Rev Left Radio - MAGA Communism: Opportunism, Social Chauvinism, and Terminally Online Tailism

Episode Date: September 30, 2022

Alyson and Breht reflect on the recent online stir caused by "MAGA Communism" and analyze the ideas of some of its main represenatives and proponents.   Together they discuss and clarify core marxist concepts, criticize and explain the specific errors being made, shine light on its intellectual influences, explore its connection to previous iterations in american history (like the movement that formed around Lyndon LaRouche), laugh at the extremely predictable response they recieved from Trump supporters, and then they reflect on what it all means and what we can learn from it.  Support Red Menace on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/TheRedMenace Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio

Hello, and welcome to Red Menace. My name is Allison. I am here with my co-host, Brett. And today we have another episode that is not strictly speaking on any specific text. We decided to push our episode on Conquest of Bread back to. next month because we felt that there was something worse addressing this month, which is unfortunately the trending hashtag that I'm sure all of our listeners have seen of Maga Communism and all of the kind of discourse that has sprouted out around that. So we decided that, you know, this is probably worth taking an episode to talk about. We'll get a little bit into why we think that's the case, but that's what we're going to be talking about today. So Brett, I'll hand it over to you and maybe you can give our listeners a sense of why this is something we think is worth intervening in? Sure, yeah, because I think this is important. I think both Allison and I

had an initial impulse to just, you know, ignore it. It's so absurd on its face, especially to people who, you know, have been in the game for a very long time like Allison and I. And, you know, it's like this idea of like, don't even give them steam and momentum. But on the other hand, we both kind of agreed that when some, when a movement arises and it manifests and it's dressing itself in the garb of our tradition of Marxism while pushing anti-Marxist, anti-communist, chauvinistic reactionary elements, we have a special obligation to speak up. So if this is just a random right-wing thing or like it popped up in the anarchist community and the other anarchists had to deal with it, you know, that's one thing. We probably would ignore it. But because it's

claiming to speak, not only in the name of Marxism, but in the name of Marxism, Leninism, and it's claiming to be the, I mean, in so many ways, the real true interpretation of Marxism and everybody else who disagrees with them is a fraud or an idiot or some combination thereof. We thought it would be very helpful and it's our obligation to do it and we can clarify core Marxist concepts in the meantime. And I also wanted to say that a lot of this stuff could be disorienting to newer people, people on the baby left, people that are just looking for political alternatives. You know, you could see why especially certain people with huge egos speaking very confidently about shit they kind of only half understand in the best case could still be appealing and

convincing to people who are disillusioned with the normal processes of politics are looking for an alternative. And, you know, if you are somebody that is indoctrinated in the reactionary, settler chauvinist, you know, nationalist, you know, white supremacist. culture of the United States, and you're looking for an alternative, this can be appealing because it combines the sort of revolutionary aesthetic and impulse with elements of ideology that, you know, for certain people conditioned in American society, is not hard at all to digest. And it actually doesn't require you to do the, you know, deeper work, I think, that really principled

people who want to learn something like Marxism have to do over time, which is, you know, really analyze yourself, purge yourself of your own liberalism, deepen your understanding of geopolitics, of history, of theory, et cetera. And this can kind of be a short cut. It's like, oh, this charismatic, very confident person online is, you know, sort of pulling from this eclectic mix of high intellectual sounding theory and making these arguments. It can bulldoze somebody over and win somebody over.

And so we felt we have an obligation because it's pretending to be Marxism to do this. We have an obligation to younger folks coming up who want to not be swayed in the wrong direction. And I think it'll give us an opportunity to clarify some core Marxist concepts that even if you're coming to this episode ready to laugh and dunk on these clowns, you could still walk away with like, oh, that's a good point about Marx. And this is what we actually believe about what works and what doesn't, et cetera. So for a slew of reasons, we felt, you know, against our better judgment that it's worth diving into and correcting this shit and combating. it and I've seen some other comrades do the same on some other shows as well and I've seen that and I was like that's that's the correct thing to do we must combat it and so that's kind of what we're going to do we're going to kind of explain it we're going to put we're going to use

their own words to show what they actually believe in we're going to show why it's a failure we're going to show why this is not new and then we're going to sort of ponder where this came from is this an organic thing is this a brainchild of two egomaniacs on the coast is this op, you know, or is this Larushian front, right? There's a bunch of different options. We're going to run through them at the end and see what we come up with. But I also wanted to mention as well, before

we get into it, around the time that this episode comes out, maybe not exactly the same day or whatever, but around the time we're also releasing, I think, a two-hour episode on Lyndon LaRouche on Rev Left Radio. And that is just a deep dive specifically into LaRouche, who he

was historically, what his movement was. And once you study and understand, Lyndon LaRouche and his little movement. This maga communism, Pat Sock, Mecca, tanky bullshit, you really see that this is nothing new. That so much of this stuff is a complete reiteration of previously utterly failed attempts to kind of take a surface-level Marxism

or revolutionary politic and marry it to increasingly reactionary chauvinist and just straight up non-Marxist ideas. So, you know, me and Allison are going to kind of do some of the theoretical work here, but then over at Rev Left, you'll be able to learn some of the history. And those two things together will really give you a really good idea of where this stuff comes from, and I think, inoculate a lot of people from its various temptations. We can go ahead and try to find this, which I think is going to be difficult, but we will

take our best shot at giving a definition of what Maga Communism is. So I guess up front, right, the context in which we're intervening here is that Maga Communism became a trending hashtag on Twitter, right? It started trending largely because of Jackson Hinkle, who is kind of a online media personality, and I guess he would frame himself as an organizer. He's been involved with a couple different groups, including Movement for a People's Party. He kind of started to get some attention online with his declaration so that he was a Marxist-Leninist and a American patriot a while back. And he recently has been pushing this hashtag, the other person who's been pushing this idea as well. Under the term Maga communism is Haas from Infrared, who also has

kind of pushed this patriotic angle in the past, along with a couple of other different things. As you noted, Brett, this idea has gone under a lot of different names, right? So the most recent one before Maga Communism, they were calling themselves Mecha Tinkies. Patriotic socialism is a term we've used and other people have used, although they've all pretty strongly rejected that term because of their argument that socialism is inherently patriotic. So they say that it is a redundant kind of non-distinction. But all of these things have kind of gotten at the same idea. And again, it's kind of hard to define what this idea is because it's almost a meme in a lot of ways, right? Different people are making all these threads saying, this is what Maga Communism is.

I've seen like seven different threads that are multiple tweets long of what it is that all have contradictory things. And that is kind of a hard thing to respond to. But I think we can trace out a couple of features that definitely are unifying here. So one is kind of the strategic idea that the communist movement, not the left, because they do try to distinguish themselves from the left, but that communism needs to primarily rally Maga supporting disenfranchised Republican voters, more or less, and that in doing so, it is important for communists to reject liberalism and embrace kind of a set of right-wing

social positions in terms of being anti-Black Lives Matter, anti-antifa, anti-trans, and anti-LGB, generally, and kind of bring these into a communist context in order to appeal to these people. So that would be one aspect of what's going on there. How much they are anti-trans and anti-LGBQ, they'll contest. Again, there are people who align themselves under this label who would say, oh, we just kind of have a live-and-let-live approach to it. there are people who consider themselves traditionalists who align themselves under it. So there's a broad range here, but these kind of more chauvinist right-wing social attitudes being

grafted into what they are calling a communist program is sort of one aspect of it. Anything else you want to kind of dive into there, Brett? Yeah, you know, whatever they end up saying any individual says about being anti-trans and anti-LGBQ, you can just see the rhetoric in these spaces. You can see some of the talking heads, you know, really just get into it on Twitter, using just completely reactionary language about trans people. In some in some corners of this movement, quote unquote movement, there's this idea that the LGBTQ movement in general is a sciop or is, you know, it has a siop element to it and is not just regular people that have been

LGBTQ, you know, just asking for rights and basic human dignity after being deprived of it for millennia. It's like, so there's that conspiratorial aspect. I've seen some of them, even some of their talking heads who was who when i say that i mostly mean a hinklin haz but a few others talk about like patriarchal communism really really uh play up basic machismo um you know like as this element of what they're trying to do here and again you know for somebody like me i'm very sensitive to like very ego driven people very ego driven personality movements and i i see a lot of ego and overconfidence. It's like a Dunning Kruger effect with a lot of these people. There's a sense that a lot of them, you know, are pretty new to these ideas, have not put

in the work of actually understanding, you know, the complexities of Marxist theory and history and are just kind of circulating and gravitationally orbiting these personalities. And they're very egoic and they lack all humility. And that's always going to be eternal. off because I specifically think, especially when we're in this realm of Marxism and revolution, that this is complicated stuff. There's a lot of history here. I've always made the argument that, you know, knowledge and analysis on the, on the communist left is done communally and in unison with actual practice on the ground. There's a lot of anti-organizer and anti-organizing rhetoric, you know, coming out of this formation as well. Some of them taking

outright pride in not organizing others, as you say, maybe Hinkle playing into the idea that he organizes because he's been associated with a few different organizations. But, you know, it is sort of just like any movement or formation or even online trend, there's going to be a spectrum within it of different beliefs. So you can't say every single person believes this exact thing. But you can get certain ideas. You can judge by the way that they talk to each other. You can judge by some of their strategies, how they interact with other people on the the left, et cetera, and you can pull some basic currents out of that. And I think everything that we've said so far can be fairly laid at their feet. These are people who actively say a lot of

this stuff. And, you know, a lot of, like you said earlier, anti-Antifa and anti-BLM, you know, which we'll get into a little bit when we got some screenshots of them going over to truth social and trying to convince MAGA people, which I want to spend some time on because I have a lot to say there. But I think, I think that's the basic definition. It is really this attempt to take social conservative values and even outright reaction and chauvinism and not only marry it to communism, but to say this is what communism actually really is. And in the process, of course, you alienate huge swaths of people that could form the base of socialist support, which we'll get into in a bit as well. But I think that really nails down what it is.

And also, last thing I want to say is like there's some talk about, you know, is this the same thing is patriotic socialism? Is this an outgrowth? In Haas's infrared, you know, the rise of Maga-Communism manifesto he just released, he says the most fundamental purport of Maga-Communism, which he says is falsely labeled as patriotic socialism, which connotes institutional loyalty to the state. Right. So you say, like, I don't like the term, but the basic people are the same. And whether or not they are exactly the same or there's a slight split happening there, It's this maga-communism bullshit, it's the logical extension of the core right-word shifts that were already present within patriotic socialism and many of these same people claiming that label at first and then, you know, for various reasons saying that's actually not specifically right for us. We're going to do this other label, but it's the same fucking group of people.

So I would just say that, you know, don't really see these as two distinct tendencies or whatever. This is really the same group of people doing the same fucking sort of shit. Yeah, and I think the one thing that is just, like, really worth emphasizing is that, like, ultimately this thing that we're talking about is fundamentally eclectic in a way that I think you have to wrestle with and think about. One thing that, like, stands out to me is, like, you said, Brett, there's this, like, pro-patriarchy stance, right? Which even beyond these two figures, the other big person I think of is, like, Samira Khan, who recently tweeted out some stuff about, like, all women fundamentally need to be protected by men, and it's the job of men to be protectors. this shouldn't be controversial. Like this kind of like horrifying, crass reactionary pro-patriarchy, which is kind of like framed as traditionalism in a lot of ways, right, and a return to tradition.

And this is also kind of like eclectically mixed in there with taking Marxist criticism of the sex industry as well and kind of articulating that criticism in a more socially conservative way often. And also at the same time, though, this like explicit defense of like pro-patriacist. article pro sex industry figures. So Jackson Hinkle tweeted out that Andrew Tate was banned from the internet for being a defender of traditional gender norms, as if Andrew Tate isn't an accused sex trafficker and a pimp, right? Which is fundamentally in contradiction with those ideas of criticizing the sex industry from a communist perspective. So there's this eclecticism here that is

really fundamental to what we're talking about that makes these kind of weird contradictions almost inevitable and hard to pin down. But the important thing I think you're right is that this is the same group that we've all been talking about for like over a year now, right? Like it's the same set of people. Whatever ideas and labels and sort of individual ideas they're shifting between, it is still a concrete phenomenon, even if it is really, really eclectic at its core. Absolutely. And one other point, because we use this term reactionary quite a bit. And, you know, sometimes chauvinism, conservatism, reactionaryism, fascism even are sometimes used synonymously. But I think the core distinguishing factor of reaction is that the politics, at least a huge chunk

of it, is structured around reacting to social, economic, political progress. So in the last several years, we've seen, for example, as one example, huge strides in the LGBTQ movement and social acceptance and gaining some basic rights. At first, it was like, you know, in the early odds, respectable, you know, gay couples who want to get married. And then, you know, as that became accepted and more people are saying except you know this and this and this and this and so that's a natural organic social movement of people saying this is who I am and I just want to be treated like a regular human being with basic dignity and equal rights and what reactionaries do what makes somebody a reactionary is that their politics are then congealed around reacting to that shred

of progress to to violently in many cases or vociferously acting against it pushing back against it their politics are almost not like here's our vision of the future It is, I hate this Black Lives Matter shit. I hate this LGBTQ shit. I hate these union leaders getting up at E and talking about communist shit. So throughout history, reactions can come from conservatives. They can come from fascists. They can come from both.

But I also want to say, I think you can be a conservative without being a reactionary. Because a conservative in the philosophical sense, the Burkean sense, is basically a philosophical liberal that just emphasizes liberty over equality and wants to kind of, you know, be the the guy who pushes the brake as opposed to the, you know, the progressive liberals who push the gas pedal. And you say, I'm not against progress. I'm not, I'm not against moving in these general directions. But, you know, for all these various reasons, we should, we should be slow about this. We should do it in a balanced way. Whatever, right? There's an argument for like a conservatism that doesn't have to be reactionary. But in many instances, especially in a settler colonial empire,

you know, conservatism dips very quickly and easily into reaction. So I just wanted to make that clear because we'll be using terms like reactionary throughout and I just want to say like I'm using that term consciously I'm not just throwing it out there right yeah and I think that distinction's important to you because on the one hand I think you're correct right like much of conservatism in the United States is still liberal fundamentally right like especially if we think about like the Bush era kind of neo-conservatism that was still very much a liberal conservatism right in most of its outlook and when we're talking about reactionary we're talking about something a little bit different than that and one of the things that's interesting about that label is

that's part of why I use it intentionally, is that reaction can also be reaction against aspects of capitalism, right? Because one of the things from a Marxist perspective is that capitalism was a revolutionary movement itself, right? Capitalism was a revolutionary transformation of society by the bourgeoisie who overthrew previously existing systems of power and economic orders of feudalism. And there were quite a lot of philosophical reactionaries throughout history who were critical of capitalism and modernity in ways that sometimes overlap with how Marxists are critical of those things, but who don't want us to progress dialectically past capitalism by resolving its internal contradictions, but want to return to something before it, right? And so that's another reason

that term is important, I think, is that reactionaries can sometimes say things that sound kind of like what we're saying, right? And we need to wrestle with that and think about the distinctions there. Right, absolutely. Two more points up front before we move into this. I just also, I want to say up front that, you know, I don't want to pretend that this is a principal disagreement between genuine Marxists, right? I had a friend. I'm not going to say who it is, you know, a comrade, a good person, somebody who I've worked with in the past, kind of present this disagreement, even taking the right side of the argument, but presenting it like, hey, there's a lot of name calling going on. There's a lot of, you know, basically presenting this is like, you know,

this is a legitimate, you might disagree with it. I disagree with it. But this is a legitimate Marxist formation. They have legitimate ideas. We shouldn't be name calling. We shouldn't be treating these people like their enemies or like their anathema. You know, we should really engage with these arguments, blah, blah, blah. And I just like want to say that I just really disagree with that because I do not think that we are on the same side. This is not analogous to, for example, like left comms and Leninist and Maoist disagreeing about theory, right? Sure, we're all Marxist. We might call each other names and fling shit. But we have disagreements fundamentally rooted in the core philosophy and history and theory of Marxism. And we will refer to that theory and that

tradition in the mode of us debating one another, right? This is an outright reactionary distortion of Marxism and abandonment, I think, ultimately, of communist politics. And this is just perfect Lenin quote that really sums us up. It's been going around in the face of this stuff. But Lenin said, unity is a great thing and a great slogan. But what the workers cause needs, is the unity of Marxists, not unity between Marxists and opponents and distortors of Marxism. So while I'm not a leftcom, I think left comms, you know, have the good ones, have a reasonable rooting in the Marxist tradition. I do not see them necessarily as distortors of Marxism. They are advancing their version of it, their interpretation of it, et cetera. We can have a good faith

debate. This is not Marxism. This is an outright distortion of Marxism, or what I've taken to saying lately is this is not the right wing of Marxist socialism. This is the left and center of the new right. And what is the new right? It's not the alt right. I want to make that clear. The new right is like this recent formation. It's on the American right. It's kind of gaining steam online. And with some candidates like Blake Masters, you know, like Peter Thiel and his whole political project, it's, and it gets into like Kurdish-Yarvin monarchism and weird shit like that. But basically, the core of new right is like let's marry social conservatism and even like political conservative authoritarianism with basically social democratic pro family what would be called left populist economic policy so this is

like we're hardcore right wingers conservative you know social values where we'll even use political authoritarianism to cement those values but what's needed is like a rejection of right wing libertarian free market orthodoxy and like uh you know we should we should promote through through policy see like real Americans having good American families, et cetera, right? And the sort of North Star figure for these folks is like Victor Orban of Hungary. And so I really see this movement, even though it dresses itself up in the garb of the Marxist tradition, as much more the left and center of the new right as opposed to the right wing of Marxism. And I just wanted to kind of say that up front as well. Yeah, I think that's a good point. And I think it's worth connecting the American new right

also with the European new right, which emerged kind of in the post-World War II context, where the far right in a lot of ways had to reconsider how it was going to position itself after the defeat of fascism. And one of the tendencies that kind of occurred in Europe that I think is worth thinking about is what's often called like the revolutionary conservative tendency. So this was a kind of more new right formation in Europe that would draw on people like Evela, people like Schmidt, who are certainly critical of capital and liberalism, right? while also being very much reactionaries and rightists and conservatives in a sense, and who argued for this kind of revolutionary conservative perspective.

So this stuff is not new just because it's now kind of emerging in the U.S. This goes back all the way to sort of fascists reconfiguring their politics in a post-war context. And it's played out across Europe and Eurasia as well with people like, you know, Dugan drawing fairly heavily on some of these figures like Avala and Schmidt as well to kind of create these very eclectic new right philosophies. So I do think it's worth kind of placing this in a continuity with how fascism reconfigured itself post-war. Yeah, and it's kind of funny and timely that this movement, right, pops up right after

we just do our little four-way into reactionary philosophers. Because you can see, I mean, just outright in Haas' writings, it's just a fuck ton of Schmidt, for example. And these figures are like right there in the writing. And it's like, oh, yeah, we just did an entire episode on this. I just read an entire, you know, text from Schmidt. this is exactly Schmidian shit, you know? So I think it's funny that we did that and we'll get into it a little bit more, but definitely

if you read Haas's writings and you go listen to our episode on Schmidt, you'll begin connecting the dots real fucking quick. And if you listen to that episode that's coming out on Rev Left on LaRouche, those dots will be connected even quicker. Yeah, I guess one way we can move forward before we get into like the theoretical points of clarification is maybe you can save like Hinkle's list of demands till the end. We can kind of dunk on that at the end here. Right. But I actually do one up front actually. I think it's useful to do this up front is to read directly from

Haas's little manifesto he put out on the rise of maga-communism. So this comes out right as all this shit's happening this week. This is like it's supposed to be the theoretical articulation of what maga-communism is. And when you go and ask, you'll get a lot of different answers and distortions depending on who you're asking. But I'm like, let's just, and then they'll often say as well like you never actually engage with the arguments you're all just emotional leftoids who are just you know based on your feelings and you guys just don't like you know the aesthetics of patriotic socialism or magac communism or you have a personal grievance against haz or you're jealous of his popularity and so you're not actually engaging with his arguments blah blah blah so i just wanted

to read his conclusion of this long-ass motherfucking screed he put out defending maga-communism in his own words so you cannot say that we're not taking this shit seriously in fact he starts this out by saying beautifully, for our part, the communists disdained to conceal their aims. So he's telling us we're not concealing, we're not deceiving, I'm telling you right here what we believe. And let me just read it for you. So everybody can hear it in his own words. For our part, the communists disdained to conceal their aims. We plainly believe that the MAGA movement requires its own political party. While we remain sympathetic to Republican candidates genuinely aligned against the establishment, the majority of the Republican Party remains firmly

entrenched in the hands of the same globalist ruling class. We hope the great leaders and figures of the MAGA movement, yes, the great leaders and figures of the MAGA movement will endure the coming realignment and join forces with all the genuine partisan forces into forming a real working class third party. Trump, for his part, while having been a real political outsider, is being blackmailed, is embroiled in a politically motivated. lawsuit and is being targeted by the FBI. Whatever happens to Trump, the spirit of the MAGA movement must survive because 2016 was only the beginning.

We believe the MAGA movement has the potential to be turbocharged into a revolutionary movement by, of, and for the American working class. There is no other choice for us American MAGA communists. And he goes on. Last thing I'll read. We will go where the MAGA movement goes because we sincerely believe in its truest aspirations. It is the duty of American communists to stand by the people and become genuine fighters for the people, regardless of how well their ideological message is at first received.

We have no other belief than belief in the power of the American working class. We will win over the MAGA movement, or we will become politically extinct. There's nowhere else for us to go. We have no interest in winning the support of insulated and self-content leftist scum, who are the prostitutes of the bourgeoisie. Our faith lies with the people alone. And so maga communists now make it their goal to go down to the people and fight alongside them in a common partisan struggle against the ruling class. So he disdains to hide his views and those are his views. You know, you could frame it as basic entreatism into the Republican Party, but he says, you know, we just take the MAGA party

or MAGA movement and turn it into a third party, right? So first of all, where's the revolutionary Marxism. And second of all, Maga is not a grassroots, you know, like working class movement. It is a fucking campaign slogan taken from Ronald Reagan and applied to Trump's campaign. And like the January 6th riots, you know, weren't about the American ruling class being fucked over by capitalists. In fact, they were carrying signs in that says communism is the real pandemic. Communism is the real disease. And their goal was to get Trump another fucking term. This is not revolutionary. This is not Marxism. This has nothing to do with communism, socialism, revolutionary working class politics whatsoever. And the fact that he outright says we will go where the MAGA movement goes. And if we fail to radicalize the MAGA movement into being MAGA communists, then we will go politically extinct. And they will. And I just wanted to say that, like every former iteration of this exact fucking strategy, whether in Germany, America, wherever, it always falls inevitably. and ultimately into the dustbin of history.

And that's where they belong, and that's where they'll soon be. But in the meantime, we can use this as a way to clarify our politics against the politics of reaction and chauvinism. Absolutely. Want to go ahead and jump kind of into the analysis of what the fuck is going wrong here? Sure. Yeah, you can start us off there. I've talked enough so far. Yeah, I'll start us off.

So a couple things that I think are worth wrestling with that are happening here. Obviously, there's a lot in that quote that Brett just read. and we'll get into that in some detail. But there's a few things that stood out to me when reading through Haas' piece, looking through what Hinkle has put out. And the first one is like this fundamental utopianism to this whole thing. And really, I would place this within the context of what has historically been called utopian socialism. And a big part of that is that these people are just kind of fucking trying to just will a new political movement into being in a really bizarre way, right?

One of the really crucial things about Marxism is that it is a scientific approach to socialism, which my God, have Brett and I really gotten into it in the past about what that means. But if nothing else, I think we can tie it to this idea that Marx puts forth time and time again, that communism is not just a condition which is imposed on reality, but the seeds of communism exist already within capitalism, right? And so Marx and Ingalls talk about this in various ways. the contradiction that Engels focuses in on very, very well is the contradiction between socialized labor and private ownership, right? Capitalism has socialized labor, but kept ownership in

private hands, which means that socialized labor is a part of a contradiction that if it is brought forth into a political force can socialize society and overthrow private ownership and create communism. So again, the seed of communism already exists within capitalist society. And so communist organizers trying to come up with strategies, trying to come up with an understanding of how to go about achieving this, trying to answer Lenin's famous question of what is to be done, have to start by looking at the conditions that exist within capitalism and determining who can be mobilized through, according to Lenin, a Vanguard party in order to bring these contradictions to the forefront and bring about a revolutionary struggle. And this is what makes Marxism Marxism. It's the scientificity. But, you know, there's not really something like that built into what we're seeing here with the Maga communist. There's not a close analysis of why the Maga movement expresses a fundamental material contradiction within capitalism. There's broad populist talking points about rule versus city and about the sort of national versus the global. But none of this

is tied into production itself, the means of production and the relation of these groups to the modes of production, which is what makes Marxism a scientific perspective grounded in actual political economics. Here instead, we basically get repackaged culture war of different values of the globalists and the anti-globalists or the rule versus the urban with no actual material analysis of what's at play. And you get this utopian attempt to create a whole new ideology and a whole new kind of idea just out of thin air. And this is precisely what Marxism has critiqued over and over and over again as a utopian approach to socialism. And it leads to fundamental revisions within socialism to the point where you get to hinkle on fucking one American

news network saying we're not opposed to private property as communist. And how could he not end up there? Because he doesn't start with the fundamental contradiction, which occurs at the level of production and ownership. He starts at a cultural contradiction and then creates some utopian ideal from there. And so one of the really big ways that we can distinguish this from Marxism is utopianism versus scientificity and a focus on production and property versus a focus on cultural values. And I think that is the first line of attack that's really worth putting forward to show why this is not fucking Marxism. Absolutely. And Marxists and communists were not against globalists as such, nor, and because after Hinkle said, you know, communism has nothing to do with

the abolition of private property. What we do is we fight the globalists like George Soros. So he's playing into right wing, you know, anti-Jewish, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories for sure, but also he's obscuring capitalism, imperialism with terms like globalism. No, we're not against globalism. What is globalism? Well, globalism in the neoliberal era is like the globalization of supply chains and of the neoliberal project more broadly, a privatization of austerity, politics, et cetera. But globalization is a much broader sort of thing that We're moving in that direction technologically, communicatively. You know, for millennia, humans have been globalizing.

So this is a term that is obviously a right-wing buzzword. That means certain things to right-wing people. But what it does, especially in conjunction with saying this is nothing to do with abolishing private property, is it obscures and mystifies the actual enemy and the actual focus of our ire, which is capitalism, imperialism, as a structural system. not even really in the true Marxist sense we don't even like specifically hate capitalists and imperialists as individuals right because we understand they're structurally constituted such that globalists is even worse than saying globalism because we're structuralists we're talking about historical structures we're not talking about individuals and their plots right so so so really understand when they use terms like these these right wing buzzwords they're not only pandering in this pathetic fucking debasing way to the right. They're also actively obscuring capitalism and imperialism, which is what fascist and reactionaries do. Take your eye off the actual

ball of who has wealth and power in this society and shift it towards anything else, anything else. And globalist and George Soros, you know, might as well be the thing that he chooses on Tucker Carlson's TV show. Yeah, I think one thing I want to add there to you is to be generous to them, perhaps, for a second, and show why even in the generous read, this is incorrect, is that sometimes if you push them on globalism, right, they will tie it to more than just kind of cultural things. They will tie it, like you said, to globalization. And at times when they're trying to sound more Marxist, they'll tie it to finance capital, right? And they'll be willing to acknowledge that globalism is this kind of finance capital, international institution

of banking and lending and loaning, securities exchanges, all of these things. And one thing I think is very important here, though, right, is to say we are attacking finance capitalism, but we want to leave capitalism on the domestic and national level and leave private property intact is to fundamentally miss what finance capitalism is and why imperialism is not, you know, separate from capitalism. It's the fucking highest stage of capitalism, right? So if you want to go back and reread some of your linen and go back to imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism. Lenin does draw a distinction, right, between the finance capitalists and the national bourgeoisie. But part of his point is that capitalism trends inherently towards the

monopoly of finance capitalism, right? That's not a fluke that happened. That is what capitalism progresses towards. And that monopoly capitalism and finance capitalism is a refinement of that national capitalism by which a nation then moves on to the international stage. So the idea that we can fight finance capital while supporting the national bourgeoisie within the imperial core or supporting property relations is a fundamental deviation itself that misunderstands how finance capitalism and monopoly capital are a necessary structural outgrowth of capitalism more broadly. Exactly right. And that's, you said something about, you know, if pushed by Marxists, they'll shift their language to Marxist language and try to, you know, adapt in that way. And that,

I think is a crucial point of opportunism because when they're pushed by Marxist, when they know they're talking to Marxist then they'll shape their language if they're able to, if they have the theoretical depth to do it. They will half-ass shape their language into Marxist jargon. But when they're pushed by conservatives, they go on Tucker

Carlson, what do they do? They adapt their language to that audience, jettison, core values and traditions and, you know, basic theoretical foundations in the meantime. And this is what opportunism does. It's a chameleon that will take on different shapes and forms based on what's opportunistically convenient or available to them. And if somebody like Hinkle, he doesn't want a revolution, he wants a career.

You know, he likes getting dressed up in his little business casual attire from his little, you know, rich neighborhood he lives in and goes on shows like Tucker Carlson has his little profile rising and he'll do whatever to whatever audience will take him. And if you're going to be a grifter or an opportunist, it's really good to just tail right because there's a lot of money. and a lot of fame and a lot of, you know, stardom and followers to be had on that side of things. It's a much more dreary, toiling existence to be a principled Marxist, no matter where the broader cultural movement is. And these people really do get battered around by the cultural wind shifts.

Now we're in a time of heightened reaction. So you see Marxists, quote unquote Marxists, tacking towards social reaction. What did Lenin say? All the social chauvinists are now Marxists. are now Marxists. Don't laugh. Because they are buffeted by the winds of what's popular, what will get you money, but we'll get you attention. And the moment those wind shifts change, direction, they'll just move in that direction. And I think that's really, it's really important to see how opportunism plays out on this level. And then the other thing is, you know, for somebody

like Hinkle, if you ever want to get serious about learning Marxism, you know, Allison and I've been doing this since you were voting Democrat and wearing Bernie pins, you know, you could just, listen to our back catalog and learn a lot of stuff, bud, you might actually, you might actually level up a little bit intellectually. But, you know, what I really do believe is all these motherfuckers will be Republicans in five years. All these motherfuckers will be on the new ride or some version of reactionary. You know, the moment, and we'll get into them trying to go on and convince maggots about Marxism, but the moment, you know, things change or it's like, yeah, Marxism no longer, you know, fun to play with. They'll move on and in long run they'll be voting

Republican straight tickets, you know, when they're when they're 45 years old. So that's a prediction I'll, I'll tack my reputation to. Absolutely. Yeah, we can go ahead and talk about what you just gestured towards there a little bit, which is that the fucking MAGA people aren't into this shit, right? I think in a way that's worth talking about a little bit. One of the interesting things that people who monitor this have started to note is that a lot of these people have been going on truth social to try to convince people, you know, of this Maga communism idea. And super unsurprisingly, like actually remarkably unsurprisingly, they've been met with kind of standard better dead than red kind of bullshit that you see on the U.S. right.

People are not interested in communism, even if it's only communism in name, on the sort of Maga right because anti-communism is pretty fundamental to that. And again, this kind of gets into like the ahistoricalness of this. Haas tries to put forward this argument that anti-communism is kind of like coincidental to the American right and that, you know, he calls it almost quaint in his essay as an expression of like an organic Americanism. But if we're being honest with it, anti-communism in the American right is a specifically constructed thing that has had an exceptional amount of funding put into it. And the American right has been shaped through anti-communism and emerged through it. So much of the right today and the anti-globalist right that

these people want to attack themselves are products of the John Birch Society. Alex Jones, for example, who did a lot to really popularize the idea of globalism versus nationalism, the language that these people tell. His father was a John Bircher. He cites John Birch literature and John Birch writers on his show. He has had the son of a major John Birch person on his show multiple times. these anti-communist almost conspiracy organizations have been built into this version of the so-called dissident right from the very beginning. So it shouldn't surprise us that when people calling themselves communists are trying to pull these people into their coalition, these people are going to be very opposed to it because anti-communism is not incidental. It's not just a quaint, silly mistake of the American right.

It's fundamental to its historical construction. Yes, yes, absolutely. And if you want to go, like this is just, it was so funny to see. online on Twitter. I think I retweeted it as well. There's like these screenshots of these Maga-Communists going on to truth socially, you know, Donald Trump's social media site and just fucking, I mean, debasing themselves to Trump reactionaries to try to get them to like them, right? He's like, literally one of them was like, please, sir, you know, I'm one of you, like BLM and Antifa, are the real fascists? You know, like this, this like groveling, like,

please like us please accept us you know i'll say a racial slur if if that's what you want for me like this sort of debasing is just so fucking pathetic and what happened the right wingers all of them in there were like fuck you we'll kill you like we'll fucking shoot you you pelosi democrat communist kenyan you know whatever the fuck and it's just it's just so hilarious it's so fucking pathetic i mean have some goddamn self-respect to go in there and just grovel for people that fucking hate you. And so that's the contradiction that I think will be worked out in them ultimately just like dropping the communist part because, you know, there's just no gain.

There's no traction to be gained by going into these ideologically committed anti-communist spaces and trying to say, we're marrying MAGA and communism together. You're just a fucking joke to them and you're a fucking joke to us. And that's, I think, the deep irony because, you know, they want to unite Marxist and MAGA. Well, they did, but only in our shared hatred and relentless mockery. of them so they did what they wanted but in the absolute wrong way that they expected it too um so so i just thought that was um it was really really revealing and and when they're on those pages and they're talking to them you can just see the hardcore reactionary elements come out i mean

calling black lives matter you know the real fascists black lives matter was the largest protest in american history after a slew of police officers caught on cape murdering Unarmed black people over and over and over and over and over again. And then you're on your knees in truth social forums talking about them being fascist, you fucking weasels, man. It was fucking absurd. But that's who we're dealing with. And then just to kind of shift away from mockery into theoretical points of clarification, this is what we mean by tailing the reactionary, right? You could like, you could tail liberals.

You could tail the intermediate, right? You're supposed to unite the advanced, but you could also tail the backward. obviously we want to isolate the backward because by backward we mean like ideologically committed to being against everything we stand for and so there's there's no real i mean maybe you can get one on one and do the work to win one of them over but as a block as a group of political formation they're backward not because they're ignorant just need to be educated they're backward because they're committed to hating us in our entire plot project and fucking sacrificing their lives to stopping it um and so if you understand that you could see why you know tailing them is absolutely absolutely absurd. I mean, I'll give a, I'll give a tip of the hat to somebody who wants to go on these forums all day and try to like one by one convince these people not to be fascist. Like, you know, that's not work I want to do, but you know, somebody's out there is equipped for it and good for you. But to tail them, this is a prime example of it. So this, this, this tailing the reactionaries is anti-organizing ethos. And the idealism of like, we're pushing our ideas on conservative websites and social media. Like we're making maga-communism trend. And this is how our political movement is gaining force. Well, you know, you don't convince conservatives or anybody by going on their social media sites and spamming it with your ideas. You convince people through struggling alongside them for their material interests. You implement the mass line, you know, you put in actual work.

And instead of tailing those committed ideologically to violent, if ignorant, anti-communism, settler chauvinism and reactionary nationalism, you focus on organizing and education. the apolitical, the poor, the disenfranchised, the colonized, non-fascist working class people, which is the majority of working class people of all ethnicities, all religions, all races, all creeds, and everyone who has a material interest in the struggle against capitalism and imperialism. This often entails just out of pure necessity isolating the backwards, never tailing or courting them. And when you do things like wave the American flag, denigrate LGBTQ people, tell service workers trying to union that they're not even real workers, much less deserve our support, and fetishize the image of working class as being synonymous

with like a white guy in a high-vis vest and a hard hat, you actually actively alienate the international working class and huge swaths of the domestic working class. And you even fail to get support from the specific slice of workers you fetishize as being the only real working class. So on every front this fails. And having said that, though, I'm not arguing. and neither is Allison, that we shouldn't try to reach out and connect with struggle alongside

of or convince conservative white workers of our politics. Like half my family is like conservative working class people. The other half is liberal working class people. All my close friends from growing up are like union guys in the trades. And while they certainly aren't fans of the Democrats or the Republicans or even really have solid political identities, when you ask them about policy, they actually like tend toward the socialist left. And they have no particular like love for the American flag.

they disdain reactionaries like every other decent person. It's just like this really distorted view of who the real working class is. And it is not who you think it is. And to make that synonymous worth of the working class just actually isolates the 80% of working people you could be appealing to in favor of the 20% who fucking hate you and will kill you the first chance they get. And also like just like pure numbers. If you actually look at the people that vote compared to the people that don't vote, you look at the primary and the general election you got about 25 to 28% of Americans at 25% I think in the primary is 28 in the general something like that that actually went out and voted for Trump you know and on top of that this is that this is a quarter of the American population most of them are not necessarily proletarians proper a lot of them as we've talked about in our in our January 6th episode way back a lot of them were like retired admirals business owners you know

labor aristocracy, members of the big bourgeoisie, et cetera. And the overall Trump supporters were actually more wealthy on average than those who voted against Trump and for the Democrats. So just taking this basic facts

about the makeup, the political makeup of our society, this is not a good strategy by any stretch of the imagination. And it actively alienates those who strategically really could be won over and really do have a material interest

in revolution, in socialism, and in the overthrow of capitalism, imperialism. Right. Yeah, a couple points on the reaction, or the tailing reactionaries thing, too. I think there's like two clarifications that are important and then maybe one additional theoretical position. So on the clarification end, and you got it this, right? We're not saying, like, it's hopeless if someone voted for Trump, fuck them, right? That's not what our position is. Obviously, there are people who are truly disenfranchised from politics who did vote for Trump. Some of those people do exist. And those people may be possible to win over to a communist movement.

But the question is, how do you win them over? Is it by just affirming everything they believe? No, because anti-communism is baked into what they believe. If you are going to win them over, it's going to be because, one, they're part of the working class, which is not true of the entirety of the Maga movement, even if it's true, some of it. But one, you'll win the ones who are part of the working class, and you'll win it by organizing fucking power for workers, right?

and demonstrating to those people that there's a materialist interest in organizing across class lines and that those class lines are communist lines. That's how you do it. But incidentally, these people have the exact opposite strategy. They want to shit on labor organizing. They want to shit on organizing on the whole. And then they just want to affirm everything reactionaries already believe, right? So we're not saying there's no hope for the backwards. We're saying the hope for them is to win them over through demonstrating that class struggle has something to offered to them materially, not by affirming their ideology. Exactly.

The second thing that I kind of want to clarify, too, this is one thing that this side makes, you know, a point they make that I think is somewhat correct, which is that it's also wrong to assume that liberals are somehow, you know, on our side and we can just affirm their ideology and win them over too, right? Liberals are also anti-communists pretty fundamentally in the United States and also represent an ideological threat that has to be contested. And once again, they'll be won over when they are. working class and can be brought into coalition across class lines through communist organizing,

right? So it's not that, you know, conservatism is somehow more dangerous than liberalism. Both of these are huge mistakes. Our whole last episode was about the ideological errors of both of those. But we win over people with incorrect politics through struggle, not through affirming their politics. And that's a very, very important thing. The other thing I think is worth putting forward is kind of a theoretical aspect of this that is worth thinking about in relation to Lenin's work and what is to be done is I also think that this kind of tailism that we see here really is something that Lenin critiques very explicitly within this. You know, Lenin talks about what is to be done, how we have people who are kind of focused

on finding like the organic movement and the spontaneous movement of the people. And that rings out so obviously in that Haas quote that you read, right, where he's kind of framing Maga is this organic, spontaneous movement of America and the American people pushing back throughout Haas' essay when he's kind of theorizing what the partisan is and why Maga is the partisan. There's this whole, it's a genuine, spontaneous expression of this partisan struggle. But Leninism disdains spontaneity. It disdains the idea that the organic is enough. Linen's entire critique of those things, and the reason for the Vanguard Party is to create a party

where politics and ideology exist in order to unify the various classes and the struggle against capitalism, not just tailing organic and spontaneous expressions of populism, right? This is like fundamental to Leninism that these people who claim their Marxist-Leninists are, you know, diverging on and actually going in the exact opposite direction, which might be because they're a bunch of fucking weird eclectic Schmidians, not Marxists in the first place. Yeah, exactly. I see in this outline you have a point about the possibility of purging and the

historical analogs. Do you want to touch on that really quick before we move into using? Yeah, I think this is one thing that's worth talking about a little bit, which is that let's say, you know, the possibility that this coalition that these people want comes to exist, right? Because one of the interesting things that I think we really have to wrestle with historically, and this is less true in Germany than it is in Italy, is that the roots of fascism did incorporate leftists within it, right? Unfortunately, it did incorporate anarchists and communists. We did see some kind of people who would consider themselves socialist pulled into German fascism largely under the essay. But even then, that was kind of minimalistic. And when the essay was seen as kind of the more

pro-worker side of the Nazi party, it was still not so explicitly socialist. But in Italy, a really fascinating thing is that a lot of the foundations of Italian fascism were syndicalists and socialists, including Mussolini himself, right, in a way that is kind of hard to wrestle with. And we saw a lot of people who went from being on the communist side of things flipping to the fascist side of things because they believed that fascism had the power to achieve some of the workers' goals that they wanted to. In the context of Italy, the figure that I think really, really embodies this is Edmondo Rosoni, who was actually an IWW organizer, who flipped to the fascist side. And he ended up being in charge of the national syndicate, so kind of the

national labor union under fascism, because he believed that that was the main way to win concessions for the workers. And to his credit, he won a lot of fucking concessions through this strategy. But the interesting thing is that, as happens basically in every fascist movement, is once the fascist state consolidated with its cross-class alliance of some petty bourgeoisie, some workers forces, some lumpen forces, and finance capital, he essentially got purged out of that position. The syndicate was split up because the big bourgeoisie and finance capitalists within the party believed it became too powerful. It was gutted of its support, and he was removed from his position and moved to smaller positions within the state.

So even if, you know, you make this compromise to get some of these, you know, pro-worker, pro-populous demands, fascism has historically always purged that at the time that it solidifies because its cross-class alliance includes the bourgeoisie and the finance capitalist. So I think Rosini is a good example. But even in German fascism and within Nazism, right, you had the essay, which was generally seen as the more populous, lumpin and proletariat side of the party, that pushed, you know, the more Strasser-specific views and these kind of pro-labor views, and they were perched as well in the Night of the Long Knives, right? So even if you manage to achieve some kind of coalition between

the nationalist right and some sort of socialism, this has happened before. And guess who loses in that? The socialists who choose to enter that coalition. History has played itself out pretty fucking clearly here. So even if this is a possibility, I would say, you know, you are setting yourself up to get fucking purged down the line and for this compromise that you've made to really be used to betray you and the workers you deceived along the way. Yes, exactly. And historically, fascism and certain articulations of it and manifestations of it did try to appeal to, you know, the working class in various ways. But when they take over power, it's always, and they're acting like, you know, we're going to be a, we're not overthrowing capitalism, but we're going to be a mediator,

make sure that the real Americans or the real Italians or the real Germans get a fair shot. You know, they'll make this rhetorical moves, but in practice, it is never, ever pro labor. You know, the first people that the Nazis, for example, went after were union leaders and, you know, killed them, socialist, communists. And when they actually put in their economic policies, they are never, regardless of rhetoric, pro working class, much less let the working class take power. It's always like ushered in and they're like, no, we don't need to topple these class. hierarchies. We will make room for everybody, but then in practice, it's just a recapitulation, re-fortification of the capitalist mode of production and the capitalist social relations. It happens every fucking time. This time is not going to be any different. I have a question

for you. The big point, I just wanted to reiterate really quick as you're talking about organizing. I just want to say there's no shortcut or way around the actual hard work of organizing and educating and building a mass base of support. There's not enough Twitter bots in the world you can pay off. There's not enough manifestos in the world you can write that will ever take the place of actually going out and struggling for material gains alongside your neighbors and community members. And this active disdain towards organizers and organizing is absolutely anathema to everything that we believe. And is actually how you get the death of any revolutionary movement is to say, we don't need to go out. And we just need to join January 6th. We don't need to go out

and like organized regular alienated working class people from the electoral system who don't believe that either party represents their interests, which are many, many, many times more multitudinous than these like reactionary ideologically committed right-wingers. It's just, it's just wild. But I have a question sort of out of left field here, and I'm just kind of want to get your take on it, which is what do you think it is? And this might just be as simple as saying they were never Marxist-Leninists, right? But there's certain deviations that various tendencies tend to make.

And you can see it like anarchist, for example. Not all of them, but there's a tendency to the specific deviation of liberalism, which is a right-wing deviation, or the left-wing deviation of like adventurism and subculturism. That's what anarchists have to be on the lookout for. MLMs, when they do deviate, they tend to deviate leftward, right, into adventurism, getting way ahead of the masses, etc. trotskyists have this very interesting historically delineated line of like you know moving towards conservatism but like a lot of the neocons and neocons of our age backing the iraq war for example or ex trotskyists christopher hitchins who went on to to advocate for the war against the dam hussein in iraq started off as a trotskyist and left Marxism after that to become functionally at

least in the in the form of a foreign policy a neo-conservative so we see that these these tendencies tend to happen. Not always, there's principled people in every category here, but when they do deviate, they tend to deviate in these directions. What is it about MLs in particular that these specific kinds of right-wing deviations, tailing the backward, courting chauvinism, over-focusing on the superstructure of liberalism instead of the capitalist base, which gives rise to it, etc. Why is it that it seems to that specific form of deviation, historically and presently, seems to come out of the Marxist-Leninist tradition in general, the non-Trottsky ML position. Do you have any insight or is it just as simple as saying these people were never

ideologically committed and so they were prone to just deviating in any direction that was opportunistically available to them? Yeah, I mean, so a couple things. One, I think that generally, and this is not specific to the ML, but it's important before we get into the specifics is that these deviations often come out of like a kind of hopelessness, I think, right? They come out of losing faith that we can do things the way that they have to be done, losing faith that the masses can be brought into communism in the first place. And historically, if we want to kind of theorize why this is happening right now, one thing I would throw out there, right, is that as huge as the George Floyd uprisings were, one thing that everyone's wrestling with is they didn't

turn into anything from a communist perspective, right? There's not a enduring kind of organizational effort that was able to come out of it, which feels like a huge defeat, right? And I think the other thing that is worth thinking about, too, is that when you're in an era where the dominant party and presidency in the United States, at least, is a liberal party and a liberal president, you are going to see your politics oppositionally to that in a way that is good, but that can cause you to overemphasize anti-liberalism, perhaps. So that might be one part of it. And so there's kind of this defeatism in there that I think causes people to look for other options. And I don't think it's fair to be like, oh, none of these people really believed it in the

first place. Because I think historically, if we look at the people who have jumps ship to the right from the left, a lot of them were committed organizers, right? That has been true. I mean, even the Italian guy I was talking about, right? Lifelong syndicalist who made that jump. And so I think there's a certain defeatism that comes in. There's certain cynicism that comes in that prompts that. And then in Marxism-Leninism in particular, Marxism Lennonism puts forth a strong critique of liberalism, right? Lennon, more than many, many other theorists puts forth a critique of liberalism. That is very strong. comes up, it's most likely going to be an anti-liberal deviation, right? That is the form that it is likely to take and that it can map onto. So I think that's a part of it. And then, you know, the Maoist critique would also say that within Leninism, there's an incompleted Marxism that can only be completed through cultural revolution, through the mass line, through PPW, and these other things. And that absent that Marxism, Leninism, is prone towards these kind of deviations. We can't really get into that whole fucking debate right now. But that is definitely what the Maoist critique also contributes there as a theory to it. But regardless, I think it is a defeatism.

It's a cynicism. And then it's a confusion about what illiberalism is and replacing materialism with just illiberalism is sort of what I think is happening there. Yeah, perfectly said, I think that makes complete sense. And that hopelessness is absolutely a really good thing to make a point out of because that really is, it's hard, you know, to be on the Marxist left in the United States of America. It always has been hard. Right. And it's, it's always a of rather discouraging a political project, but that's what we're committed to. But yes, all across the political spectrum, and we've even seen this in our own time. People just get disillusioned.

They start looking somewhere else. And there's also this element, I think, of social media and online that promotes these sort of like buffet approach to political identities. You know, there's no real, there's nothing you're actually investing and you're not actually accountable to anybody. You're not putting in work anywhere. you're just online and you're projecting a persona and in that context it becomes it becomes much easier to just be like I'm trying on the close of Marxism today I'll be an anarchist tomorrow I'll be a conservative in five years it's like there's there's an element of that too which

kind of tosses all of this up into another layer of just you know people coming into the ostensible movement that aren't ever really committed and I think in in Hinkle's case I would just say he's never really had a firm grasp of Marxism Leninism at all I I think Haas is much more theoretically rooted, although, as you said, eclectic and drawing from reactionary thinkers and this half-digested Marxism that is often used to, like, bludgeon their already favorite target. So, you know, they'll bring up socially necessary labor to say that unionizing Starbuck workers aren't properly proletarian or whatever.

So even their use of Marxism is like a reactionary half-ass use of them to bludgeon people that they see as they're like cultural enemies or whatever. Absolutely. So that's interesting. Yeah, I think you gave a really thoughtful response to that. And again, that's why it's, you know, MLs should have to step up and combat various deviations within their shit. Anarchists have that obligation within their culture and milieu, et cetera. So that's why I think, you know, part of the reason we're doing this.

Although, you know, you and I, I think we tail the line between ML and MLM. But insofar as we are ML or give rise to ML theory, it's like this anti-revisionist ML that would some of it, which would later, you know, turn into or be one over to MLM, but regardless, I think it's an interesting take for sure. Do you have anything else to say before we kind of get into this speculative last part? No, honestly, I'm pretty down to just get into that. I think there's some interesting questions here that are worth reflecting on a little bit. Again, we're not going to give any definitive answers here, but there are some questions to be had. Absolutely. So we've talked about the theoretical errors at length. You know, we've talked about what the definition of this movement is, how it manifests, what its strategies are.

We've read from their document, you know, word for word. And so the question arises, and this is a question I think that sometimes frustrates me, right? Because on the Marxist left, because of the history of Cointel Pro and this insane history of these counter-revolutionary attempts to squash Marxism or anybody even resembling socialism or communism, there's this overcompensatory, I think, effect to say like every asshole an idiot is an op, right? And I kind of work against that as like, no, you know, don't underestimate the ability for people just to be weirdos and assholes, especially online. Not everything is an op. But at the same time, you know, this has some interesting characteristics. So I'm just going to give some speculative ideas. One of the ideas is simply that they're opportunistic grifters, that like I said earlier, the cultural wind shift towards reaction.

They find a spot on the, you know, the media outlets where they can kind of drive home this specific weird deviation and get some clout, you know, more or less out of the, out of the thing. So it could just be peer opportunism and, you know, peer griftism or, you know, in the most charitable analysis, like maybe well-intentioned people who've become, you know, diverted or lost their way in some sense. That's the extra charitable version. But the other option is that this could be an op. And let me just articulate that position.

And then, Allison, you might articulate another option or two as well. But I just think, like, you know, we're in an environment where more and more young, young people in particular are fed up with capitalism and a majority, and this is unprecedented in American history, a majority of millennials and Gen Z now support socialism, even if many of them are still very confused and ignorant as to what exactly that means. It can sometimes just be, I don't like the way things are set up in this society. Socialism seems to be the alternative and, you know, I like some of the basic surface level values. It could be that. But a lot of people also are digging deeper, seeking out more information. So this is a wild, you know, development in American

history in particular. We just haven't quite seen things like this. And of course, if you're millennial or Gen Z, you have every reason in the world to fucking hate this economic and political system. Okay. So many of these young people spend inordinate amounts of time online, right? Not me, but the people write younger than me are digital natives, their entire life they've grown up online. So that's where they spend their time, much more than the older people. And of course, U.S. intelligence agencies have a huge incentive to get on these platforms and disrupt, confuse, intensify sectarianism, promote reaction, encourage splits, boost egomaniacs pretending to speak in the name of true socialism while actively mystifying and obscuring it, etc. Right? We understand

that there's a huge incentive here for them to do that given, specifically this very consistent polling showing that young people are fed up with this shit. And what does it take to do this? Almost nothing. It's easy. It's incredibly cheap. And it clearly works. If you can get on the social media, you know, platforms and you can get into the discourse and you can use bots or get enough of you active at the same time, you know, there's a small percentage of Americans who are actually even active on these websites, especially something like Twitter. And you can actually, you know, make some gains, if you will, very easily and almost for completely free online. So why wouldn't they do this, you know? I'm not saying they are. It could be as simple as what I said earlier, but there is a very logical reason in this case in particular why someone would advance the op charge. And so, you know, I'm just saying it's very easy. It's cheap. It takes very little.

And it obviously has an impact. So that's the option. So that's the charitable option. That is the opportunist grifter option. And then this is the, this is a sci-op option. Allison, do we have any other options? Yeah. So a couple options. One thing that I'll add to the sci-op one real quick, possibly, is that

the other side of the op is that it could be possible that the leaders in this are totally genuine people, right? I don't think Kinkle is. There's that video of him saying he does everything he does for clout, right? So probably not him. But Haas, I could see as just like a genuine person who believes the shit he's saying. He's certainly willing to write a fucking exceptional amount of words in defense of it. It could be possible that this is a genuine conviction. And also that this could be being promoted by intelligence agencies. And one of the things that I think is worth pointing out is the fucking algorithm on Twitter is not something that is publicly knowable, right? What gets pushed and how it gets pushed is not something we know and we don't know

who's involved in it. And we do know that Twitter has relationships with intelligence agencies who could definitely exert pressure on the company about what gets pushed. And one way that we can see this too is that revolutionary voices lose access to the platforming. One of our comrades who makes great MLM videos has recently noticed that his tweets are getting zero impressions despite having tens of thousands of followers, right? That tells us something about how the structure of this site and its algorithms behind the scene push content. So even if people are genuine, there is still the possibility that there's intelligence work being done here to promote specific ideas. And every left is content creator. Yeah.

Yeah, really quick. Just to double down on that point, there was just a Washington Post article, released titled White House Worry's Over Use of Fake Online Profiles and Psychological Warfare. The Pentagon has ordered a sweeping audit of how it conducts clandestine information warfare after major social media companies identified and took offline fake accounts suspected of being run by the U.S. military in violation of their rules, etc. So I just wanted to say this is a concrete thing that actually does happen, that the mere presence of them online engaging in info work. But go ahead. Yeah. So I think it's possible that people are not directly being directed by

intelligence agencies and also that intelligence agencies can boost these kind of things. So I think that that is worth wrestling with. It could be an op. It could just be grifters. It could, whatever. There's a million options here. We're not saying either one, but it's just worth sort of going through the panoply of options, if you will. Do you, Alison, we're over an hour now. Do you have anything else to say I have one thing to wrap up on if you don't? Yeah, you know, on the op question, the one thing that I think is worth saying is, it doesn't matter at the end of the day which one of these things it is, because the function is the same, right? Like, regardless,

of what is driving this, which aren't things that we should be aware of. I mean, it's fucking naive to pretend intelligence agencies and bad actors don't exist, right? Like, you can't just, you know, throw that possibility out. But regardless, I think you're right, Brett, we are at a time where a lot of people are starting to identify with the label socialism, and where the meaning of that label is very confused, right? Like a lot of these people who are starting to say, yeah, I think I support socialism or capitalism, do not have a developed understanding of what socialism means, which is a time when for Marxism clarity over the meaning of socialism is key, right? Creating that clarity, pulling people into it.

And it's at this exact moment that this bullshit comes along and tells you, well, actually, the meaning of it is fucking following the Maga movement wherever it goes and badly citing Schmidt essays. You know, this is kind of what we're getting here. So regardless of who's pushing it, the function is the same. It's confusing the meaning at a time when we need a materialist assessment of socialism and a way to bring that assessment to people who are now starting in question capitalism

because they're reaching levels of desperation where capitalism is clearly untenable so whatever the intention of this is who fucking knows that is the effect and that is why it needs to be opposed and that's why unfortunately as much as I'd rather

fucking ignore this shit we're doing this episode right yeah exactly and just one more point on the op speculation stuff it's like it is very funny that like Tucker Carlson and OAN would interview Hinkle

And obviously it comes out of Jimmy Door and that whole fucking rabbit hole in and of itself. But do you think Tucker Carlson and OAN would put on a really articulate, committed Marxist who could articulate why capitalism, imperialism keeps down the working class, who can make sense of the ideological cultural war differences and how it ultimately serves capital? Like, of course they wouldn't. So they have on this quote unquote communist to talk about fighting the globalist and George Soros. So whether it's a plot or Hinkle's just a fucking clown, the fact that he actually got to. spot on those shows speaks volumes in and of itself. They're not letting me and Allison on those fucking shows. Not that we would want to go. I mean, I would go on. I would go on and talk my shit, but I would be a principal fucking Marxist, you know. But ultimately, my last

word on this, aside from pushing people to go study the historical precedence of this movement to really get deep clarification on what these things actually do and where they ultimately end up, is just to say that if you're somebody that is committed to mega-communism or God forbid your Haas or Hinkle are one of those people themselves listening to this for whatever reason and you just absolutely hate us. Understand that what ultimately determines who's right in these debates about tendencies and sex and splits and what you believe and what I believe is how it cashes out through the effective advancement of our class. And that has the ultimate word on all of this. One of the reasons that were Marxists, that were Leninists or that were Maoists,

is that we can take history seriously and that we see what actually works and what we mean by actually works is not who can write the prettiest or most interesting manifesto but it's who can actually fucking advance the ball for our class

and against the dictatorship of capital and that is what brings us to Marxism-Leninism and that's what makes us want to study these strategies and these histories and these theories and so if you think that we're wrong

if you think we're stupid fucking leftoids liberals de-class bourgeois phantoms then you can just kick our ass by out organizing us and proving in real struggle that your line works and ours doesn't and once you do that once you achieve revolution through the maga party Allison and I will call it a day well you know we'll hang up our microphones and we'll walk out of here but you know call me crazy I don't exactly think that's how it's going to play out and we have a real world life to live and see how this stuff ultimately plays out and that is I think

just worth stating that the ultimate word on this, the ultimate victory is never had on Twitter or who can come up with the better debate or who has the better points or who's read more marks, it's who's more effective in the class struggle. And so if you really dislike us and you think we're fucking way off base,

prove us wrong by advancing the ball not for MAGA, not for Trump, but for the working class and not just the American one and not just the white working class, the international working class. That's how you win. All right, well.

I think that sums up this episode. Yep. Like I said, we were going to do the Conquest of Bread. We just did our four-way into reaction. We ended that with the three-way fight. We're touching on this episode, actually, as an unexpected extension of that broader foray into Schmidt, Evela, and the three-way fight. But now we are going to move on to our little anarchism series. We're going to do Conquest of Bread next month, and another anarchist after that.

I'm thinking, I don't want to get too far ahead, but I'm thinking we might take the month. of December off. I don't think Allison and I have ever taken a month off and it's obviously a holiday season, et cetera. But at the new year, we're also going to start Angles' family and private property. What is it called? The full title. Origin of the family. Origin of the family and private property. So like we did, Wretched of the Earth with Franz Fanon, it was a longer text. We broke it up into three episodes. We might do something similar. But that's a really interesting text. That's one I have not personally read yet. And I think we could do a lot of really interesting work working through that. So a couple anarchist texts, a break, and then we'll start the new year going back

to angles and diving into those texts. So thank you to everybody who supports us on Patreon. Thank you to everybody who shares our episodes, who finds value in what Allison and I do. And we'll continue to do it as long as we have people that tune out there. Stay safe out there. Love and solitaire. Niggia in my trip and let me know. I thought all that Donald Trump bullshit was a joke. Know what they said when rich niggas go broke. Look, Reagan so cold Obama's so hoke Donald Trump spent his trust

for money on the vote I'm from a place where you probably can't go speaking for some people that you probably ain't no there's pressure built up and it's probably gonna blow and if we say gold then they probably gonna go

you vote Trump then you probably are dope and if you like me then you probably ain't enough and if you've been in jail you can probably still vote we let this nigga win we gonna probably feel broke you bill wars we're gonna probably dickhaw

And if you don't have to do it Fuck down try Fuck you Fuck down try Yeah, nigga fuck Donald try Yeah Yeah, fuck Donald try Yeah

Fuck Donald trial Yeah Fuck Donald try Yeah, nigga fuck Donald try Yeah Yeah fuck down Hold up Hold up I got to say hold up

We're the youth We're the people of this country We got a voice too We will be seen and we will be heard Hold up I fuck with Mexicans Got a plug with Mexicans When a little need a switch

Who I call a Mexican This comedy central ass Nicar can't be the president Hold up Nip Tell the world How you fuck with Mexicans If what be the USA Without Mexicans

And if it's time to team up Shit let's begin White people feel the same As my next to kid Let this nigga win God bless the kids God bless the kids This nigga wicked and weed

When men nip late That's bloods and crips We're on LA Rally We gonna crash your shit Fuck Donald Trial Yeah, nickle, fuck Donald Trial Yeah, nigga, fuck Donald Trial Yeah, yeah, fuck Donald Trial

Yeah, fuck Donald Trial, yeah, fuck Donald Trial, yeah, Nicka, fuck Donald Trial, yeah, yeah, Fuck Donald Trial, yeah