does not place the working class as the referential centerpiece of this feedback mechanism. It places a bourgeois demagogue at the center of a loop whose infrastructure—the platforms, the algorithms, the data—remains the private property of capital. To call this an advance over liberal democracy is to confuse the replacement of one form of bourgeois rule with another for the abolition of bourgeois rule itself.

The tweet in question being this one. I don’t know if you just got tired and gave up trying to understand or, maybe, you were writing this for a week, finished some of it, forgot crucial details you had to study, and got confused when you resumed writing?

Talking about “Al Din’s cybernetic sovereignty” implies that I am somehow myself proposing a new form of sovereignty, rather than analyzing the objective emergence of a new form of popular sovereignty which, by the way, I do not attribute any normative content to.

You claim I do not place “the working class” as the referential centerpiece of this feedback mechanism. I will simplify it radically for you: the “working class” is the “subject” itself.

It places a bourgeois demagogue at the center of a loop whose infrastructure—the platforms, the algorithms, the data—remains the private property of capital.

If your way of (poorly) interpreting the cybernetic relationship is such that Trump is at the “center of the loop” (which, if you know anything about cybernetics, you wouldn’t claim) then by this “analogy,” it could not simply be the “working class” directly at the center but a centralized agent, in this case, the supreme Party of the proletariat. Appealing directly to the “working class” without mediation is just empty posturing.

The very simple idea is that Trump acquired feedback directly from how he thought his supporters reacted to him, acted upon this feedback, and continued working off the reactions. He did this initially through television ratings, social media, markets, and more. The crucial thing is that originally, he did this in a way that bypassed expert consensus. By setting the precedent of basically legitimating viral, wild forms of information that carry the potential of acquiring a life of their own, without expert or institutional mediation, he inadvertently facilitated the rise of unregulated conspiracism, popular distrust in institutions, and newfound popular courage to challenge the pharmaceutical industry’s agenda during COVID.

Trump did not intend any of that. He was not the “center” of anything. The real “center” of cybernetic popular sovereignty is not a personality but a type of popular ‘hyper-object,’ the general will in the form of a specific tendency, aim, goal, or orientation of society. The specific control over the algorithms, platforms, and data, of course gives the hegemony the ability to suppress, distort, and ‘define’ this ‘general will.’

The problem is that the economic logic embedded in algorithms itself resists this tendency: It is biased toward the maximal acquisition of authentic data and algorithms that can competently produce data necessary for the basic goal of marketing people goods. ‘Capital’ itself needs to squeeze out as much margins as it can through this, as a matter of life and death. The highpoint of Big Tech’s direct attempt to enforce the will of the hegemony through political control of algorithms, data, and platform access was between 2016–2023.

Now, one can argue that following Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, which set the precedent of an almost universal relaxation of regulations and guidelines on tech platforms, that the hegemony now exercises direct control over the ‘cybernetic process’ through subtle manipulation of algorithms, etc. All this proves is that it is not enough to be present and dominant on social media, and nothing more. If we thought it was enough, we wouldn’t have launched the ACP. We wouldn’t have spent so much money, time and resources doing offline work, building independent material infrastructure and organization.

Moreover, let us actually analyze this new ‘direct control,’ since it itself presupposes the complete reorganization of the state machine itself! It is precisely this apparent reorganization of the state machine — Trump gutting and replacing the American state with loyalists — that has helped lay the groundwork for an inevitable constitutional crisis and civil war. Those ‘enforcing’ the regime’s agenda are themselves cybernetically aligned with it, the target audience of the White House’s shitty memes, people who follow retards like captive dreamer. In other words, Skynet can now build its own robots, only this is not the real skynet — for the cybernetic ‘loop’ is controlled cheaply by the old hegemony itself. Hence its transparent inauthenticity, its outward fakeness, the face of Laura Loomer, which the majority of the MAGA popular base can see through and has already, largely broken ranks from.

The cybernetic form of the general will, is evidently constrained, given transparently definite, obvious parameters, which institutionalize it in the same way the Fed “institutionalizes” crypto by launching its own shitcoins: By no means a comprehensive replacement of any established system; more like an additional, finally legitimized supplement.

That popular sovereignty now assumes a cybernetic form, does not mean the Trump administration, elected on the illusory promise of popular sovereignty, represents the general will. Just as Louis XVI and Nicholas II could produce sham bourgeois parliaments, which were ultimately organs of monarchical power — so too can the imperialist hegemony produce sham ‘cybernetic loops.’ But in no way does this change that popular sovereignty had once taken a constitutional and parliamentary form — or that its form is now “cybernetic.”

What Al-Din describes as a rupture in political form is, in fact, merely a new terrain upon which the same class forces contend. MAGA Republicans and establishment Democrats embrace social media populism only rhetorically.

In other words, there has been an objective rupture in the political form, so much so to the point where it is filled by apparently distinct politico-ideological contents. In other words, even Democrats have to pander to a new political form, just as Marx observed French monarchists had to pander to the bourgeois parliamentary form. The real power of the Democrats and Republicans is suspended by a hegemony whose material foundations have been outmoded. Its power is of course consolidated (rather than newly replenished by civil society), and that is the point. They now compromise with a new form of politics that is evidently, and essentially rooted in contradictions that condemn the regime; which is in essence misaligned with it!

It’s easy to observe how the consciousness of the American people has surpassed anything that could be contained by the conventional political establishments at a pace far too rapid for the latter to appropriate or domesticate consistently. Both parties now openly pander opportunistically to tendencies with clear political significance they have no sovereignty over.