MAGA communism’s strategy has been vindicated by the Trump base’s revolt. The next step is mass organization.
This week, the account Texas Patriot made a tweet that’s gotten almost fourteen million impressions. It said: “F*ck it. If Trump takes us to war, I'm done with him and his administration. I voted for: NO WARS/Cheap gas/No taxes/Cheap groceries/MAHA…What of these things has actually happened? I'm pissed.” The evidence that Trump’s base largely agrees with Texas Patriot on this goes beyond the popularity of his post; surveys are showing that more than half of Trump voters don’t want the U.S. to participate in an Israel/Iran war.
For the communist movement to succeed during this next stage, we will need to connect with the large part of the American masses that’s been having thoughts along these lines. We’ll need to bring in the many people who are getting disillusioned with Trump, and by extension with all aspects of bourgeois political theater. To do this, we’ll have to embrace a strategy that goes beyond social media. Though online messaging is certainly important, every aspect of what we do must further the building of collective organization. Which is the only thing that can truly give the masses power.
This is the next phase of the MAGA Communist movement: a phase where it transcends the particular space from which it originated, and becomes something universal. MAGA communism began during the Biden era, when the imperialism-compatible left was the main threat towards the class struggle. At that stage, it was a top priority to separate Marxism-Leninism from radical liberalism, and that’s of course still important; but since then, the Democratic Party has collapsed in an unprecedented way, and the MAGA populist strategy has taken on a more widespread role in our politics. So the original progenitors of MAGA communism no longer necessarily use that label, as at this point that would be redundant.
Haz Al-Din, chairman of the American Communist Party, has clarified that MAGA communism is not part of the ACP’s program; MAGA communism isn’t the party’s official ideology, its ideology is Marxism-Leninism Unified Tendency. (Meaning a position which upholds all historical forms of existing socialism, while making all the necessary critiques of those forms.) This makes sense from both a theoretical and strategic perspective. Those within our tendency have always been Marxist-Leninists at our core, and advancing Marxist-Leninist theory does not require calling it something new.
MAGA communism’s purpose has been to break ML theory out of the “left-wing communist” circles which used to keep it confined to liberal academia; and orient it around a real project for going into the masses. And now that the conditions have become even riper for doing this than they were a few years ago, we have an opening to bring in great numbers of people. The important thing is that we stick to Marxism-Leninism, and orient our mass work around the Marxist-Leninist goal of institution-building.
All of the statements that MAGA communism’s theoreticians initially made about this movement still apply. It’s still the case that we will go where the MAGA movement goes, as Haz declared three years ago. What’s changed is that we no longer have to operate within the confines which the more challenging past conditions had imposed upon us, meaning that if we navigate this new age properly, we’ll be able to greatly accelerate our progress. We no longer need to address the left, at least not for the most part; the compatible left lost its former relevance along with the Democrats. The U.S. empire’s “progressive” NGO wing does still pose a threat, with its recent projects involving an effort to attack Mexico from a “decolonial” perspective; and we should counter this, but we must keep all of our antagonists in the proper perspective.
We need to pull away from the habit of regularly engaging ACP’s loudest critics, and intensify our focus on the task of organization-building; constructing the popular institutions we need is the pertinent task at this stage, as that’s what the circumstances have come to allow us to do. The end goal was never to win a debate, because communism does not have any end goal; there will never be a moment in history where communists say “we’ve done what we set out to do.” The present stage of organization-building will precede the phase where the masses have overthrown their imperialist dictatorship; but even that moment will be no closer to the “end” than the present moment is, however distant such a scenario feels today.
Embracing communism means coming to have boundless ambition, as communism reveals that the possibilities for building and innovating truly have no limit, And this is what makes communism compatible with the spirit of MAGA. Trump’s supporters came to him in the hope that he would take away the constraints which monopoly finance capital has imposed upon America, and let America live up to its developmental potential. Communism not only provides the route towards this, but doesn’t impose any constraints itself; all it does is identify the contradictions that are presently holding our civilization back. When we truly understand communism, we become able to embody that civilizational potential, which will never truly be reached in full; the potential is endless, because our task as innovators will never be done.
In his clarification of what Marxism truly is, Haz concludes that communism is actually the perfect answer to the oppressive conformity which anti-communists claim it represents:
The significance of Communism intervenes not in the need to create a new community, but on the contrary, to give expression to the precise indeterminateness and contradictions propelling the development of a given community. That is why it doesn’t refer to anything specific. Nothing is more anti-communist than Communism itself. Impotent intellectual wimps like James Lindsay and other rightist idiots cannot even dream of coming close: Communism alone emancipates humanity from its objective ‘communist oppression.’…Communists do not need to ‘abolish’ anything whatsoever - insofar as anything deserves to be abolish, it has already abolished itself in reality: Only in Communism, are the contradictions, changes, and aspirations of a people suspended into a single phenomenal horizon. Communism only gives expression to the ‘real communism’ already inherent in a given civilization or people, it simply NAMES this. Communism just names the excess of development, indeterminacy, and contradiction possessed by every civilization.
The entire argument that the James Lindsay types make relies on the perception of communism as being synonymous with wokeism. With the technocratic, uncompromising, and elitist ideology that’s most outwardly promoted by the Obama wing of our ruling class, and that the Trump wing evidently shares commonality with in important areas. This is ultimately the driving ideology behind the present war drive, because to justify their destructive machinations, the elites present themselves as the leaders of progress. The MAGA base, and the bulk of the broader U.S. masses, recognize how much of a lie this narrative is. Our ruling class has propagated the idea that their monopolist system is communism; but by building the organization that the masses need, we will show the MAGA base what communism really is.
The popular confusion about communism represents a contradiction; but because contradictions have already abolished themselves in reality, the correct response is not to treat the masses as our enemies. They are our allies, and they’ve already gotten behind the mission to free our society from capital’s constraints. Now we must enable them to gain that freedom.
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