Chapter 06 / Communism in the post-MAGA Age

‘Cybernetic Popular Sovereignty’ & Empty Signifiers

Gigi continues to misrepresent this ‘concept’ as mere ‘cybernetic populism’ or what is commonly called ‘grifting’ — tailoring one’s social media content toward the maximization of likes or other forms of digital positive reinforcement. They confuse a supposed ‘strategy’ they falsely attribute to us — doing anything and everything to maximize engagement — with what was supposed to be an analytical concept, rooted in an understanding of how traditional institutions of ‘popular sovereignty’ are being outmoded through new, wild and disruptive forms of association, collective identity, and popular self-consciousness that have been engendered by social media.

This has nothing to do with a strategy of ‘maximizing positive engagement’ but rather an understanding of how masses have come to acquire self-consciousness, representation, and agency in the Information Age. This is neither praised as ‘good’ nor condemned as ‘bad’ but is rather understood as an objectively new reality of how mass politics is structured and conditioned. The era of large personalities or privileged agents exercising control over a mass political subject from the commanding heights of institutions is absolutely over; that there is something in the Trump phenomena which resembles this in its most crude form is nothing more than a profound historical irony. It’s funny for a reason.

Mass political subjects now form around what appear to be autonomous and prolific principles, ‘memes,’ and though it sounds ridiculous, the basic premise of any competent political leadership (including and especially that of a Communist party!) lies in understanding the objective material tendencies inherent in these principles and applying that understanding to clarifying, and thus intensifying, the relationship between them and the masses. A political party cannot itself create these principles; it can, in fact, only organize itself around them in intensive, exclusive, and intentional ways rooted in concrete understanding. Mobs and masses form around Islam, around the Quran — through fanatical, unmediated, unfocused spontaneous, direct devotion; and within this analogy, Communist Parties must be analogous to Sufi orders (the Qizilbash, Bolsheviks, fulfill the ‘merger’ of esoteric, Sufi knowledge, Marxism, with exoteric, mass-religious tendencies, the worker’s movement).

MAGA Communists argue that “MAGA is an empty signifier” [5], a word or symbol whose specific content is less important than its populist function as a pole of attraction for diverse, contradictory constituencies. In the MAGA Communists’ analysis, “MAGA” operates like “Hope” or “Change” did for Obama in 2008. And, if untethered to a concrete program or history, an empty signifier can theoretically be filled with any meaning, including Communism.

This is a profound misreading of Ernesto Laclau’s idea of the Empty Signifier. Empty Signifiers are not simply ‘empty receptacles’ of any possible political meaning because they are “untethered to a concrete program or history.” Empty Signifiers are not actually ‘empty’ in that sense.

For Laclau, Empty Signifiers are signifiers of (counter) hegemony: they articulate a metonymic chain of grievances, resentments, dissatisfactions, or interests, goals, tendencies, etc. within/with a given political totality. The reason they are ‘emptied’ of any particular ‘content’ is because they represent the discursive construction or foundation of a given political totality itself. Empty Signifiers really do signify an objective, concrete, particular contradiction: Namely, between a given political totality and itself, or as Laclau might rather put it, the impossibility that a political totality could acquire self-relation.

So no, it is not simply that the fact ‘MAGA’ was “untethered to a concrete program or history” that had made it a possible basis for the rediscovery of mass Communist politics: It was the fact that, as Laclau would put it, it signified the impossibility of the American political system as a unified totality, an impossibility Marxists should easily recognize corresponds to the objective reality of class antagonism itself. “MAGA” was an Empty Signifier because, in other words, it simply signified the contradiction between the form and content of the United States of America itself.

Not only can Communists have a specific articulation of that contradiction, according to Marxism, they must have the uniquely correct one.

During the Biden era, the rejection of MAGA did not entail a principled rejection of Trump specifically but almost always a rejection of America’s contradictions as objective and thus irreducible to any specific ideological metanarrative or discourse, etc. Rejecting the Empty Signifier in favor of a ‘fulfilled’ one, regardless of its ideological content, practically amounted to an attempt to cope with the system’s objective contradictions by reasserting a narrative which, concretely speaking, reasserted its harmonious integrity. So-called ‘Marxists’ were as equally guilty as ‘Build Back Better’ Biden Democrats in this, however much they abstractly and theoretically asserted the reality of class struggle — they denied it concretely. Class struggle for them was, and remains, confined to a narrow set of special, wholesome ‘terms and conditions,’ where ‘proletarian beasts’ must prove to the bourgeois intelligentsia they have lost their fangs, by showing how ‘wholesome’ and ‘intersectional’ they are, etc.

But his attempt to reimagine what MAGA means ignores the fact that the term is already overflowing with the content of a concrete reactionary political movement.

I remember the Biden era, where MAGA supporters rallied around rejecting imperialist foreign aggression and Democrats cheered on genocidal Ukrainian Neo-Nazis and warmongering against Russia.

I simply fail to see what was concretely more ‘reactionary’ about MAGA than the Democratic Party. You may point to Trump’s acts as president now, but are we supposed to forget that Joe Biden presided over proxy wars against Russia and the genocide of Gaza? Were genocidal Joe Biden and his denizens of shitlib supporters just ‘less reactionary’ genocidal warmongers? What does that even mean?

We can discuss encroachments on American civil liberties and “democracy,” but what has happened under Trump that is at the very least not in continuity with what everyone ignored was happening under Obama and Biden? Wasn’t it actually under Obama that Big Tech consolidated power? When liberals loved Elon Musk? There is no real material difference between Obama, Biden, and Trump administrations except for the fact that Trump has a much more strained relationship with the mainstream media: that under Trump, everything is out in the open whereas it is concealed or ignored under Democrats.

destruction of civil rights, democratic rights, women’s rights, and so on is “standard American ideology”

I couldn’t help but smile at this. Do you mean to put my words in quotations, as if I told any lies?

Of course it is “standard American ideology.” Unless you mean to argue that you don’t care about the rights of Afghan, Iraqi, etc. women — and by this I mean principally, of course, the basic right to live. Or the rights of Gazan women, which Biden did not seem too enthusiastic about defending. And the women of the Donbass? What about their rights for one decade as they were being terrorized by Ukrainian fascists?

Oh, I see. You mean the federal right to have access to abortion. Forgive me if I do not strongly distinguish between the violation of this right of American women and the violation of the right of women victimized by US imperialism to, in the first place, live. I am, after all, a principled internationalist!

worshiping a billionaire strongman is merely a ‘wrong choice,’ and all of it is ultimately dismissed as “mundane.”

Well yes, because it rather is. I grew up in America. There is nothing new about people worshipping billionaires. In fact, I believe the reason people worshipped the billionaire Trump is because, as Michael Moore, who I am sure you are great fans of, observed, they saw him as a vehicle of revenge against the billionaire class whose worship was rather normalized.

Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, celebrities. I grew up in a country where these billionaires were lionized and glorified by everyone.

Forgive me for finding the worship of Trump ‘mundane.’ In fact, I will retract that statement. It’s not mundane. It’s god-damn hilarious, is what it is.

He strips both the movement and its supporters of their actual political beliefs. He dismisses the concrete reality of what MAGA is and what it does

What has Gigi told us about the “concrete reality of what MAGA is and what it does?” In fact, he has told us nothing at all except what it ‘“believes.”

that underneath the real MAGA movement lies a pure, democratic yearning waiting for him to mold it.

Bizarre, disturbingly suggestive language.

ignoring that its content is already determined by a specific chain of equivalences (white grievance, anti-immigrant sentiment, imperial nostalgia) that constitute it.

So, your “material class analysis” (which you claim is lacking in my own theory) is that the movement is defined by a specific chain of ideas and beliefs.

An empty signifier emerges from a “chain of equivalences” among disparate social demands—it is empty because it signifies the unity of many particular struggles that are only contingently linked to it in the course of real struggle, not because it lacks any meaning at all. It is a product of political practice rather than rhetoric.

Though I am glad you took the time to actually look up what ‘Empty Signifier’ means, you should have re-written your earlier criticism around the obvious fact that I clearly did mean to say that ‘MAGA’ was an empty signifier in the sense of uniting disparate social demands and grievances, unifying different struggles. You claim Empty Signifiers are a “product of political practice rather than rhetoric,” but according to Laclau himself, political practice is discursively mediated and constructed. He would not recognize this dichotomy between “political practice” and “rhetoric” — especially in relation to something as materially consequential for politics as MAGA.

To claim this vessel is “ready” for appropriation to socialism by rhetoric is a delusion

But that isn’t what I claimed whatsoever, now is it?

Yet their chosen base—MAGA—is actively demolishing that history. MAGA does not celebrate the civil rights movement. It does not honor Lincoln’s democratic vision. It carries confederate flags, it rallies behind Trump—who hates democracy and hates the last 100 years of American progress.

There is much to unpack. To be clear, we have no exclusive ‘MAGA base’ in 2026. MAGA does not really refer to anything in particular today. Perhaps it might now refer to the 15% of people who still genuinely support Trump — Laura Loomers, Iranian diaspora, lumpenized nihilists. We obviously regard them as our enemies. It was the, more or less, 35% of normal Americans aggrieved by the establishment who we regarded with the significance we did, and they are quickly coalescing with younger generations to form a broad, anti-Zionist, anti-Epstein tendency distinct from the duopoly.

I have made it clear numerous times on streams and on social media that what has emerged is a new, post-MAGA popular subject. What you are describing is a very broad, eclectic, wild phenomena, across multiple different periods of time.

To be clear, national historical nihilism is an endemic, widespread tendency among all sections of the American population and has been. National historical nihilism, like all other kinds of nihilism, are symptoms of the decadence corresponding to imperialist monopoly capitalism. Communists have a unique responsibility to defend the integrity of American revolutionary history. But that cannot be confused with a type of ‘political intelligence’, according to which the revolutionary potential of a given population should be determined on the basis of its proximity to historical facts. According to this arithmetic, nonwhite communities, where conspiracy theories and alternative views about history are endemic, would rank the least ‘progressive.’

But what is unique or advanced about any of this? A yearning for popular sovereignty against elite institutions is not a discovery of the MAGA movement—it is the animating impulse of populism in every era and on every point of the political spectrum. The Populist Party of the 1890s, the New Deal coalition, the movements behind Sanders and Occupy, the anti-war movement, the Black liberation movement—all express precisely this yearning, and most of us do so with far more advanced politics than MAGA.

We uphold all the aforementioned examples of populism as genuinely progressive developments in the history of US politics. With some reservations about the New Deal coalition, of course. I am not sure what the point is. In late 2022, when the meme was ‘hatched,’ none of these movements existed. Except MAGA.

To carry the actual inheritance to the progressive American historical tradition, Al-Din claims, means celebrating the legacy of these fighters for progress, not making excuses for the inheritors of the Confederate historical tradition.

To demonstrate the superficiality of this view and of such historical signifiers, consider the Young Patriots, who organized with the Black Panthers while using Confederate symbols. Though they were enlightened as to its significance and abandoned it, would it have been fair to characterize them as ‘inheritors of the Confederate historical tradition’ materially — because of the symbols they used, alone? Are not the real inheritors of that historical tradition those who do not in fact use such historically discredited symbols? A cursory ‘money-trail’ analysis would reveal that, indeed, the real heirs of the Confederate tradition today often are found in the ranks of ‘progressive liberals,’ who, after all, regularly appeal to the virtues of slavery in their defense of the economic advantages of mass migration!

The obvious heir to the history of democratic popular struggle stood right in front of them: the growing progressive base.

Where? Are you referring to people that waved the banner of Stepan Bandera, or does the employment of historical symbols suddenly become irrelevant when its victims live far away?

What growing progressive base? Who did this actually refer to in late 2022? Who were they? Give a concrete example of this ‘base.’

They shed distinct political identity, independent organization, and concrete demands to court MAGA.

That couldn’t possibly be true, because the majority of ‘us’ were in the CPUSA during that time.

The progressive worker rejected MAGA and returned to theirs.

Following October 7th, 2023, Zionism and anti-Zionism became the primary axis of political polarization and differentiation. Nobody “returned home.” In fact, the changes we anticipated would happen, happened in ways far beyond what we could imagine.

In 2026, as MAGA fractures, the MAGA Communists fail to attract anyone. They have nothing to offer its dissidents—no organization, no institutional power, no viable program. They abandon their theory, and instead, it is the Democratic Socialists, Democrats, and alt-MAGA forces like Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes who have won over those who have departed from the MAGA movement.

The “alt-MAGA” forces in this paragraph are doing a lot of heavy lifting! In fact, as Yanis Varoufakis himself pointed out, winning over the ‘post-MAGA’ segment of the population is the only chance Left-Wing politics has to assert itself with any degree of independence or leverage over the Democratic Party, who constantly blackmail the Left with the bogeyman of MAGA.

It is the Left’s dependence on the traditional electorate behind the Democratic Party that is the chief obstacle to even the most minimal Left-Wing program having any popular basis, since the traditional Democrat electorate are thoroughly professional, upper-middle class, members of bourgeois, respectable civil society.

That has always been the ‘threat’ behind ‘Left-Wing populists’ who were purged, rooted out, and completely expelled from the Democratic Party after 2016: That they would compete with Trump to win over the then populist, working class base full of rage toward the system, who would give them the leverage they needed to defeat the Democratic Party establishment. These ‘Left-Wing populists’ largely lost their backbone: Confronted with ideological confusion, they either defected to the Right entirely or fell in line with the shitlib Democrats in the name of ‘anti-fascism.’

MAGA Communism, in the basic sense of the phrase, absolutely implied the correct perspective and strategy here. But once again, the specific strategy was sabotaged in its crudest form. “Leftists” objectively enabled figures like Nick Fuentes, etc. to monopolize and capture much of the post-MAGA popular base, having contributed to the discrediting of any Left-Wing alternative. Meanwhile, the suggestion that “Democratic Socialists” and Democrats have succeeded in capturing this base is simply laughable to the point of being worthy of outright dismissal, with no needed elaboration.