Proletarians Anonymous: A 12 Step Praxis for Revolution
Greetings to both my comrades and my many enemies. My name is Nick Walther and I am a grateful recovering addict and a proud Communist! At my last Jacobin Magazine study group, my fellow Communards and I read and vigorously debated a dispatch from Comrade Peter Ikeler. Uncle Ikeler’s thesis can be summarized as such: large swaths of the American working class struggle with opioid addiction, rendering them powerless to organize against capital while in active addiction. Opioids are indeed the opiates of the masses. Sad! Even worse, when they do get clean, it is the collective struggle against addiction, whether in institutional recovery or self-help, 12-step based programs, that has largely replaced the organized union struggle against the bosses. You think your sponsor is going to tell you to start a union or go on strike when you complain to them about the thousand-pound boot on your neck, squeezing the life out of you every second you’re on the clock, the surplus value of your labor stolen from your pocket by the piggie who expects you to be grateful for the scraps they throw you, your hopes and dreams a lyin’ on the ground? No! Your sponsor will tell you to be grateful for the boot, to pray for the boot, to make the boot your higher power if that’s what it takes to stay sober! Commandant Ikeler proposes a synthesis to solve this problem by “incorporating language from recovery programs [into the coming insurrection] . . . .” (bracketed language mine).
Now, my comrades quickly dismissed this as bourgeois revisionism, arguing that the working class doesn’t need a new language, but simply needs an educated — in Marxist theory, of course — vanguard (preferably our group) to lead them into battle with the bourgeoisie. Grab the sack of potatoes and smash the bourgeois state machine! The potato imagery was a reference to Marx’s 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, and the smashing of the bourgeois state machine is from Lenin’s State and Revolution, but of course you don’t have to know that, because I’m here, daddy’s here. Despite my prodigious knowledge of Marx, Lenin, Mao, Kim 1, Kim 2, Kim 3, any other Kims I’m forgetting, I was unable to persuade my comrades of the revolutionary insight in Chairman’s Pete vision. Mine was the only dissenting voice in the clique and I have been excommunicated and denounced as a counter-revolutionary and a Trotskyist (fake news). However, as a hardline socialist in recovery from a nasty heroin addiction, I feel as though I can take Dear Leader Ikeler’s synthesis and put it into revolutionary practice. And I have done just that. I have taken the original text of Bill Wilson’s Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, and transformed it into a post-modern classic of Marxian community organizing.
No easy feat finding a blueprint for class struggle in the words a stodgy, alcoholic patrician and wall street hack from the 1930s, but with Marxism, anything is possible. Don’t forget that.
The following is to be read at the beginning of every meeting of my new 12 step praxis for revolution: Proletarians Anonymous. Consider this the first meeting. You’re welcome.
Proletarians Anonymous: How It Works
Rarely have we seen a revolutionist fail that has thoroughly followed our path. Those who do not revolt are workers who cannot or will not completely give themselves to dialectical materialism, usually lumpens who are constitutionally incapable of losing their chains. There are such counter-revolutionaries. They are not at fault; they seem to have been born reactionaries. They are naturally incapable of grasping and developing a manner of living which demands reading all three volumes of Das Kapital in the original German. Their chances of gulag are higher than average. There are those, too, who suffer from false consciousness, individualism, and commodity fetishism, but many of them do revolt if they have the capacity to make it through the entire Zizek-Peterson debate (all three hours).
Remember that we deal with Capitalism — rapacious, merciless, vampiric! Without help it is too much for us. But there is One who has all power — that One is Marx. May you find Him now!
Social democrats have availed us nothing. We stood at the barricades. We sang the Internationale with complete abandon.
Here are the steps we took, which are demanded as a program of revolution:
1. We admitted we were powerless over Capitalism — that our labor had become alienated.
2. Came to believe that a praxis greater than neoliberalism could advance us to fully automated luxury gay space communism.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of Marx as we understood Him (Trotskyists will be shot tho — I am not a Trotskyist).
4. Made a searching and fearless Hegelian analysis of the unique historical circumstances that allowed Capitalism to emerge in the southren countryside of early-modern England through the primitive accumulation of real estate.
5. Admitted to Bernie, Alexandria, to ourselves, and to our local DSA branch that Capitalism was not a historical inevitability and is most definitely not the End of History.
6. Were entirely ready to have an asthmatic Che impersonator train the Antifa super soldiers.
7. Humbly asked Elizabeth “I’m a capitalist to my bones” Warren to become a socialist. (WHAT THE FUCK, LIZ, GET WITH IT!)
8. Made a list of all corporations/fascists that had harmed us, and became willing to demand restitution from them all.
9. Made those fuckers pay by Any. Means. Necessary. Except when to do so would get us Zucc’d.
10. Continued to check our privilege and when we engaged in microaggressions promptly admitted it on all social media platforms.
11. Sought through continuous study of all three volumes of Das Kapital in the original German to improve our conscious contact with Marx as we understood Him (Trotskyists get the icepick tho — I AM NOT A TROTSKYIST).
12. Having had a class awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to other proletarians, and to practice this praxis in all our affairs.
Alright, that’s it, now you know — go forth and insurrect!