MAGA Communism versus ‘Democratic’ Socialism
The MAGA Communists arrived at the only conclusion their constraints permitted: as far as real American politics are concerned, we should not fight at all.
By fighting you mean running very costly and expensive electoral campaigns. The question is how do you raise the money independently of the bourgeoisie in the first place, genius? At minimum, before asking people for small donations, you have to build a sustained presence in their communities and acquire some kind of real, material reputation, and that is what our Party is attempting to do.
They instructed workers to stay home from the 2024 election entirely, arguing that “NOTHING would terrify the regime more than a <25% turnout”
Which is actually true.
In reality, many factions of our ruling class — not least MAGA Republicans — actively suppress the vote and are thrilled when the working class stays home.
And yet Trump won the popular vote.
“Pressure” is the very method the MAGA Communists despised in the post-Marxist activists and NGOs orbiting the Democratic Party. Where progressive leftists lobbied Democratic leadership to adopt better positions, the MAGA Communists lobbied Trump.
No, we didn’t lobby Trump. What happened is that I made the observation that he objectively does not have any grassroots pressure to radically alter the regime agenda. Nowhere in that observation is there any implication that I or we tried to lobby him. By the way, what happened? I thought the ‘general theory’ of ‘MAGA Communist praxis’ is going to a Trump rally, taking videos, and going home?
You seem to arrive at the “general theory” of our practice every time you think you have a new piece of information about what we do.
If you were shown information that I was taking a shit, you would write,
“Ah. And there we have it. Though the MAGA Communists despise the Democrats for being smelly, here is the epitome of all they do in practical terms. Haz, he takes shits. On the toilet. Just as the idle bourgeoisie sits upon the armchair of speculation, Haz simply poops and that is all he does. This is the true secret, the true riddle, and general theory of MAGA Communism. Ah, I love it. The feeling of being a true intellectual who discovers the truth behind things.”
They cede political power to the most reactionary sections of the bourgeoisie without challenge, permitting the “elite” they claim to oppose to rule and consolidate power.
Right, the bourgeoisie has political power, ever since we ceded it to them. They rule because we permit them to. Very correct. We basically have all the power, but decide to cede it to the bourgeoisie because, well, I don’t know, of our habits as content creators. Astute and powerful observation.
The MAGA Communists designate any worker who might take an independent position on cultural or political questions as a leftist saboteur —
By an independent position on political questions I presume you mean voting for Democratic Party candidates, right?
MAGA Communism failed because it was little more than a systemic liquidation designed by a new stratum of digital influencers who, operating on the elitist assumption that the American worker is too backward to grasp Communism, attempted to goad Republicans and young socialists into consuming their content by audaciously slapping the “Communist” label onto politics MAGA already held.
Not really. You fail to consider your biases as a liberal. Our “rhetoric” during the highpoint of the “MAGA Communist” phenomena (2022–2023) focused on very specific lines of consciousness, articulation, and rhetoric that developed within the MAGA movement with astute discrimination. We did not simply slap a “Communist label” on “MAGA politics.” We articulated the concrete content of Communist politics by attempting to draw out the discourses within MAGA that were most conducive to a principled, counter-hegemonic position.
If we simply adopted “MAGA politics” carte blanche, we would have neglected its internal contradictions, avoided treating it with the discrimination we evidently did, and, for example, adopted 1:1 Patrick Bet-David’s views with a “communist” coat of paint. We developed, pressed upon, and articulated very specific, critical contradictions within that phenomena, which have at this point, already been drawn out without our help!
Instead, MAGA supporters are following authentic MAGA influencers they actually believe in. Influencers like Tucker Carlson, who, unlike the “MAGA Communists,” genuinely embody the racist, nationalist, and capitalist MAGA project.
I genuinely disagree with this. Tucker Carlson is objectively more Left-Wing than nearly all Democrats. He probably just doesn’t agree about teaching LGBT to minors in schools. You can disagree with him about that, but what is the use in vilifying him in this comical way, especially when you advocate voting for Democrats?
If Communist politics can only gain a hearing by ceasing to be Communist, it is addressing the wrong people.
That is what we’ve been trying to tell you. Your politics have ceased to be Communist because you are forced to pander to suburban wine moms, hedge-fund managers, and other Democroids.
When the most progressive and organized sections of the working class cohere around a struggle against racism, sexism, and national oppression alongside economic demands, social justice broadly, we constitute a hegemonic pole of attraction.
Where is that happening?
Our unity and militant unwillingness to abandon core positions
Who is “we?”
Communist engagement with the progressive masses of the Democratic coalition necessarily entails conflict with liberal leadership and its institutional constraints, and with the limits of reformism itself.
What happens is that they will label you a red fascist bigot who defends the fascist USSR or denies the genocide against the Ukrainians during the holodgoymor. You will be blocked from having access to their events at the highest levels. At lower levels, petty-bourgeois professional activists will ensure lies are fed about you to the naive, “progressive masses,” too zombified and enthralled by the “movement” to second-guess what its “respected voices” say. You will simply be ostracized and canceled. If Bernie Sanders can’t challenge Democratic leadership, neither can you.
I genuinely want to know what your solution to this is. The buck has to stop somewhere and that somewhere is having a backbone: Walking proverbially with your nuts hanging and not giving a fuck about being canceled. Do that, and congratulations, you are now “reactionary” and “toxic” according to the gatekeepers with a monopoly on how that is defined.
Meanwhile, a random conspiracy theorist ex-MAGA guy will listen to what you have to say for themselves and not necessarily give a shit what the ‘safe space’ keepers say because the entire content of their consciousness is premised on mistrust of what others have told them. When you rely on demographics that refuse to think for themselves, you can’t argue for alternative interpretations of history, theory, or ideas misaligned with the status quo.
There are no “progressive masses,” anyway. The young “liberal” masses are all rapidly coalescing with the “far-right” around anti-Zionism, radically dispensing with political correctness and other precious signifiers of ‘progress.’ It’s very simple. Futureless young people in debt, with no future, no opportunity, and no prospect of success now have just as much rage toward the system that MAGA white workers did in 2015. It doesn’t matter that many of these young people wanted to become interpretive dance instructors or pursue some other nonsense. They have been failed by the system and have become proletarianized.
There is no “Democratic Party coalition.” There is a large, angry, “third party” tendency rooted in conspiracism, anti-Zionism, and abject rejection of the system itself. This has always been where the masses are, to whatever extent they existed in any independent capacity.
Under such a process, MAGA does not need to be “won over” directly, but rather won through the structural displacement and subsequent rearticulation of the American political landscape.
This is an eloquent way of saying, “vote for Kamala Harris.” It means nothing. Your vote doesn’t even matter and your calls for people to vote don’t matter. You’re not a shot caller and have almost no influence. If you did, you wouldn’t need to argue such a stupid strategy in the first place. Your position here is immaterial and fully inconsequential. You can cross your arms and hope the Democrats are successful, and somehow that will lead to the victory of your tendency.
But the Democrats were successful in 2020. They acquired a majority in congress. What did they do with that victory? What happened was that Trump won again in 2024.
The Democratic coalition, precisely because of its breadth and social function, accumulates progressive demands it cannot satisfy. Its periodic crises are signs of overextension, and the role of communist politics is to intensify these contradictions—to force a break between the masses and the political ideology and leadership that falsely claims to represent us.
Bernie tried that by fulfilling Obama’s promise of free healthcare. He was successfully blocked out. They even rigged the elections against him. That was the limit: You want to intensify contradictions to prove to the masses that it’s rigged? Already happened. And yet here you are, still advocating for Democratic Party entryism.
This is the blind spot not only of the MAGA Communists, but of much of the ‘vanguardist’ left—the micro-parties, DSA factions, and sects that dismiss the Democratic base as “labor aristocracy,” “petty-bourgeois liberals,” and “sheeple,” despite the fact that they also contain the most advanced progressive masses in America.
I am not sure why you are deciding to conjure up a mythical “Democratic Party base” when US politics itself is in the process of a dramatic re-alignment. The “Democratic Party base” that voted for Obama is not the same one that voted for Clinton or Kamala. The blue-collar working class is the decisive popular base thus far, which vacillates between both parties. They are by no means reliably Democrat. Democrats often rely upon minorities, via appointed, corrupted, and bribed community leaders, but even their hold there has begun to slip. So what is this mythical Democratic Party base? The only consistent Democrats are those materially incentivized to align their consciousness with the system and believe its expert lies about COVID, Ukraine, pro-Zionism, “economics,” Holodomor, etc.
You claim these people are somehow a reliable base for Communist politics. You’ve twisted yourself into a pretzel of confusion.
The vanguardist who waits for a “real” proletariat and the MAGA Communist who courts a fantasized one both refuse to engage the working class where it actually stands.
When you go over the data of the 2024 election, you find that the working class overwhelmingly voted for Trump, whereas traditional Republican electorates shifted to Kamala. Where then was the working class where it “actually stands?”
The task before American Communists is not to court the disaffected
It’s not to court the disaffected, the wretched of the Earth? Perhaps we need a new Internationale:
Arise, you who support incremental policies to expand Obamacare on the basis of fact-based study of healthcare outcomes in marginalized communities,
Arise, ye who Slava Ukraine
Stand up, you prisoners of misinformation, Russian propaganda
The YIMBY Abundance Coalition,
Will dance the Fascism Away! Hooray!
Here, we put forward our own program: Communism. For the social liberation of all against all forms of oppression, wherever that oppression may be and whatever form that oppression may take.’
But notice how you reference nothing concrete, nothing actual, just abstractions, abstractions, abstractions. You are actually doing what you falsely accused me of: You are defining Communism so vaguely that it is simply just liberal rhetoric, with the word Communist attached to it.
Garrido is a Historian and Theorist—he knows what dual power really means, and he should be embarrassed to mangle this concept for political cover.
What is dual power, if not what we are attempting to build right now?