Zombie Apocalypse

A New Zero Level For Communism And Why We Proletarians Should Conspire To Play “King of The Hill”

Introduction

My last ideological intervention in Gramsci’s trench war (the propaganda war or “info war” that is independent of concrete movements) which the Americans are fighting masterfully drastically underestimated how far the discourse among US-based anti-capitalists has already come. My general idea was that the material basis for ideological divisions within the critical spectrum, i.e., those divisions that are reproduced largely (but not fully) without interventions from the ruling class, has gone long ago. This idea appears to stand — but I had no idea how right I was until I tested the theory.

The far more important practical methods hinted at in my previous article were on the other hand woefully underdeveloped. In a situation where the ideological divisions in the critical spectrum are shallow, practical methods are more important than anything. However, the position that ideological divisions indeed are shallow in the US (though unfortunately not in Europe where I live) is far from a consensus position and must therefore be justified first.

Currently, people are struggling to understand this moment in history and are reviewing previous work, hoping to reconstruct something that matches the radicality of this moment. To this end, the most recommended reading is Lenin’s The State and Revolution, which was itself a reconstruction of previous work to match a similar moment.

This is a brilliant idea which I will follow. But in order for this text to be properly Marxist, I feel it is a better approach to first develop a brief sketch how the American working class has reached this moment.

The Shared Proletarian Experience In The US Since 2016

While there are tons of events through which the American proletariat attempted and failed to constitute itself, notably Occupy Wall Street 2011/2012 from which we inherited the great Slogan “We are the 99%”, the true beginning of the shared experience of the American proletariat was 2015/2016 with the Campaign of Bernie Sanders who according to urban legend once proclaimed: “by the way, I am a socialist” (though a quick google search did not produce any evidence for this exact wording and instead points me to Elon Musk’s later response that he is “an actual socialist”).

It was in this moment that a relatively new phenomenon emerged: the Online Left. This was and is a collection of preexisting YouTubers who saw themselves as “being for good things and against bad things” (a type of slogan that they would later mature to ridicule) and had now been exposed to a giant wake up call that you can actually use the dirty word “socialism” and talk about political and social issues still become popular in the most positive sense of the word.

People are very doubtful about the actual effectiveness of this Online Left. So let me enlighten you a little bit why I believe they were actually very useful in helping the proletariat develop its current understanding of the world.

Do you know how AOC (Alexandria Ocasio Cortez) and the Squad (the group of people around her) got elected into the house of representatives? This was the result of a group of idealist activists around Kyle Kulinsky from Secular Talk, who co-founded an electoral organization called “Justice Democrats” — who are today called on Twitter “Just Democrats”. It is worth mentioning that in the mean time, comrade Kyle canceled himself from this very group and was not allowed to interview Bernie Sanders after 2020 and still thinks that you can reason with the parliamentary left.

Why is such an obviously failed attempt worth mentioning? -Because Kyle gets a lot of shit for this take on Twitter and YouTube, and I mean a lot. But how come? In order to understand the meaning of the shit thrown at Kyle better, we have to dig deeper into the Online ideological battle ground as it presented itself in 2016.

To reiterate, 2016 saw the awakening of a bunch of YouTubers who finally saw an opportunity to talk politics, though in a rather superficial “we need to get left politicians elected and tax the rich and implement medicare for all” manner. Despite this superficial approach to politics, the Online Left turned out to be a genuine market place of ideas.

One particularly interesting YouTube channel at the time that suddenly got way more attention than usual was (and still is) Democracy at Work. The main figure on this channel, Richard Wolff, managed to deliver an ingenious message in such a harmless tone that he even got invited to a 2017 talk at Google to deliver the message.

The message itself was fairly radical: that what Marx meant by “working class”, “proletariat” or simply “workers” doesn’t refer exclusively to factory workers or people working in sweatshops in the third world, but specifically to what we today call “employees”; that those employees stay employees because they don’t have enough cash to start a business and are therefore forced to work for “employers” who do have this amount of cash which curiously gets constantly reproduced; that the solution consists in the workers taking charge of the means of production — the factories, offices and stores — and that we need some sort of a “Social Revolution” in the long run to make this happen.

That such radical ideas were given so much attention is a result of the following ingenious move of comrade Wolff: he attached the idea of the “Social Revolution” to obviously harmless people like Bernie Sanders and AOC. Further, his entire work seems to carefully avoid questions of systemic violence that might stand in the way of such a “Social Revolution”.

The sheer self awareness of this man’s role in the historic development of socialism is further evidenced by the fact that he happily refers the audience to others when they ask questions about how to build a union or a worker co-op or do anything else that might be practical. He is just the harmless old man standing on the entrance of the Marxist rabbit hole, smiling and waving at you and offering you tasty cookies in the form of hammer and sickle.

Comrade Wolff’s ideological interventions were accompanied by the black Marxist Cornel West who is most famous for a mantra that can be summarized as: “we tried black faces in high places — we need something else!” and by another great Comrade who also has a show on Democracy At Work, professor David Harvey. David Harvey is most known for reconstructing and thereby keeping alive the Marx from Capital in his more or less famous lecture series.

Another properly Marxist way to read these interventions and this group of people critically supporting Bernie Sanders and The Squad is that they realized that there were only two possible outcomes: Either this approach would actually work and those politicians would commit the terrible crime of violating principles, or it would not work, drastically increasing the credibility of the idea that we need a “Social Revolution” — whatever that means.

The latter occurred in 2020, after another failed presidential election bid by Bernie Sanders. The first signs that there was something profoundly wrong with those parliamentary “Socialists” emerged during the early stages of the Covid pandemic.

In a perfect example of Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine, both factions of what is today understood to be the capitalist single party — the Republicans and the Democrats — seized the chaos of the complete mismanagement of the lock downs. The most impressive manifestation of this mismanagement was a spike in unemployment without precedent in modern US history. At the time, it was discussed in the most apocalyptic terms, but today, a quick Google or YouTube search vomits up only far more calm discussions.

What got almost covered up through the hysteria at the time? The true nature of the Cares Act — an unprecedented transfer of wealth to the rich under the guise of Covid relief for small businesses; but not only that: it also almost went unnoticed that Bernie Sanders and the Squad went along with this stuff. I wish I could provide good sources on these claims, but I’m afraid one would have to grind page by page all the way back to the reporting at the time by critical media (Lee Camp, Jimmy Dore, even Kyle Kulinsky), as a quick search on YouTube or Google does not produce any results that highlight the radicality of the discourse at the time. I’ll leave doing this research or asking those content creators to re-upload their reporting from that time in case it “got lost” as an exercise in building class consciousness to the astute proletarian.

But the big ideological bombshell that turned the proletarian battle field into what it is today happened later in 2020 and 2021: Force the Vote.

Another great dialectitian of our time who reads his Lenin through actual activism rather than books (though he also invites Scientists of different varieties on his show) is Jimmy Dore. If you have heard that you should hate him, please do recursively check your sources (I don’t believe that all the left YouTubers hating Jim today are “bought”, but maybe some bourgeois entity injected the idea into the discourse that he “isn’t a leftist”) and ask yourself if you have investigated him thoroughly by watching his show, not any commentaries. True: comrade Dore is a dirt bag and has some nuclear takes, but please be true comrades and tone down your narcissism of minor differences.

Here is the important part about Comrade Dore: He wholly agrees that in the long run, we need the socialization of the means of production. Comrade Wolff is a recurring guest at Dore’s show. Dore keeps telling his audience to cancel him (cancel Dore, not Wolff) if he should ever deviate from the main anti-capitalist principles. Dore acknowledges that he has a price for which he could be bought and therefore deliberately avoids to run for any offices in bourgeois democracy — a vital move given the experience that we are about to discuss.

What was Force the Vote?

Dirt bag Comedian Jimmy Dore had the ingenious (no sarcasm) idea to have a look at the handbook of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). In this, he found an insight that can be summarized as follows: If the Democrats have a slim majority in the House of Representatives and there are a few leftists, the few votes that leftists have are an extremely valuable asset. They should be used to extract concessions for the proletariat in exchange to advance more harmless parts of the bourgeois agenda.

[Update 15th March 2023: in an earlier version, I wrote “scumbag” instead of “dirt bag” which sounds the same to me, but to native speakers is apparently more offensive — sorry for that; I like Dore and I mean “dirt bag” strictly as a compliment, as we all love this side of Jimmy when he uses it against true enemies]

This tactic is only possible owing to the two party duopoly. In Europe where most countries have proportional representation, left parties can simply be excluded from government by bourgeois parties forming a coalition. A case study in this is how the German party DIE LINKE is consistently excluded from government because they refuse to embrace NATO etc. This is the exact tactic bourgeois parties used to tame the German Greens who are today internationally despised by proletarians.

Jimmy Dore asked The Squad loudly to play this tactic by organizing a digital town hall. In order to address your criticism: Of course it was digital — it was still lock down time. But it was well attended. And here is the proposed exchange: a floor vote for Medicare for All (the main agenda item that Bernie advocated) in exchange for the re-election of Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House.

The idea was not to immediately get Medicare for All, but to expose the Democrat’s true colors to a wider national audience. But the Online Left got something even better: a complete refusal of the Squad and their mouthpieces to fight in any meaningful way, based on bullshit. To add insult to injury, in 2023, a minority in the Republican party played this exact tactic to extract concessions for their agenda.

This largely summarizes how the white Online Left became what it is today (I will discuss the events since 2021 at a later point). A lot of opportunists “stayed true to the proletarian agenda” and kept advocating for electoral politics without demanding anything from their political representatives. But today, the largest independent YouTube channel without preexisting fame that I could dig up that is talking left-wing politics is Second Thought with 1.47 Million — oops, that was a few weeks ago — 1.49 Million subscribers as of the time of writing this. And what ideology does he officially subscribe to (although I think he misreads the meaning of the current moment)? Leninism.

If you have followed the events in the US at any depth, you might now think that I have forgotten about something crucial that happened between the Cares Act debacle and the Force The Vote stunt. If you think this, you deserve Gulag as you have not paid enough attention to the last paragraph. What I specifically said was: “This largely summarizes how the white Online Left became what it is today”.

What do I mean? Obviously, I mean the protests after the killing of George Floyd on the 25th of May 2020. No, I have not forgotten this crucial process. The reason why I wasn’t able to include it organically into the above history is precisely that it came from outside the white Online Left. They were all taken by surprise, but supported it enthusiastically. They were not personally biased in any way against the black struggle — the problem was that they inherited a proletarian ideological battleground where social relations between black and white activists had been severed.

I will not give a detailed account of the course of events at this point, as the very interesting lessons hidden in there would distract too much from the flow of this narration. I’ll do it at a later point in this article.

The true significance of this violent outburst was that the white Online Left recognized the true radical potential of the black perspective. Consequently, some of them reached out to black activists and highlighted their struggle. Again, Jimmy Dore is an absolute pioneer in this, as he keeps inviting members of the criminally underrated Revolutionary Blackout Network (RBN).

The years 2016 and 2020 were quite dense. Much more could be said about them if you do your digging on a more global scale, and I’m skipping some other noteworthy events in the US that happened between those years, like for instance the teacher’s revolt or the beginning of the unionization efforts at Amazon and Star Bucks (which really only began in 2020). They too were started by actors other than the Online Left, but the Online Left did a lot to highlight these struggles.

The year 2021 was quite silent in comparison. But this was only the silence before the storm, as 2022 and early 2023 gave the concept of time an entirely new meaning.

But before we start to dig deeper into those events and uncover how radicalizing 2022 truly was (and the remainder of this article won’t even mention the strike bans against railworkers), we will take a break and finally investigate the reading that is currently being recommended on US Twitter.

Lenin: The State and Revolution

My goal is to justify the conclusion that the US Proletariat are both closer to and simultaneously farther away from a truly radical break than they themselves are aware of and that ideological unity is far nearer than they think.

It is at this point that we have to reconstruct what previous and contemporary work actually had to say about what exactly stands in the way of the radical break. The radical corners of Twitter know this and are therefore currently reading The State and Revolution, and therefore, I have done this homework, too. However, I have found some major complications on the contemporary ideological battlefield that may prevent certain corners from sharing in this reading experience.

This brings my to my other big aim: to demonstrate that on a material level, a once important distinction between Marxists and another faction of the radical proletariat that Lenin talked a lot about does no longer exist. We should therefore be able to achieve a far greater ideological unity of the proletariat today than ever before.

Let me first as briefly as possible reconstruct Lenin’s understanding of the bourgeois state and double and triple down recommending to read the text for yourself.

Lenin names the beast right in chapter 1 by quoting Engels:

The state is, therefore, by no means a power forced on society from without; just as little is it ’the reality of the ethical idea’, ’the image and reality of reason’, as Hegel maintains. Rather, it is a product of society at a certain stage of development; it is the admission that this society has become entangled in an insoluble contradiction with itself, that it has split into irreconcilable antagonisms which it is powerless to dispel. But in order that these antagonisms, these classes with conflicting economic interests, might not consume themselves and society in fruitless struggle, it became necessary to have a power, seemingly standing above society, that would alleviate the conflict and keep it within the bounds of ’order’; and this power, arisen out of society but placing itself above it, and alienating itself more and more from it, is the state. -Engels

Lenin concludes:

This expresses with perfect clarity the basic idea of Marxism with regard to the historical role and the meaning of the state. The state is a product and a manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms. The state arises where, when and insofar as class antagonism objectively cannot be reconciled. And, conversely, the existence of the state proves that the class antagonisms are irreconcilable.

This last sentence is the exact lesson that the Americans are currently learning from experience: the very existence of the state proves that the class antagonisms are irreconcilable. How? Lenin continues:

Engels continues:

“As distinct from the old gentile [tribal or clan] order,[2] the state, first, divides its subjects according to territory….”

This division seems “natural” to us, but it costs a prolonged struggle against the old organization according to generations or tribes.

“The second distinguishing feature is the establishment of a public power which no longer directly coincides with the population organizing itself as an armed force. This special, public power is necessary because a self-acting armed organization of the population has become impossible since the split into classes…. This public power exists in every state; it consists not merely of armed men but also of material adjuncts, prisons, and institutions of coercion of all kinds, of which gentile [clan] society knew nothing….”

Engels elucidates the concept of the “power” which is called the state, a power which arose from society but places itself above it and alienates itself more and more from it. What does this power mainly consist of? It consists of special bodies of armed men having prisons, etc., at their command.

In plain English: the fact that the welfare state is destroyed in order to maintain an larger and larger police and military is evidence that there is a class who are against the welfare state and who feel that they need armed people to protect them from the masses.

The theme that Lenin and Engels are riffing on is one that is present as a cargo cult in today’s leftist culture: ACAB (“All Cops Are Bastards”). What is meant by that in very blunt terms is that over time, the “good things” that earlier periods of class struggle extracted from the bourgeoisie as a concession are increasingly replaced by a growing police force that prevents methods previously used in this exact class struggle to extract concessions.

In the immature form of ACAB, chanting this slogan at random protests or writing it on a wall is utterly unhelpful and makes you look unserious — no matter how much of Lenin you can quote. If anyone had truly understood Lenin’s explanations how all the distortions of true Marxism arose, they should have embraced the social democratic concept that in Germany we call “Die Polizei — Dein Freund und Helfer” (The Police — Your Friend and Helper) until a way is found to authentically deconstruct this narrative.

But in the US, weren’t the George Floyd protests precisely so significant because they signified an authentic outcry against this “special group of people” — in our time, the police? We will see later just how significant this outcry truly was.

A brief recommendation to my German comrades, distilled from this experience: interventions like that in Lützerath that signify the beginning of the end of the credibility of the Police in Germany would be far more effective, if the protesters documented in more detail with cameras what exactly the police is doing and who starts the violence — a concept known as sousveillance (“undersight”, as opposed to surveillance, “oversight”). This is precisely what radicalized our black comrades in the US. The whole footage should be visible at a central place and everyone should be at their best behavior — yet determined to materially change things. If such a central place exists already and I am just not aware of it, I urge every comrade to propagate this information.

But what is the Marxist answer to the bourgeois state? Just another state? -Not quite. Remember: the very existence of a state is a proof that the contradictions between the ruling class and the exploited classes are irreconcilable. If therefore, you somehow replaced the state by a utopian democratic community of all people, one could not call it a state.

However, in the process of replacing the bourgeoisie’s admission of its own existence, the oppressed class will have to have one. Even if the proletarian movement has the most success in intervening in the symbolic order by being at its best behavior and just engaging in sousveillance, there are no guarantees that violence will not be strictly needed — for example if another country’s bourgeoisie tries to punish the successful revolutionary proletariat with extermination.

In Marxist jargon, this transitional state that organizes the violence is called “Dictatorship of the Proletariat”, and if it is truly an expression of a classless society, it should immediately begin to “wither away”, recurring only if more violence is needed against an outside force.

What this withering away means practically is that the proletariat begins to engage in self-empowerment, independently and spontaneously everywhere in a country experiencing a proletarian revolution. We will not dwell on the examples Lenin or any precursor or successor gave, as I hope that giving examples from today’s struggle will be far more enlightening. I will do so at a later point in this article.

But let me drive home a crucial point how not to think about the revolutionary process. I have mentioned it earlier, but let me repeat: on what basis did contemporary Marxists support Bernie Sanders and The Squad? -Strictly on the basis that they might perform a miracle and actually get something done without any proletarian action or that by closely observing and exposing the way in which they fail (which our Marxist friends helpfully left to the young idealist Online Left) would help to radicalize the proletariat. This point is RIGHT THERE in Lenin’s work that we are reconstructing.

[Update 26th of March 2023: Ok, actually it’s a summary of a variety of points dug up by Lenin from prior work. The most important ones can be found in the chapter on the Paris Commune to which I now link. In an earlier version, I linked to the controversy with the Anarchists which is besides the point made here. Also note that we have quite a bit more experience with parliamentarism today, where the most instructive example of how quickly socialist parties in power can “betray” their agenda is perhaps that of the presidency of self-proclaimed Leninist Mitterrand]

We therefore have to correct contemporary “Leninists” — especially in the US — who haven’t understood a damn thing on this crucial point: “Revolutionary Parties” running for elections are completely pointless if you already have hypocrites that pretend to stand for “good things” or call themselves “Marxists” or “Leninists” or “Social Democrats” or “Leftists” or “Greens” in parliament. They are already doing your job of de-legitimizing the state! One should only support “new” candidates that stand for “good things” if a spontaneous idealist mass movement supports them — on the basis that this candidate can only either commit the terrible crime of violating principles and actually succeed or lose which is yet another data point that we can point to.

Lenin did not take over a ready made bourgeois state machine, instead, the proletarians smashed it and replaced it with a new state of their own that they created in order to accomplish certain tasks given to them by history. This taking over of responsibilities by a new set of institutions was the withering away of both the old and to an extent already the new state, as the new state was more open than the old one. It still had to have the character of a state in order to be able to fight the bourgeoisie inside the country and outside, but it also had the character of simply a community. Had the enemy gone worldwide, the hope was that the character of that community would prevail and the state character would vanish — the final act of withering away of the proletarian state.

Let us now turn to another theme in Lenin’s work that is today of crucial importance. As I claimed earlier, there are certain aspects in Lenin’s work that will significantly complicate its reception today by a faction of the radical proletariat, which is the reason why I have so far not mentioned them directly (even though I have pointed to sources where they were mentioned): Anarchists.

In fact, throughout “The State And Revolution”, Lenin appears to disagree with Anarchists on remarkably few points. I have identified three:

1. Anarchists do not support the political struggle in the sense recovered above.
2. Anarchists have a naive view of a single event that would “abolish” the state.
3. The Anarchist vision of “federalism” is disagreeable, because it means decentralization, which means you couldn’t nationalize railroads (one of the few features of “centralism” he actually mentions in this work).

On every single one of those claims, Lenin is empirically wrong when applied to contemporary Anarchism. Proof: ever since late 2016 until right last month, I thought of myself as an Anarchist and read according literature. Neither the Kropotkin nor the Malatesta nor the Berkman nor the Chomsky actually reconstructed and kept alive (or even still being alive) seems to suggest that one ought not support the electoral struggle in the sense developed above. None of them suggests that the “abolition” of the state would be a clean process with a single event. And none of them has anything against a federal railroad.

Did I support Bernie Sanders and the Squad? You bet! I did it precisely on the grounds developed in this article. I have to admit that this ingenious tactic is not explicitly a part of the Anarchist tradition, but the fact that I was by far not the only Anarchist that has supported both Bernie’s 2016 and 2020 bids speaks volumes. The underlying reason is that Anarchism prides itself to be undogmatic, which is for example ingrained in our practice not to identify our political ideology with the name of great thinkers. But the forceful language of the “terrible crime of violating principles” is a great Hegelian joke!

Regarding the process by which Anarchists hoped to “abolish” the state, Zoe Baker has provided some valuable insights that I am not going to discuss in any depth here. Suffice it to say that it is not envisioned to be “trivial” or “clean” at all.

Regarding the railroads, what do you think Anarchists would have done with them? Destroy them? -No! They would of course have federalized it.

Are Marxists the only ones who are allowed to claim “distortion” in order to excuse all the brain dead takes on their theory?

The remainder of the discussion will follow a recommendation made by Marx in a letter to W. Bracke:

Every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programmes. If, therefore, it was not possible — and the conditions of the item did not permit it — to go beyond [some programme that you don’t need to care about], one should simply have concluded an agreement for action against the common enemy. But by drawing up a programme of principles (instead of postponing this until it has been prepared for by a considerable period of common activity) one sets up before the whole world landmarks by which it measures the level of the Party movement.

I read this as a recommendation to tone down — but not water down — the discussion about the actual disagreements that exist between real existing Leninism and real existing Anarchism. The only way I can discuss the matter at this time is in the most moderate tone permitted to me by the state of discourse out there on the street — excuse me — Twitter. The reader who wants to know more is invited to examine my previous article, although it had a more aggressive tone on this point which — as I know realize — may trigger Leninist sensibilities.

What is the true disagreement? Basically, Anarchists dwell on the Marxian theme that a tool created by humans in order to shape the world can at the same time work in the converse direction and shape humans without humans even noticing at first. This is what Anarchists claim happened to real existing socialism.

Can there be any disagreement among dialecticians that this is a distinct possibility? This belief has today even penetrated the Leninist bubble (how exactly I believe this happened is to be sketched below, but suffice it to say that the Leninists themselves did in my view not reach this conclusion independently on their own).

The main critique of Anarchism is that there may be a significant flaw in the way democracy itself is constructed and practiced both in bourgeois parliamentarian democracy and in all major successful socialist experiments so far. This is the key to understanding what real existing Anarchists mean by federalism.

If I may, I will briefly sketch what flesh and blood Anarchists truly mean by federalism without justifying it too much.

My personal intuition how Anarchists think about the end goal of a classless society is that protest is inherently pointless. An example would be a society where everyone lives on their own patch of self-governed land without a ruler. This is not a particularly attractive classless society, as we don’t get the benefits of cooperation, but it certainly drives home the point that there are societies where all protest is as reasonable as protest against bad weather.

Decentralization is of course a part of federalism. Who would want to live in a society (which I do not claim Leninists developed) where every single decision you make in your personal life has to be decided upon by a central committee?

But this was not the point of federalism. The point is that certain elected positions in society that we think of as very important simply don’t have to exist on a permanent basis. One could replace parliaments (which Leninism also abolished!), for instance, with summits that decide on specific issues that had been brought up in society. Crucially, the delegates on the summit are workers — trusted ones, but without any permanent markers of power and subject to recall — that go back to their lives as workers after the summit. I hope that this maybe makes clear that it at least makes less sense to protest against than against people in elected and powerful offices.

To prevent a critique that I hear constantly against this idea: the Anarchists following this (or similar) idea haven’t ever got anything done.

This one and only truly serious objection suffers from the following hypocrisy: “revolutionary Leninist parties” haven’t ever got anything done either. Here, I do not only mean in the west, but also where Leninism was successful. According to Lenin’s own work, it was in reality the revolutionary proletariat itself that wanted to take history in their own hands. This is the only force that can ever get anything done.

But who is right? Leninists or Anarchists? How do we decide this?

Whatever justifications either side puts forward, they will inevitably fail from a lack of data. The only data we could point to was actual use of violence and force in real existing socialism. Fortunately, our class enemy was obsessed gathering all the data and putting it into a “black book of communism”, and comrades like Michael Parenti have done great work to remove all the bogus points from it. Here is a good summary of this discourse, and here is a more anarcho-motivated take being somewhat more rigorous with the numbers but less with language and definitions.

How do we interpret the remaining data? Well, that’s the problem. Anarchists and Leninists have looked at those same data and reached opposite conclusions. Anarchists interpret them as a sign that Leninist states were indeed not what they claimed to be — proletarian democracies — while Leninists consider them tragic cases of collateral damage of a state that had to be violent in order to deal with a ruthless enemy.

The proof is in the pudding. The only thing that could have enabled us to judge the true character of, say, the USSR is if communism had obtained global hegemony and capitalism was in the process of disappearing. Only then could we truly have seen if the Anarchists are right with their warnings. A proletarian state refusing to wither away after a future communist second coming of Fukuyama had declared the end of history would have been an admission of the correctness of Anarchism.

Let me now briefly reconstruct how I think the Anarchist critique in the above stated toned down but not watered down form has already reached the Leninists.

The Mao Conspiracy

The hypothesis developed in this short chapter suffers from a lack of time on my end. I have only recently been induced to read more Mao (after an Irish comrade, Marxist Paul on YouTube, informed me — I believe in a not so friendly exchange of comments on both ends— about the existence of an Anarchist-to-Maoist pipeline), so my reconstruction will be vague and probably incorrect. In the interest of the unity we seek, I ask the comrades who are more well read on this topic to nevertheless STFU and embrace my interpretation of Mao as the only scientifically correct one for this moment.

It is a well known fact that Mao was an Anarchist for about five Minutes before adopting Leninism. My claim is that Mao actually remained an Anarchist to the very end without telling anyone.

I imagine comrade Mao realizing at some point that Anarchism simply had a PR problem, therefore being ineffective even tough being scientifically — in his view — more correct. In the interest of “getting something done”, Mao did the only thing possible to him: a false conversion.

From this point onward, he became the great “proletarian businessman”, i.e., badass proletarian that actually does stuff on the ground that he was. But as he did his work, he kept whispering something into the proletariat’s ears: that whatever they constructed would probably be incomplete and needed to eventually be taken care of in another series of “Cultural Revolutions” where proletarians were supposed to even throw bombs at party offices.

Where have I heard that before? -That’s right! This is what Anarchists would have recommended when the material conditions had been right.

I guess when Mao formulated the idea, he had the exactly right materialist idea in mind. But as far as I understand the events of the one actual “Cultural Revolution”, he had become too far removed from the reality on the ground and overestimated the extent to which the proletariat had actually understood the message at the time. But exactly this violence forever changed real existing socialism. The fact alone that the Chinese actually did commit some extent of mass violence forced a conclusion onto the Leninists: that there might indeed be something wrong with the socialism that had been constructed. Otherwise, why would the people have “obeyed” Mao’s “orders”?

The dialectic joke of Mao remaining an Anarchist to the very end without telling anyone can be read in two ways: Either he successfully programmed Leninists to “do Anarchism” when the time comes without them knowing it, or the Leninists perfectly understood what Mao had done and it were the Anarchists who to this day were not let in on this joke.

In either case: ever since this act of violence, the distinction between Anarchism and Leninism has lost its material basis. Whether it was ever justified can at best be understood by how China develops, where the real existing “Cultural Revolution” failed (in the short run) to achieve the task for which it was designed.

It has been argued that contemporary China does not have “real” private property and they can “press the socialism button” at any time. Allow me to play with this idea for a moment.

When Deng Xiaoping decided to “open China” for foreign capital in order to organize technology transfer, this was in reality just the reflection of a conspiracy of everyone in China. They agreed that Deng should tell the US that everything was cool and that they were capitalists now and that US and European capital could safely come without any worries. But in reality, they just hid their hammers and sickles under their beds and waited.

Today, allowing western capital to still exist in China is outgrowing its usefulness. The only reason to allow it is to undermine any narrative of China as the big bad evil communist aggressor. But the Chinese are still waiting with their hammers and sickles and will at the right time conspire again to seize the imported means of production.

You know what? I would positively love it if they played it in such a South Park worthy way. Just allow me to be skeptical about it. I’m wholly aware that the Chinese communist party has more members than my country, Germany, has inhabitants, but having been a member in a party (though in a western country), I also know that this doesn’t necessarily mean anything. In my opinion, only time will tell.

This brings us to the only scientifically valid conclusion for the US proletariat for this moment. On the contemporary ideological battleground, traditional Leninists (often called Stalinists, but they hate this term), Anarchists and Maoists have been exposed to be three sides of the same coin.

Materially, all three are identical — they simply put a different emphasis on different aspects and have different roots. It is therefore no longer scientifically appropriate to use any of these terms, and we are approaching a new Zero Level: today, the name of the game is finally once again plain and raw

Communism!

Trotzkists also existed throughout this history ;)

The Events of 2021–Now

The last two chapters established that the far left isn’t as divided as it thinks it is. The chapter before that gave a brief genealogy of the newer additions to this far left. The remainder of this text is concerned with two goals:

1. I will show how new divisions arise and become stronger over time. In particular, I will establish that it is not ideological divisions that lead to movements splitting up, but it is movements breaking up that lead to ideological divisions which in turn accelerate the process of splitting up.
2. I will try to show a way out of the dynamic.

It is now that it is appropriate to continue our examination of the events leading to today. Unfortunately, 2022 is in many ways still a mystery. I can therefore not tell the story of 2022 in a strictly linear manner, as time is currently losing all its meaning. I have to instead peel it like an onion, cutting through different layers of reality, the outermost of which is today largely understood and therefore only needs to be repeated.

Unfortunately, neither YouTube nor Google algorithms reward the task of reconstruction, therefore, a lot of what I write would take too long to recover from sources. I will not waste my time digging them up again, but anyone who has taken part in the project of reconstruction of the history of the war will largely agree with what I write. Notice that at no point, I am defending Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine and the Ukrainians as such have my sympathy. But dwelling on this and not digging deeper would be a shallow take.

We had left off in early 2021. Basically, 2021 is barely worth mentioning, except for the very ending of the year, when Russia had started “surrounding” Ukraine and demanded immediate negotiations with the west over the Pan-European security architecture it had been promised after the Cold War.

This sets the stage for 2022. Russia’s “ultimatum” passed, and for some time, they did virtually nothing. Then, the USA started crying “foul” and produced a lot of “intelligence” reports that Russia had to unleash a damn war. In order not to look weak domestically, this then happened right after China’s Olympics had passed (carefully avoiding a diplomatic carfuffle) in February.

My personal take on the weeks immediately leading up to the war was that Russia was trolling the US. Had Putin just let Biden’s schedule for this attack pass and retreated without consequences, it would have exposed just how full of shit US propaganda is.

Unfortunately, the US had a fallback for such a maneuver: they claimed that they were deliberately leaking those “intelligence reports” precisely in order to deter such an attack, when the precise order of events tells a completely different story. In my judgement, it would still have worked, as the Emperor is wholly naked today.

Alas, Putin’s advisors were no good dialecticians in this moment. Their fragile white male ego got triggered and they did something that they could not undo: recognize the independence of the Donbas republics and give a lengthy speech based on an earlier essay.

This lengthy speech arrived in the western consciousness in a completely butchered fashion. Basically, the take home message appeared to be that “Ukraine is a fake nation created by the USSR and therefore, Russia has a right to conquer it back.”

I haven’t listened to the speech, but read the essay which it was based on and I know what parts of the essay those “messengers” were referring to. tl;dr: Yes, Putin did emphasize that Ukraine had been born out of Russia — but precisely to make the opposite point: that there is no real reason why Ukraine would genuinely hate Russia and this hatred must therefore be inauthentic, due to outside forces. Here, Putin’s advisors were passable dialecticians.

After this ideology bomb, there was about a week of silence. Then, the actual invasion came — including an attack on Kyiv.

It is the shared understanding of the reconstruction community that the invasion force was never intended to capture the whole of Ukraine or even just Kyiv. This army was way too small.

In April, Ukraine and Russia almost reached a peace agreement. The terms were not so bad: independence of the Republics that had seceded, neutrality of Ukraine and an international alliance guaranteeing Ukraine’s independence, since how could Ukraine trust Russia’s word? Unfortunately, the only countries geographically able to provide such a security guarantee wanted nothing to do with it. Months later — after Boris Johnson had already left office — , it was uncovered that he had delivered that precise message, thereby making peace unfeasible.

The summer was — some interesting changes in the British government aside — a relatively silent period during which things were mostly dug up. One important recognition (that I had already been aware of prior to this war) was that there were influential members of the wider intelligence community — in particular George Friedman — who openly talked about how the US had a material interest in sowing divisions between Russia and Germany, since a coming together of German tech and Russian resources could mean a serious blow to US hegemony. Given that George Friedman delivers completely nuclear takes on other things — e.g. China being insignificant — we can count this as a lucid moment of an otherwise not too smart analyst.

The full extent to which the US establishment had these plans was recovered way later when someone dug up a clip of Condoleezza Rice making the same points.

Other important events were Merkel and later Hollande “admitting” that the Minsk accords were mostly about buying time which Ukraine had formidably utilized to arm itself.

In Merkel’s case (which I have actually read in a bit more context), the situation was interesting: the interviewer was bullying her into self-criticism. The interviewer stated that the whole world was waiting for Merkel to admit mistakes on how she was too weak on Russia.

And this is what you get if you ask a representative of the bourgeoisie for self-criticism: the even more radical dirty secret of this interview that was not widely discussed is that she “admitted” that Germany and others had not used the time good enough. For example, she had not exactly held speeches upholding the 2% of GDP defense budget target that NATO had committed to, thereby constructing a past in which “Putler” was already the “evil fascist great dictator” that he is officially understood to be today.

In late September finally, Nordstream (a pipeline for natural gas which large parts of Europe use for heating and electricity) had an “inexplicable accident”, for which some Polish politician who is married to a member of the US think tank community immediately publicly thanked the US. Quickly, old videos of Biden were dug up where Biden stated that Nordstream will not continue, and he reiterated that the US had the means to achieve that.

This circumstantial evidence that could and should have lead to further public investigation was immediately labeled a “conspiracy theory” — a good old CIA term used to discredit anyone who says anything with even the slightest undertone of authentic criticism pointing to an “us versus them” narrative against the state. The same happened later to a report by Hersh who had uncovered even more details through an anonymous source, which is circumstantial evidence and therefore nothing more than an invitation to do more investigation.

The timing of Nordstream is a bit curious, as everyone who followed the official narrative was currently eating popcorn watching the Charkow counteroffensive.

It was only after these two major events that Russia got pissed. They annexed the two “independent” republics in order to create the necessary commitment and then started their mobilization and a heavy bombardment with rockets which should have ended long ago since a) “Putler” should have died from all his sicknesses, thereby magically destroying Russia like the death of the emperor destroyed the Empire in Star Wars VI and b) any day now they should have run out of ammunition.

It is at this time that the idea that the Russians are open to unconditional peace negotiations with the west which is often still echoed on the left became invalid — and immediately was projected further into the past by bourgeois media.

Oh, by the way: large parts of the world see right through the lies of the western bourgeoisie and hail the war as a sign of their own liberation from the US empire, as it is already forced to reassign troops and ammunition from all around the world — which unfortunately also means that the idea that Russia could land a slam dunk anytime soon because the Empire is stretched too thin and unable to focus might still turn out to be false. In fact, this is my very prediction: that the war between two bourgeois countries will do what it always does once it becomes too static, escalating by matching equal forces against each other. This is the very form of material violence.

This very thorough reporting from the ground is largely due to the conservative christian (yet proletarian?) comrades from The Duran, Brian Berletic and on the left Caitlin Johnstone, Danny Haiphong, The Grayzone and many others.

This leads us to the second layer of the onion: what the hell did the left do? -They were busy reconstructing, as good dialecticians should do! However, they only reconstructed bourgeois history and completely failed to look into the mirr -

The Apocalypse of the Zombies

[Edit 3rd January 2024: that was a really bad day on Twitter, but looking backward, I took it way too seriously]

Well, damn. Writing a book was really a bs idea.

When the interesting ideas started to emerge in my head last Saturday, I thought I might still have some months to go — a crucial mistake. The romantic Zombie Apocalypse where all you had to do is throwing a little love potion at Zombies that were mutually eating each other’s brains (and it worked on a small scale, Twitter is my witness) had already turned into an Apocalypse of the Zombies on Twitter by the 27. of February 2023 – at least, Twitter sounds unusually violent today.

Ok. Time to do what I always do and seek cover and own my mistake.

Once again, I had overestimated myself.

…

Nope, on the 28., I can conclude that it were just some violent outbursts on Twitter by exactly those people who had inspired proletarians on the ground so much – with no apparent common underlying cause. I assume they have started losing faith, as the memo they sent out into the world did not magically change the official public discourse on the left, despite being apparently very inspiring to people on the ground.

Let’s face it: what’s the point of delivering nuclear take after nuclear take against things we can’t change and dunking on comrades who have been your friends five minutes ago? Wouldn’t it be far more scientifically accurate in this specific historic situation to turn attention away from the war and publicly analyze cat videos? Twitter actually confirms this idea.

On this day, I have tried EVERYTHING to still get the message into the more official left discourse, but nobody really took me seriously. This leads to two conclusions: First, that there is still time and second, that the book might once again be the proper course of action — except that I have now got a glimpse into a historic process that I failed to take seriously: the Revolution eating its children. The “book” (though it’ll now be just a long article) has become even more urgent — even though I may eventually not be the one delivering the message to the proletariat if another player becomes King of the Hill first. It would still be a victory for the working class.

2021 — Now: Continuation

Where were we? Ah, yes: the second layer of the onion. How come this part of the left seemed so intent to construct a narrative that their own government was the bad guy, even though it is quite obvious that Russia had still actively chosen this war?

The answer is that they followed a cargo cult: the idea that the main enemy always stands in your own country. This is of course true in a very primitive sense: your own government is the only one that you can do something about. But it must be vehemently rejected in another sense: this is not the revolutionary take of Lenin.

Lenin wrote in The Defeat of One’s Own Government in the Imperialist War from 1915 that this is the only authentic way to oppose the war. A radicalized class wants it, this is axiomatic. The whole text dunks on people with slightly different takes. For instance, Lenin spews vitriol at people who actually desire the victory of Germany while at the same time violently criticizing opportunists and chauvinists defending Russia.

I bet there are commentary works out there that have simply been “forgotten” that make this gap between this 1915 take and the Lenin’s 1917 take from “The State and Revolution” explicit. And I make another bet: that all the people he dunks on in 1915 had been his close friends five minutes ago. Why? Because if this is the case, history repeats itself.

There is another left, the existence of which we had “forgotten” during 2022, as we had cut off our ties from them and hoped that our analysis — and with “our”, I mean the part of the left that I followed — would magically make those other leftists see the light, even though there was zero mutual trust. Jimmy Dore and Kyle Kulinski are more or less bitter enemies today. They had public fights prior to the Ukraine War, but the war was really the big divider. But of course, they are only examples of a far bigger divide that you see all over the place today. Other examples are Chris Hedges versus David North or The Vanguard (YouTube) versus RBN (also YouTube).

This other left kept digging up “evidence” that in reality, “Putler” had planned this invasion all along. I am willing to admit that there may even be some truth to it. But how did “my” side of the left fortify against this?

Basically, today “we” are convinced that the Bandera hailing Ukraine is in reality a Nazi regime. And what is our “smoking gun”? Nazi imagery and Nazi symbolism is at best indicative of some more profound truth, but this truth is not truly reflected on. Wasn’t it always our stance that words and symbols mean nothing and that we should look at the material circumstances?

Here is a message from the other side that has somehow made it through the cracks of the ideological trenches that have emerged: Ukraine displaying more and more Nazi symbolism is a result of them being under attack by a vastly more powerful enemy precisely based on the — back then — LIE that Ukraine was authentically a nazi regime. Ukraine cynically embraced this message as a way to dunk on the aggressor — and the west that constantly “fails to deliver enough weapons” and that turns a blind eye to the now rich Nazi symbolism.

Sometimes, a narrative similar to this even spontaneously emerged on “my” side of the left but was then “conveniently forgotten”: that Zelenski — the comedian peace candidate in the election that got him to power — is forced by several factions in his countries and by the west to fight this war.

Looked at it soberly in a third layer of the onion, this is the key insight that we just have to generalize a little bit: Fascism is not bad people doing bad things. It is Goethe’s Mephisto, except inverted: it is the force that wants good things and does bad things. This is what the once united Online Left has become a part of.

Here, I am not just talking about that other left, I’m also talking about “us”, as we have reached a modus operandi where for each friend we win, we lose one. Whatever we’re doing today is not uniting working people. When comrades disagree with us, we are not listening carefully why they disagree and we are not looking for solutions, but we insist in sometimes very unfriendly language that we are right.

Ultimately, even if we can’t convert people like Kyle Kulinsky, shouldn’t we at least have a message to reach his supporters? And wouldn’t such a message necessarily be somewhat generous and friendly to their idol?

[Update 21st of March 2023: a similar line of reasoning applies to that other left advocating for Marianne Williamson. You know what? We should wholeheartedly support them! I like comedy, and if some people need another kick in the nuts before they get it, I don’t need to waste energy insulting them over it. What we do have to do is informing people that there are alternatives. We’re not here to rub salt into wounds that have yet to form, but when the time comes, we want to have advertised and conducted ourselves as evidence based healers of those wounds. And it may still happen that they perform a miracle and what they do actually works — in which case: GOOD.]

All of this brings us to the fourth layer of the onion: Fascism is a result of the bourgeois distortion “freedom” of speech becoming identical with itself. Vicious institutions like pop culture have injected into our brain that thinking that there is an objective political truth is radical and therefore bad and that we should just chill and realize that for every opinion, there is a counter opinion. Staying calm is always the proper course of action.

And what do we do with people who fail to stay calm? -We oppose them. This time, by “we”, I mean the social organism that we are all part of. And what does “opposing” an opinion mean in its mature form when the radical side organizes a protest? — A counter protest, organically grown from the opportunistic desire of some proletarians that you just stay calm, thereby unknowingly defending a wicked system that everyone knows is rigged.

It is now that we should finally have a sober look at the 2020 riots in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd. Isn’t this precisely what happened? Initially, there was a violent outburst where police stations were burned down — yet they were so universally understood to be authentic that such acts got majorities in official polls.

How did capital react to this? -By “decolonizing” ads and products.

Let this sink in for a moment. If you are one of the brain dead people whose ingenious take on such events is “just stay calm, for every opinion, there is a counter opinion and we can solve this through the democratic process we have”, this was the cue that the protesters — rioting against that special force between the proletariat and capital — were somehow bought agents of capital.

Counter protests emerged, and suddenly, the protesters were met with more and more counter violence. Not only were there shootings and cars driving over protesters, but under this guise of those counter protesters being fascists and therefore the most pressing issue, the state felt confident to become more violent too and even abduct protesters in black cars without license plates.

But how did it all end? — Basically, with the super villain from the D.C. universe, mayor Murial Bowser — and I insist that the only scientifically accurate pronunciation of her name is that which coincides with the creature from Super Mario — created a giant Black Lives Matter mural that could be seen from outer space.

At this point, the protesters slowly but surely drew the only correct conclusion: “fuck that!” And they went home.

Which brings us to the fifth and final layer of reality: they know it. Parts of the Online Left have slowly started reflecting on it. For example, Michael Parenti’s son Christian Parenti has recently given an interview that was helpfully commented by the YouTube channel Midwestern Marx (for this alone, Midwestern Marx deserves more subscribers that Second Thought with their more idealist take) where Parenti explains that this specific cynically perverted form of Diversity is a ruling class ideology.

Specifically, he exposed a concept for which the scientifically correct term I believe is “Rainbow Capitalism”, where huge corporations display rainbow flags. My trans friends agree with this take. I proposed to just change their symbols a little bit so corporations can’t appropriate them anymore: simply include hammer and sickle into the rainbow flag.

Recently, I had a sober discussion with a culturally conservative Leninist. Yes, such a mythical creature actually authentically exists. Remember: fascism is not bad people doing bad things. It is good people doing bad things. You know what he told me when I asked him if my ideological intervention would be accepted by his comrades? He told me that it would not be accepted and that we should just go to the end and use the USSR flag.

There is a social phenomenon in the US called “MAGA [Make America Great Again] Communism”. This emerged in 2022 and is often misread as a second coming of “National Socialism”. This is completely the wrong take, although our leftist friends may unknowingly help to make it come true. No, it is simply culturally conservative people who have their own take on Marx and Lenin.

From their perspective, it is Diversity that is an expression of the coming fascism, as it has through past protests made its way to a perverted “cultural hegemony” through exactly the process described in my reflection on the George Floyd protests.

MAGA Communists claim that they only hate the cultural hegemony of the rainbow flag and that their movement has nothing against trans people. I responded that this is unfortunately not the case and that I personally know trans people who get death threats. It did not take much convincing to make him publicly announce that he opposed such death threats. He even has a trans sister (I did not ask about their real gender) whom he loves and would defend!

Did I say that the fifth layer of reality was the last layer? I was wrong! There is a sixth and final circle of hell (Episodes 7, 8 and 9 that you would expect from Dante have been cancelled after the experience of Star Wars).

Throughout this section, I have highlighted a recurring theme whenever I talked about the Online Left: First, there is a decision which side you are on on a given topic. Then, you construct a narrative to justify this position. But if in a third step, your perfectly reasonable narrative fails to convince your fellow proletarians in the other faction, your prior decision to hate them gets reinforced.

This is precisely what I set out to show: that first, there is a material division, and then, this is reflected in ideological divisions among proletarians; conversely, we are perfectly capable of finding common ground with people with wildly different ideologies, if we decide that we’re on the same team.

At the center of hell, there is one Janus-Faced creature that we commonly refer to as “Love”. It is the thing that makes us want good things and therefore has the radical potential to be our savior; All the evil that we see in the world is nothing more than a result of love being butchered and corrupted through our wicked social relations.

The idea of the good is not to be found — like Plato believed — by leaving the cave and getting a glimpse at the sun. One finds it by climbing down the most scary abysses of the cave.

This brings us to the next theoretical concept which I had previously previewed already.

The Zombie Apocalypse

Content warning: this chapter will be very rich in colorful metaphors. Remember that I am a continental European, and no matter how much I try being analytical, I can’t help playing with pop culture when doing philosophy for cultural reasons. If it helps, imagine me constantly sniffing ;)

If you have paid any attention throughout the last chapter, you should already know what I am about to tell you: that we have secretly always lived through a Zombie Apocalypse — and WE are the Zombies!

Aren’t we constantly eating each others brains on Twitter and elsewhere? It is strictly not the algorithms as that are the problem. It is our social relations that have been corrupted by the social structures that we live in.

What does our Zombie-ism truly signify? It signifies that that in a certain sense, the state has actually already died long ago.

Isn’t this Zombie Apocalypse exactly Hobbes’ fight all against all that we are supposed to believe is our true nature? Isn’t the thing that gave us unity in the past precisely a Hobbesian Leviathan? The only thing that Hobbes got wrong here is that he identified this Great Other with the state. But in reality, pop culture has made it perfectly explicit how unity comes into being: it is an alien invasion force from outer space. But this alien invasion force is not the state that rules us! The Leviathan is the white whale that captain Ahab – who we know to be a jerk but who we nevertheless accepted as our boss – hunted for decades and was finally able to kill (the West unfortunately won the Cold War). Ever since, we’ve been feasting on its corpse and singing songs about a hunt that is becoming an increasingly distant memory.

What the Leviathan, the Great Other, the Alien Invasion Force truly does is to make us all silently agree and ignore the true nature of our own society and that the way in which we fight this alien invasion force is by allowing ourselves to be puppets to puppeteers that we once were aware of and then conveniently forgot.

Can’t those balloons that the great prophet Nena predicted long ago and that were shot down in January/February 2023 with the most brutal force be read as a desperate attempt to construct a new Alien Invasion Force that we all unite against while the real existing proletariat is busy watching train wrecks? Isn’t that also one among many possible motives for the war in Ukraine and the retroactive construction of “Putler”?

What I propose is that those of us who woke up to the fact that they were Zombies all their lives conspire to construct their own Alien Invasion Force: the bourgeoisie, which has in reality grown secretly like a cancer everywhere in society but to which the only healthy reaction given all the bullshit in society is to treat it as if it was an Alien Invasion Force: Vampires that use all kinds of organic techniques created by the Zombies themselves to hypnotize those Zombies. They build towers from which they spread their wicked message and cathedrals where they educate their hypnotists.

Once you woke up, please do realize how you did so: through love. This is what healed you. Utopian love — the hope that the world can truly change. So your foremost task is to spread this love, not to attack Zombies who have not yet woken up. It is the same stupid bullshit romantic narrative from pop culture, but THIS IS MARX:

The religious misery is an expression of the real misery and simultaneously the protestation against the true misery. Religion is the sigh of the harassed creature, the mood of a heartless world as it is the spirit of spiritually dead circumstances. It is the opium of the people.

The annulment of religion as the illusion of the happiness of the people is the demand of its true happiness. The demand to overcome the illusions about one’s true circumstances is the demand to give up a state that requires this illusion. The criticism of religion is therefore a seed (I insist that this is the only correct translation in this context) of the criticism of the valley of tears (DAMN, upon googling the appropriate translation for Jammertal, google offered me the search term “Jammertal Resort”!!!) the halo of which is religion.

The critique has picked apart the imaginary flowers at the chains, not in order to make humans wear the fantasy-less desolate chain, but in order to make him throw away the chain and reap the living flower. The criticism of religion dis-illusions humans in order to make them think, act, shape their reality [Wirklichkeit, i.e. the totality of things that work on you] as disappointed, sober humans so they can revolve around themselves and by this around their true sun. Religion is a illusory sun that revolves around humans as long as they don’t revolve around themselves. -Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie (my own translation)

Damn, Marx! Your work scientifically justifies my terminology of the Zombie Apocalypse and the Vampires!

Let’s dwell on this for a moment. You know the thing that people that go on stage do where they imagine that the audience is naked? -That’s the mindset. I really want you to picture brain dead people that you talk to as sad Zombies needing love potion. It’s as empowering and liberating as that Matrix thing when you realize that there is no spoon and you suddenly see the green numbers raining down. Once you view the other as a Zombie, whatever insults they throw at you really do seem like a sad cry for love. Beneath the surface of an Agent of the Matrix is still a human. Once you imagine that there is no spoon, it’s you that changes.

It sounds stupid, but what you should do with this insight is just one simple thing: brew love potion and throw it at Zombies that are eating each other’s brains! Be gentle. Realize the important lesson that great prophets have shouted at you since antiquity and that even Marxism (and even this text) reflects on many occasions: if you’re too violent with spreading radical love, you are doing Mephisto’s work. You’re still in a world of Zombies: everyone is a potential enemy if you trigger them. Therefore ideally, make them drink the potion voluntarily, even if it is difficult to make them aware first that they might need it.

Isn’t that the true meaning behind Frankfurt School’s “performative contradiction”? Americans fancy themselves to be champions of free speech, “free speech absolutists”. Sorry to break it to you, but you’re noobs: You draw a hard line in the sand when the other side threatens violence. Frankfurt School are the true PUNKS here: They discovered (through experience!) that when the other person threatens violence, they are not currently performing violence — thereby revealing that they are actually believers in free speech. It is a silent cry for love!

Of course, this horizontal way of spreading radical love has its limitations. Its effectiveness totally depends on material circumstances. It works best, when the Zombies are currently building a cathedral or have recently built a cathedral out of an underlying motive of authentic radical love that was butchered only through their brain melt. In such a situation, gentle interventions have the potential to trigger a mass awakening at some later point.

I have tested that this difference is real. In the orbit of the American Online Left on Twitter, it was not only easy to intervene in many brain eating contests between Zombies, but as it turns out, even people from whom you would not expect it have read Lenin! Granted, the n for this hypothesis is less than 10 (in terms of conversations, but not in terms of people talked to — there are always multiple parties involved), but you know what you can do in order to increase n? Test it for yourself!

In Germany though, there is virtually no such cathedral in sight. They exist only in the margins. Near such an online cathedral, I met an absolutely obnoxious human being that demonstrates just how bad the brain rot in Germany seems to be and that we’re even scarily close to burning books again. I nevertheless was able to let him at least drink a droplet of love potion.

The person in question correctly identified counter-protests as something bad. I tried to elaborate by referring to existing work that this is exactly the right take and that it points to the existence of the bourgeoisie, but that person was having none of it.

The person expressed multiple prejudices: that all those extra words without meaning are just ChatGPT speaking, that books are pointless and that one should think for oneself. Upon reflection, this last point is a view that is truly pervasive in Germany, we’re even more anti-intellectual than the US. Poets and thinkers MY ASS!

In order to meet him where this person was at, I had to reduce my messaging to a sentence that was shorter than a tweet, which contains an interesting lesson: maybe it’s not Twitter, but your social relations that corrupt your attention span?

Basically, the views we settled on were (and I’m distilling the essence of a long conversation):

Question: what purpose do counter protests have?

Answer: they are a means of social control.

Question: what is the purpose of social control?

Answer:

Well, it took a while until I accepted that this poor soul wasn’t gonna accept for now a causal explanation so I had to give them a teleological one. He wanted a conspiracy theory (that the government buys counter protesters bla bla bla), so I gave him a better one (thanks, comrade Zizek for this ingenious idea that I believe having heard in a talk from you):

The purpose of social control is to cover up the existence of the bourgeoisie which controls the government.

I insisted that those who had a similar take but pointed to Aliens or Reptilians knew nothing and that he should specifically look for people who knew the term “bourgeoisie” (and how to even pronounce it).

If you think that this is all I was able to do for this poor person, you are wrong. After this new insight (which they almost immediately bought), they came back and told me that this exchange was so long that it is almost a book and he accused me of being the digital version of a counter protester.

After a moment of existential despair, I discovered that I could turn this around: The censors don’t read long texts, so this is where the people who ask questions about the bourgeoisie hide themselves.

If you think about Lenin’s State and Revolution and all the distortions that he points out, isn’t that exactly true? This beautiful framing as a conspiracy theory, but this time, a true one?

But… what if I told you that the Americans actually are in the remarkably favorable situation that they almost have a council?

The Apocalypse of the Zombies — Continuation

Dammit, on 2nd/3rd of March 2023, an event chain that will probably trigger the collapse of the Online Left got triggered.

[Edit 3rd January 2024: it did not, but I still believe it could have if it had materialized]

There have been signs of this on Twitter before, but by now, Dore retweeted this shit from Nick Brana about him running for President, which means that this entire article is by now a document of a history that could have been. The name of the game: Dore24.

What do these people think how this plays out? Outsider comedian candidate who stands for peace with Russia — where have I heard that before? Oh, that’s right: Zelensky!

I believe that Dore’s desire for good things is 100% genuine. Similarly, I believe that when Zelensky ran, his desire was 100% genuine. That’s the point of this very text. Dore may have a bit more experience fighting the good fight (I don’t know much about Zelensky), but he has no real clue what is coming. So, what will actually announcing a run for president probably mean?

It would immediately make a large chunk of the base become very cynical about Dore. On top of that, it would kill the last hope of reconciliation with the camp around Kyle Kulinsky, as they have embraced Marianne Williamson — a moderate candidate that in 2020, Kyle ridiculed and Jimmy had on his show.

Any attempt by Dore to “be the bigger man” and “invite” Kyle and all the other leftists to become his cheer leaders are poisoned now. Can’t comrade Dore and his friends see that? There is no turning the other cheek once you have established ulterior motives with an agenda.

RBN are taking this debate seriously and report on it, but can’t really read the room as of 2nd March 2023. They see the divisions over it but still have no real idea how this may play out. Are we completely crazy?

[Update from 9th of March 2023: it appears that there are enough critical voices to prevent Jim from running, although there doesn’t seem to be a final decision yet; but right now, the critical voices appear to dominate at least the discourse on Twitter]

[Update from 12th of March 2023: yesterday, people have started to speculate that the insolvency of the Silicon Valley Bank may trigger another massive economic disaster. I don’t know enough about the case to make any predictions, but if this is true, it will also be another contributing factor to either make or break the US Online Left. Either they cover it in the most bleak terms, but only offer an electoral solution or bullshit protests, or they highlight workers taking charge and solving problems on their own]

[Update from 24th of March 2023: Midwestern Marx tried to popularize Marxism via TikTok and got banned several times. Currently, they start to get pissed that the story has been largely ignored despite the sheer lot of followers they have gathered in a short time. This is another data point of evidence that a gap of expectations has emerged: Marxism has successfully planted the idea in the heads of people that “movements for the little guy” should actually listen to and empower “the little guy” — but we still don’t have a reproducible procedure with predictable positive (or constructively critical) results to highlight our stories, no matter how interesting!]

Let us reflect on the findings so far a little. Given that people probably won’t get the memo in time, there is no haste and we can seek cover and study. People will come to the correct conclusions through experience, preventing hardships seems no longer an option.

Chris Hedges (who is known for allowing the police to take him away during protests and for teaching Howard Zinn in prisons) once expressed that one ought to act as a believer that doing good things will cause other good things, even if we don’t have proof of it. Hedges expresses an anti-empiricist view here. My findings have lead me to a different conclusion: empiricism is everything here.

Isn’t it the case that discourses derail as soon as we cause them to derail? Yes: the other person can of course be completely unreasonable. But doesn’t aggressive behavior on our side always make things worse? What we have to accept is that we are dealing with a dialectical empirical world, i.e., one where we produce empirical data for others.

Aggressive behavior on our part will invariably be read as evidence that our motives aren’t pure, once the other side has decided that this is the case. Only the most pure behavior (towards fellow proletarians, not the bourgeoisie) can possibly change that over time. It’s just the good old confirmation bias again — and we must carefully avoid feeding this troll with even a single data point that we’re bad people. It’s strictly empirical.

Another way to think about it is by rethinking stoicism. If we allow ourselves to publicly display anger, aren’t we showing a weakness that others love to exploit? Hasn’t it become a game to trigger snowflakes to melt down?

Of course, your anger at the stupidity of other people whose priority in life is to “own the libs” is valid and justified. It is your way of coping with the situation that is toxic and derails conversations. If you feel that you can’t handle the toxicity of society around you today, why don’t you take a day off from Twitter or other public forums and go on a hike?

You should only ever engage in public discourse if you feel that you can handle it without showing weakness — not because you suppress the emotion, but because you have found a better way to cope with it than displaying it publicly. And if you’re a complete noob, just read books and view any discourse as a learning exercise rather than something that you urgently have to win.

All of this appears to also be a foundational principle of Marxism if you think back to how Lenin described the proper Marxist was to engage with the electoral process. We’re nut supposed to actually believe in candidates, but we’re still supposed to unironically support them if there’s idealist support for them. Why? -Simply because there can only be two outcomes: either the (proletarian!) libs have something to learn (in which case we most definitely want them to see us as reasonable nice people) or we have something to learn.

Lenin even mentions a story in State and Revolution about how Marx interacted with idealists. When workers from Paris asked him for advice regarding an insurrection, he recommended against it. They decided to do it anyway, and Marx applauded their courage. The insurrection lead to the short lived Paris Commune, which Marx saw as a great learning opportunity.

We must realize that techniques based on all of the above give rise to a new set of power moves from which we can write a new Art of War. And the most epic such event western culture cares about is this whole Jebus on a cross thingy.

I’m an atheist and I’ll remain one. Since I know I’ll get a bunch of eye rolls from fellow atheists when talking positively about this person, I kinda prefer to immediately distance myself by butchering Jebus’ name (though I am by far not the first one who rises above rationalism while remaining firmly rooted in materialism), this time with a name given to me from Greek philosopher Homer Simpson. Apropos Greeks: I always wondered why Jebus and not Socrates became the official cult figure of late ancient Rome. Socrates is way more acceptable to modern tastes. But I think I figured it out.

Both died voluntarily. But Socrates’ take on the situation was: “The law always protected me. Therefore, the law is good. Now, the law has turned against me. Therefore, I am bad and should voluntarily die.” That… is a brain dead take.

Jebus on the other hand just gave people freedom of speech — even more than the Frankfurt School. Jebus concluded that the sins of his time were so bad, he’d probably die if he didn’t resist or try to evade the sin. His ingenious move was to allow things to play out anyway while making everyone aware that he was allowing this to happen, thereby owning everyone’s sin and making everyone feel really stupid.

In this moment on the cross, he of course lost. At least the Christians tell us that he was dead (even though the Muslims disagree and we’ll probably never know too many details about any true historical figure that this mythology is based on). But Jebus had an epic come back: his cult became the official religion of Rome a few centuries later, one of the most epic owns ever. It’s Tank Girl saying “I won”. Nevertheless, this victory was hollow because — thanks to the Council of Nicaea among other things — it fell victim to a similar dynamic as BLM symbolism during the George Floyd protests.

The remainder of this article was (minor corrections aside) written on the 28th of February and should only be seen as a glimpse into an alternative world that once sounded kinda possible to at least one close observer.

[Update 2. January 2024: there was no radical falling apart of the Online Left, just a gradual increase of factionalism, luckily accompanied by a moderation in tone. The war on Gaza actually has brought many of us together again, so a different world seems possible again now.]

The Council

Now I’ve lost it, right? Has any of the attempts of the fashionable cargo cults to organize the workers truly achieved something? Or has a council magically formed itself overnight without anyone realizing it?

Let us review what Marx had to say about how revolutions actually work:

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. -The Communist Manifesto

It is this last sentence that is of profound importance. A revolution is nothing more than people on a mass scale having a sober look at many of their social relations. Therefore, I claim the way revolutionary councils truly form is through a cheap and dirty hegelian trick: they retroactively pop into history and are revealed to be councils.

THIS is what for instance the US Online Left could become. They have all the mechanisms they need.

In 2016, wasn’t this Online Left genuinely a market place of ideas? Didn’t ideas indeed magically flow from one place to the other? Isn’t this how everybody today in this broken corpse of the Online Left knows about Richard Wolff?

But how did this mechanism truly work? Basically through authentic cancel culture. The close observer noticed something phenomenal at the time: whenever a new idea popped up in one place, the viewers communicated this idea elsewhere. They simply referred to the idea in comment sections of places that had never heard of the new idea and changed their focus slowly and gently towards people with better ideas — until the other content creators finally picked them up.

This worked precisely because at no point did viewers aggressively threaten to cancel anyone, nor did leftists dunk on each other for not reviewing new ideas. There was a general and genuine sense of cooperation and community at the time, everyone was welcome.

This is today supplemented by a more recent phenomenon: new YouTubers popped up and wanted to join the inspiring cause.

Due to market saturation though, those newer YouTubers stayed smaller. Nevertheless, they are embraced and highlighted by by the older, bigger channels. One crucial such connection is that between Jimmy Dore’s show and RBN, where Jim constantly invites RBN members.

In the other direction, RBN has some ties directly to the ground all over the US. One damn important example is a member of RBN, Rome, who is just doing the utopian thing and bragging about it: he builds a library, a community garden [whoops — as of April 7th, it has been seized by the city — another frustration against which we could fight back way easier if the ideas here were followed], feeds the poor — and made a documentary (just… do your own research on that one) and discussed this stuff on RBN (also here).

He keeps BRAGGING on Twitter how he gets shit done in his life and invites people in the most gentle terms possible to do the same. But he doesn’t do all this in a dark corner of Twitter, he does it in a way that people at least have a chance of being publicly exposed to it — and all of that precisely at the time when we want this more than ever. And even that is not all: he combines his activities precisely with the idea of overthrowing capitalism — something that isn’t that loudly expressed on Democracy at Work (who also try to reach out to the real existing utopians out there).

Isn’t that fantastic? Once you realize how inspiring this is, you do what? Precisely! If you are a listener, if you allow for your environment to correct you — you will dedicate yourself to a sober review of your social relations.

Once you think about it, aren’t there many people who have left the Online Left earlier because the Online Left was aggressive and got not much done? Weren’t there lots of people who never joined the Online Left in the first place for precisely that reason?

In fact, the Online Left has today developed into a complete circular firing squad. There is a tendency today of people tuning out — and for the first time in this process, I believe that this is an authentic expression of proletarian desires, as people, inspired by the dreams in the cathedral, actually do want to take things into their own hand today.

Let’s embrace that! But not in a childish “we want nothing to do with ANY left YouTuber anymore” move, but precisely in a “wouldn’t it be so cool if they make me their cover story?” move.

Rome surely inspired me to change my ways! I became way kinder towards fellow socialists even if we have disagreements, I started to put my years of study to use by writing long analyses, I am writing a theater piece that is a criticism of today’s society (I have nothing to do with theater, but I’m getting in touch with theater people) and I’m back to those small real life political groups that are all talk and no action and I’m trying my best to change their ways as friendly as I can.

However, with high aspirations comes a potential for extreme frustrations. Indeed, we are approaching the most dangerous break in this process: the Online Left is in a great danger to become yet another dead cargo cult. It is only through this that people are more and more tuning out — a trickle that may become a torrent of anger which would turn the Zombie Apocalypse into an Apocalypse of the Zombies.

There are already signs of this on Twitter. I actively follow people who tune out (from day to day political stuff discussed on the internet), with the result that I see frustration and bitterness, but also people posting sunsets and motivational memes with Mao.

On 27th of February, I was already afraid that I am too late and that cynicism was taking over. But it was still simply a sign from a possible future of mass frustration that we can avoid.

Wouldn’t it be just great if the “peace rallies” on one side simply silently disappeared and the responsible people analyzed cat videos and later, when the time is ready, just what the real existing proletariat out there is doing in order to take charge? Or even better: if the proletariat simply conspired and drowned the big YouTubers with requests to make their small project the cover story? Don’t you think this would scare the shit out of the bourgeoisie and make the people behind the other “peace rallies” — who were our friends just five minutes ago — curious?

Guess what: we even have assets who could deliver the memo what is going on into the other bubble(s) — people who have behaved like true Marxists and always avoided to sever social bonds by being aggressively harmless: Richard Wolff, Cornel West and so on.

The name of the game that those proletarians that are tuning out should today conspire to play is “King of the Hill”.

King of the Hill is a game mode usually found in tactical or strategic games where each faction tries to capture and hold a central position for as long as they can. And here’s what it means in our context: capture the cathedral!

We need a proletarian with an un-corrupted genuine message of being a nobody (i.e. having virtually no followers on Twitter or anywhere else), a genuine outsider to this hole process, somehow appear in the official left discourse and deliver the message from the streets — ehh — Twitter; but not only that, this person would have to do it through steps that other proletarians can realistically and actively repeat. And not only that: we need a mechanism that automatically guarantees that if a proletarian pops up, they always say the right thing — or had to go against someone’s recommendation, thereby staking only their own credibility.

The path that I am proposing is simple: somehow causing the middle tier or small YouTubers to take your desire to make it to the top seriously, reviewing what you have to say and then recommending you upward, thereby putting at stake their credibility. Or they recommend against you going to the higher ranking YouTubers, but at least you got a review of your work.

But any other way that can be turned into a repeatable one — and in fact any other cathedral (as long as all cathedrals live in peace and harmony with each other) — and has the desired properties will do. It’s a game! Becoming King of the Hill (and I mean this in a gender-neutral way) is the quest.

Just don’t go right to the high priests, ok? The most dangerous thing for you is to go to a Zombie high priest without anyone who personally knows the high priest first reviewing your stuff. Of course, you may get lucky and it works, but the high priest might as well eat you alive and throw you into an emotional volcano. Only try this if you really view it as a game and have a way to come back from this. That is: if you end up as emotional toast, you are sure that you’ll re-spawn.

Let me paint a picture what the end result should be, solely based on the desired properties (without knowing the details yet):

The Proletarian is a real badass, an urban legend, a mythical creature with super powers. In his day to day live, the proletarian has a job and is a nobody. Actually, they positively embrace the comfort of being a nobody.

The Proletarian “doesn’t ever do anything”, but knows the wisdom of the streets and of Twitter and whatever other public places there are. They are a listener.

The Proletarian just looks out for opportunities and only acts if one presents itself. If the opportunity can only be tackled through cooperation of many proletarians, they attempt to inject the idea into public discourse by having it reviewed by the lower ranks of the cathedral.

From the point of view of public discourse, the Proletarian magically pops into existence out of nowhere and always says the right thing at the right time. He couldn’t have said it otherwise, as his opinion would have been rejected earlier. It’s not censorship though: you can ask the lower ranks of the cathedral to recommend you upward anyway while allowing them to distance themselves from you. This way, it is your credibility that is at stake, but the outcome is a learning experience for everyone involved.

Isn’t that already the experience of the proletarian? Except that what they are allowed to say in the upper ranks of bourgeois cathedrals magically serves bourgeois interests. Curious how that works, right?

The second magic power of the proletarian is that they always show a different face. The proletarian is the message, not the messenger, an expression of the Hegelian Weltgeist that somehow always makes its way into some avatar’s mind.

That’s all those different faces really signify: avatars. Compared to the high priests of the cathedral, their form is very fluid in skin color, gender and all the other categories that were once important.

WE are the Proletarian. We are nobody — and precisely by the virtue of being nobodies, we can take cover in being a nobody when we aren’t needed. We live in the dark, just following events.

Conversely, we only trust those cathedrals that have provably been on our side. We don’t stick with abusers, as we create other places to go.

But by the way, what are the cathedrals even doing for us? Are they some kind of dictating body that commands us? No! They’re just the public discourse.

Seriously: what do we need politicians for? They are just clowns picking up an agenda from “society” and then writing a piece of paper that magically makes “society” behave in a certain way. Can’t society just do shit on its own?

No, what the councils should really do is give the Proletarians recommendations what to do. Both sides benefit: the proletarian will make a way more informed decision, and regardless whether the proletarian follows the recommendation, the cathedral can learn.

Who needs an official constitution for such a beautiful, fluid process? All such a document could possibly do is to encapsulate in a taken-out-of-context way the principles we once considered relevant. At best, it is a reminder that we could do better if things go wrong — a theme that I see often in non-Marxist US Twitter discourse. The most important thing really is to consciously keep the process alive, not the idea. If we need a reminder because things have gone wrong, how about we simply inject this into commentary, books and folklore?

I will not corrupt the credibility of this work by adding too many details. The whole point of everything I write is to have faith in the emerging, new empirical process. I won’t even really tackle the question how we socialize things. The important thing right now is that the proletarians capture the cathedral before it completely falls apart and make it heal. This by itself will of course not constitute a revolution, but we will be in a way better position when the revolution actually comes.

The solutions to our problems will emerge as we go, if we are diligent, disciplined and conscious of all the factors laid out.

The proletarian Leviathan — in this case truly an expression of our desires — will be a shape shifter, just like the pop figure of the Proletarian. It creeps through society like a Basilisk and gazes at problems to make them wanna die voluntarily. Once this is achieved, we unleash ourselves in the form of a Hydra that will grow many new heads for each decapitation, which is the exact thing that will make us invincible.

Apropos mythology, aka pop culture: it was always a Marxist position that culture was a mirror of the society that produced it. What does today’s pop culture reveal about our society? My take is that there are a bunch of data points, e.g. black actors running away from “Rookie” (available on Disney+) . Stuff like this has of course always been going on, but there’s one difference: today, it works.

To drive home my point that our change of perspective and activity is urgent: the temporary success of the actors in “Rookie” to change the narrative from a toxic racist police department to a police department with “good apples” who genuinely want “good things” and materially do “good things” was based on a secret conspiracy with the audience. Around 2020, the police looked absolutely bad for everyone, and the actors could credibly say (at least that’s my theory) that the audience wasn’t gonna have more of the same. Unfortunately, they have maneuvered themselves into a plot hole in season 4 when the character who wanted good things so much that he ran for union election was faced with a corrupt union bureaucracy.

In season 5, the theme isn’t really followed up on. Why not? -Because it wouldn’t have been credible. The only way this story line could have moved forward if at some point in real existing America, the Socialist International had appeared and saved the day. We failed, and if we are not careful, we will fail at a much larger scale.

Going too much into the details would distract us too much though, so just take this as a gentle seed planted in your head that you may want to look at how series like Rookie evolved over the course of the years. It’s a smoking gun, a knife in the back of the bourgeoisie, sold to us by them!

Allow me to conclude this chapter with a slam dunk on my German heritage by inverting by 180 degrees (or 360 degrees?) what some guy with a mustache said: I firmly believe that the proletarians that today laugh at me will tomorrow laugh with me.

To Our Enemies

Just chill, ok? Nothing has fundamentally changed, just as comrade Biden promised. We are still fundamentally clowns without any power.

The traditional Marxist position is that we want good things. We are about rainbows, unicorns and Pikachus. We claim that you want bad things — but as good Marxists, we invite you to commit the terrible crime of violating our principles and proving us wrong.

Once we have captured a proletarian institution, grow stronger and stronger and finally, many people start to believe in it, wouldn’t it be the most beautiful thing in the world if the police and the military just decide to go home or even join us? Even you have nothing to lose but your chains, and a world to win!

Don’t the police in the US already have a problem to find new recruits? That’s what I mean. We really don’t need to talk about revenge. Once we are many, I hope you will discover that it is not only possible to do what we are dreaming about, that it is in your own best interest to join us.

Actually, let’s take this to the end here: why not have a little bit of hope for the bourgeoisie? For the longer term future when we can actually tackle such a task, I propose the following perverted exchange: they get to keep their palaces and give us their corporations. In fact, we should even express our gratitude if they just accept the course of events: we should build statues for them!

How about a mural where you don’t have Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, but Bill Gates, George Soros, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos?

I get that people are pissed at these people, but do we really want to commit violence? No! I claim, what we want is public holidays for these people!

Wouldn’t it be positively fantastic if we used the holiday and showed up at their palaces and they hold a speech or whatever they think is great and in the Q&A session, we then engage with them in the same way as the people in Live of Brian engaged with that Roman governor who wanted a little love because he was so generous to let the people decide which political prisoner to release?

And let’s go to the end here too: If we do that fully automated gay space communism thing and send people to the Moon again, I claim the only correct response if Elon and Jeff want tickets, we should give them some. This is something that both sides can definitely agree on.

The views expressed here are the views of the author and nobody else. If they have any significance at all will be established by history. If you liked it, don’t forget to clap, share, become a fan and leave a comment. If you didn’t like it, please offer your constructive criticisms in the comments.

*sniff*