The Historical Necessity of MAGA Communism
Gigi writes:
Will you clarify the failure of MAGA Communism?
To be clear, MAGA Communism did not “fail” in the sense that it amounted to nothing. The original, active strategy behind it, which is by no means the only possible MAGA Communist strategy — becoming a major, contributing influence to the MAGA movement to eventually, directly ‘fork’ it before the 2024 election — evidently did not succeed. This is not news, and the real reasons for this have already been detailed meticulously above. On the other hand, MAGA Communism was absolutely vindicated in the sense of correctly anticipating the re-alignment of US politics in such a manner that the fundamentals of Left-Wing politics: Concrete (and not ideological, academic, theoretical, etc.) Anti-imperialism, anti-capitalism, concrete (and not merely ideological) opposition to the regime as such now arises in continuity with and from what was before called the ‘MAGA movement.’
This was not a consequence of MAGA Communists bringing Marxism to the MAGA masses. It was a consequence of the very tendencies MAGA Communists correctly identified within the MAGA movement being drawn out in decisive and consequential ways. MAGA Communism was correct in the basic recognition that these tendencies existed within MAGA in ways that were decisive and material enough that it was able to provoke a legitimate falling-out with Trump himself. Since the ‘discovery’ of MAGA Communism in 2022: We couldn’t hear the end of ‘leftists’ asserting that MAGA was simply the personality cult of Trump, that all its distinct and peculiar features are simply a consequence of Trump’s eccentric personality, that the counter-hegemonic tendencies we correctly identified within that movement were in fact nebulous, inconsequential, and in the end could never be drawn out in a way that would provoke a split with Trump or the Republican Party establishment.
The facts of recent history have decisively and irrefutably disproven the ‘leftist’ critics of MAGA Communism. That MAGA Communists were not successful in building a mass, Communist movement out of what was then the MAGA base, indicts them only for being too early, for jumping the gun too quickly, and having incorrect expectations with respect to the actual time it would take for MAGA’s counterhegemonic tendencies to be drawn out in ways that would lead to a real power vacuum and additionally, the amount of time it would take to sufficiently transform the consciousness of enough Communist partisans. For how could it have been possible to effect such an ambitious strategy without enough cadre, resources, organization, etc.? How could it have been possible, given how the pipeline to become such a type of cadre was being deliberately wrecked, sabotaged, etc. by “leftists?”
We can be indicted for mistakenly regarding what was in reality an inevitable outcome by the virtue of the logical trajectory of American politics itself — for a voluntary imperative to be fulfilled by Communist partisans. What was emerging objectively, rather than lobbied for subjectively, was the space for a new ‘empty signifier,’ that opened up the possibility that MAGA’s counterhegemonic tendencies could become decisive on their own terms, completely free from any specific trust in Trump’s person or the various hegemonic interests represented by or directly attached to it. We were too early. We arrived at the correct insight about something that was happening and erroneously identified the contemporaneity of this insight with the development of the thing itself (the thing needed more time to become what we correctly anticipated within consciousness as its logical outcome). There was nothing inevitable about MAGA Communism specifically, but what was inevitable was the emergence, from what was then MAGA, of the power vacuum (for a new signifier) that would make it possible (simultaneously rendering the ‘MAGA’ part superfluous).
However, on the one hand, MAGA Communism, in consideration of the necessary conditions that made possible the launch of the American Communist Party, was historically necessary for our movement. Even the very ‘failure’ of MAGA Communism (as qualified above) was likewise a necessity from the perspective of our history, a necessity I myself had anticipated (the necessity to ‘fail!’) during the peak of enthusiasm and hype surrounding this phrase in 2022. Not because (up until this point) it has been decisive in shaping the consciousness of the masses but because it was indispensable in shaping the consciousness of a new generation of American Communist militants who, up until this point, had no point of departure with respect to the task of establishing contact with the masses on a functional level.
MAGA Communism has up until this point proved to be more decisive in preparing Communist cadre themselves for mass work in a post-MAGA age than the MAGA masses directly. This, of course, fully vindicates and confirms basic Leninist principles, according to which the preparation, organizational consolidation, and unity of an advanced core of militants — on the basis of fulfilling the correct line with respect to strategy and theory — is the necessary precondition of any meaningful contact with the masses whatsoever. Sufism (the cultivation of an exclusive, intensive, organized devotion and dedication to principle) is an unavoidable fact of any relationship between the masses and politics. The masses, so Lenin so repeatedly emphasizes, can either be given form by the leadership of bourgeois ‘freemasons’ (who subtly and intentionally manipulate them); obscurantist, confused, reactionary ‘Yogis’ (who lead them astray on the basis of self-confusion — perhaps people today like Professor Jiang fit this description); or Communist ‘Sufis’ (who aspire to commit to the transformative consequences of merging with the masses, the rise of Qizilbash).
Toward this end, MAGA Communism simultaneously succeeded in objectively drawing a line, opening up the possibility of a specific, yet replicable, form of consciousness (as a ‘meme’) and in preparing a new generation of Communist militants for mass work decisively. The irony of those who accuse MAGA Communists of being terminally online is that MAGA Communism really was decisive in compelling individuals attracted to communist ideas to go offline. Online forms of ‘communism,’ like the online forms of any other ideology (which in America, are absolutely dominant), create echo chambers, safe, discursive spaces which, in a cybernetic manner, perpetuate and reinforce the phenomenal, affectual, psychological, noetic, etc. conditions of a very narrow form of consciousness. They depend upon strictly filtering out opposing worldviews, cultivating the reproduction of online behaviors, forms of expression, and ‘memes,’ and creating self-reinforcing, self-rewarding ‘pipelines’ capable of, to whatever limited extent, drawing outsiders into unique, exclusive cybernetic-ideo-logical cultures. In fact, ideology itself really has become subordinate to memeology.
This is of course an unavoidable consequence of how ideas actually form in the Information Age. Infrared did distinguish itself from other ‘online communist’ communities in its refusal to censor ideologies opposed to the dominant line, in order to force Communists to ‘step out of their echo chamber’ and learn how to achieve the dominance of the Communist view discursively (hence the aggression and infamy of the Infrared community, which some retard once genuinely tried to attribute to the influence of Carl Schmitt). We did distinguish ourselves from other platforms and tendencies by, from the outset, encouraging our followers to join the CPUSA, an organization whose leadership was opposed to us ideologically (and vice versa), not simply for the purposes of entryism but to comprehend the dialectical interpenetration between individual consciousness and objective, collective existence.
Yet for all this, we remained, like all other Communist phenomena in America, an online form of communism. While there is nothing wrong with ‘being online,’ the problem lies in the lack of any awareness of or effective responsibility for the necessarily material, or even at least physical, conditions of memeological processes in the first place. To put this in plainer language, all self-identified ‘communists’ in America were (and the majority remain) Communists on the internet but ‘MAGA’ in real life. As explained in far more meticulous detail earlier, the rise of distinct, self-reinforcing, collective forms of consciousness online did not prove automatically decisive for anything offline. For all the pretenses and loud, r-r-r-revolutionary blustering of online ‘leftists,’ nearly all of them remain bog-standard Democrats in real life, offline and in practice. It’s precisely this disparity that Infrared — and I myself, have always sought to draw out — and subject functionally to the same cybernetic dynamics that have proven indispensable in the formation of partisan, ‘collective subjects’: To create self-reinforcing mechanisms, etc. for the perpetuation of real-world praxis and not simply online activity.
As Gigi themselves are so keen on pointing out, these dynamics depend on tech platforms owned by hegemony-aligned corporations. There is a complete total dependency on the rules which govern these platforms. The software code underlying the tech platforms, moreover, depend on IP patents enforced by the state. The effective implementation of this code, depends on data centers, themselves owned and controlled by the same corporations. The construction of data centers, as well as the direct, physical infrastructure underlying the internet itself, depends upon a specific monopolistic ensemble of various physical sectors of the economy, which work in coordination to fulfill the strategic goals of the imperialist hegemony, etc. — up until this point, we witness the dominance of mundane ‘offline’ political practices in comparison to the bluster, excitement and extremism of the internet. But that is since the former represents the very offline conditions of the proliferation of excitement through mediums that depend on the former.
The ‘Democratic Party’ and ‘Republican Party’ would make for very poor political memes in comparison to the gallery of exciting, interesting online ideologies. But these signifiers do not compete with others on the same plane whatsoever. The duopoly parties are not, in the first place, memeological constructs but signifiers that encompass various institutional, elite inter-personal relationships, even networks based on word-of-mouth connections, kinship, ‘special interests’ — the ensemble of relationships, determinations, prejudices, conventions, etc. established by the aristocratic, imperialist bourgeoisie (the ‘Epstein class’). The various, functional material interests of the monopolistic cartels, the most influential and dominant of which being financial, which imprint upon the politics of the Democratic and Republican parties all the metaphysical weight and necessity of laws of nature themselves. In contrast to memeological online processes, we find not any viral, self-replicating and reinforcing principles in command but an embedded matrix of practical conventions, habits, and prejudices — formed as stubbornly as massive, geological rock-formations.
It was precisely the goal of MAGA Communism — or, as Joe Sims used to call it, MAGMA Communism — to force Communists to step up to the task of addressing the volcanic preconditions of precisely this offline rock-formation (to employ the Deleuzian concept very loosely and even with some degree of inaccuracy — to deterritorialize it). If the majority of r-r-r-r-evolutionary ‘leftists’ online were offline Democrats, whose implicit deference to the rock-formations of the imperialist bourgeoisie were, for them, as normal as deferring to the ground under their own feet, then by analogy, the goal of MAGA Communists was to shake the foundations of the Earth, to penetrate bellow the rock-formation, to unleash the violent, volcanic, magmatic processes of geo-logy (class struggle!) which constitute the repressed inception of the rock-formation itself. To discover how the steel is tempered! What could serve as a better example of this, than Chuck Schumer, foremost political patron of the CPUSA, expressing private concern and even panic over our attempts to organize the drayage truckers at the Newark Port in New Jersey, which would threaten the interests of his own patrons and friends that run the trucking cartels there?
Those ‘leftists’ who refuse to address the rock formations upon which their ideological posturing actually depends are simply hypocrites. They are, in practice, far worse than even the most ‘problematic’ tendencies within MAGA. Whereas MAGA liquefied the solid US hegemony (MAGMA), simultaneously unleashing both its ugliest tendencies and greatest revolutionary potential: the rock-formation (established politics) is the very consolidation of US-imperialism. Geology (real, embedded, habitual, unconscious practice) is the absolutely unavoidable condition upon which any possible biosphere (memeology) depends. If MAGA Communism evoked a sense of distaste in “leftists,” that is only because it confronted them with the real and distasteful conditions of their ideological and moral pretensions. It was necessary, for my part, to reflect and represent these conditions as a necessarily distinct, contrary, and opposing dialectical tension with respect to comfortable memeological constructs. What better way to signify the weight of this contrary, opposing dialectical tension?
It’s very easy to simply call ourselves whatever we want to, to conform our language, performative expressions, and online personalities to our ideological pretensions. But what is the cost of walking the walk? It was, and even now remains, necessary to continually pose this question to Communists, given the intense disparity between the online radicalism expressed in memeological constructs, and the reality of real-life conformity and embeddedness within the habits and practices of ‘politics.’ The disparity touches upon a very real dialectical opposition, and any attempt to simply collapse the distinction — in either direction — is the very definition of LARP. Theory (which, we can perhaps include memeology within) and practice are not the same, and it is impossible to fulfill praxis without recognizing them as distinct moments/tensions within that process.
MAGA Communism was historically necessary from the simple standpoint of communicating this fact, and its acknowledgment (along with the CPUSA 2036 strategy) by way of drawing a line, was decisive from the perspective of preparing a generation of militants for the mass work fundamentally attached to the founding mission American Communist Party. The key thing was rendering the acknowledgement of the disparity between theory and practice decisive. Not a passive acknowledgement, not simply nodding one’s head in agreement at what seems to be an obvious truth, but in an active, decisive, schismatic, and necessarily confrontational — in another word, partisan — way. Old habits, conventions, prejudices needed to be broken. The sense of comfortableness, familiarity, and complacency of ideological security (which coincided with practical conformity and impotence!) needed to be broken. All the infamies of the Infrared ‘community’ online, and of the ‘MAGA Communists’ — directly proportional to the implicit violence of passive conformity to the rock-formation, of accepting the so-called “left” as it is, this fundamental dead-end that has produced nothing of consequence for decades.