This comes from a portion of a paper that is currently being finished up by myself and a colleague that tackles, in essence, what we see as the LARP-like and hauntological nature of substantial portions of the left. This is a line of thinking that I have been wanting to explore for some time now, given the kind of debates and “praxis” that one, including myself, is able to witness popping off constantly across the digital terrain of leftist social networks. Once the whole paper is out for publication I will probably make it available here on this site as a PDF, because fuck the pay-walls behind which so much of academic writing hides.
The late Mark Fisher in his theorization of the current postmodern capitalist condition, drawing on the thought Franco “Bifo” Berardi (2011), mused that we have born witness to the cancellation of the future (2014). Sure technological innovation and the colonization of everyday life by newer and newer technologies has continued—in fact it has been accelerating at an ever greater rate—but as a society and culture, at least for those of us resident within the confines of the First World it would seem, that this innovation is only deployed in an endless loop of pastiched re-iterations of previous cultural forms with only minimal, if any, change or growth between cycles. Borrowing from and extending Fredric Jameson’s work on the postmodern condition (1992), this endless loop of pastiched re-iterations of the past is for Fisher one of the key features of late-capitalism come capitalist realism (2009).
In essence, the charge is that we have unlearned the ability to dream the future and this why Fisher asks, with the subtitle of his principle work on this subject, “is there no alternative” (2009)? And is there? Certainly at the level of inter-state relations and structures of power there can be said to be no meaningful opposition to capitalism from the left, from socialism. The world may be witnessing a slow turning towards a new period of multipolarism, not seen since the end of the Cold War, with the rise of the BRICS countries and the seeming retreat of the EU and NATO blocs on several fronts. But Mr. Putin hardly is trying to revive the corpse of the Soviet Union. If anything, with a more pessimistic eye, we are seeing the future echoes of the late Samir Amin’s postulated world of ‘global apartheid’ and ‘neo-tributary economics’ (2010).
And while much could be made, and is made, by certain sectors of the left concerning the persistence and existence of so-called ‘actually-existing socialism’ one has to fundamentally ask whether a hyper-capitalist dystopia such as the People’s Republic of China that simply deploys a haunted rhetoric of socialism—where the ‘socialist economy’ is really a capitalist economy in the form of state capitalism, with its international reach now uprooting Indigenous peoples from their lands in the Amazon in the name of extractive industry and likewise at one point was seriously considering major investments in the Canadian tar sands, and is attempting now to supplant the West as the primary neocolonial ‘benefactor’ in Africa—actually represents an alternative to the hegemony of capital that we should desire. The same can be asked of the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
Many would also point towards examples from outside of the traditional and orthodox Marxist-Leninist milieu, such as the ongoing experiments in Bolivia and Venezuela. The governments of those countries came to power when social democracy was either in retreat in Europe and being assaulted and undermined from within by New Labour, and indeed they have in many ways opened the release valve on explosive radical democratic and socialist potentials and social forces within their borders, riding, consolidating and directing a wave of poor barrio and rural populations rising in revolt against the neoliberal consensus (Ciccariello-Maher 2016). However questions have always been asked of how deep do these transformations go? While the United Socialist Party of Venezuela and Movement for Socialism–Political Instrument for the Sovereignty of the Peoples may rule, at the state level they have yet to truly present anything more than a superficial turn away from capital via the nationalization of certain key industries and the extension of essentially social democratic social reforms. Further, many of their erstwhile compatriots such as Ecuador and Brazil have also lurched back rightwards in spectacular fashion, and even though countries once outside this turn to the left have now been brought into the fold, such as Mexico with the recent elections of López Obrador, it is undeniable that the once hailed ‘Pink Tide’ is slowly ebbing.
And that is where perhaps the true question lies: for those of us who find only apocalypse and the terminal decline of not only our own species, but of also our other-than-human kin, as the anthropocene-qua-capitalocene burns the world around us, would these things even be a meaningful future to imagine? Should we desire the return of the Soviet Union, or something like it? If not the USSR, then perhaps the glory days of Maoist China? Or some other juncture that could be pointed to and said of it “that was the time; that was the moment when people were building something truly against and beyond the world of capital?”
Asking the question however of whether or not this is the kind of future alternative that we should desire though is on some levels rhetorical. It is rhetorical because this is the general practice of the left already, of those who are charged with—or perhaps more accurately: those who have charged themselves with—the duty of envisioning a future outside of and beyond the limits, exploitations, oppressions and varied miseries of a world dominated by capital. This is especially so for those who in some way or another claim the lineage of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917: Trotskyists, Marxist-Leninists and Maoists.
Left-accelerationism of the kind theorized by Fisher, as well as Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams (2016) and many others like the Laboria Cuboniks Collective (2018) is a politics that in many ways could only be dreamt up by people living within the necrotic but still beating heart of the modern/colonial/capitalist world-economy, with its drive for a universalization of the enlightenment and the presumed scientific and rationalist virtues of Euromodernity, as well as the subordinating of an ecological future to the possibility of total (Hu)Man techno-mastery over the other-than-human world. However, these theorists do get one thing correct in a lot of ways, and that is that the left, at least the left that sees itself as the inheritors of revolutions and revolutionaries past, is mired in pastiche and an inability to move beyond the past.
In their #Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics (2013) Srnicek and Williams charge the broad left and anti-capitalist movements of today with being “disappointingly unable to advance an alternative beyond mid-Twentieth Century socialism” (1). Taking particularly acerbic aim at those new social movements that have arisen since the formal “end of history,” and which gained significant currency in the wake of the global financial collapse of 2009, such as Occupy, they charge that they have:
[B]een similarly unable to devise a new political ideological vision. Instead they expend considerable energy on internal direct-democratic process and affective self-valorisation over strategic efficacy, and frequently propound a variant of neo-primitivist localism, as if to oppose the abstract violence of globalised capital with the flimsy and ephemeral “authenticity” of communal immediacy (1).
A useful analytic in interpreting this comes from the, presumably parody, Facebook group the Intergalactic Workers’ League-Posadist. In their own acidic take downs of contemporary left-wing theory and praxis they describe the anti-capitalist movement of today as mired in a ‘ritualistic repetition of past failures’ and engaging in ‘necromancy-as-praxis’.
And this is, we would contend, precisely what the left, at least the left within the First World settler colonies, engages in; lost in the cultural cybermesh of capitalist realism, unable to dream into existence new futures, new alternatives, new possibilities and new socialisms. For these necro-Leninists, the rhetoric, theorization, organization and programmatics of the right-now are largely a repetitive, pastiched emulation of past political forms and visions, vaporwaved into retrofuturist images of Stalin, columns of Soviet tanks and recycled and looped renditions of L’Internationale and Slav’sya, Otechestvo nashe svobodnoye.
This vaporization of meaningful political content has occurred to such an extent that the differences between tendencies and sub-tendencies are now at best minimal, if they truly exist at all. What differences there are between sub-tendencies usually find themselves revolving around what are themselves inherited, received ideological questions of the past: Stalin vs Trotsky, the USSR vs China vs Albania, electoralism vs abstentionism, revisionism vs anti-revisionism etc. While some of these questions, such as that between different claimants of Maoism—as well as between them and Marxist-Leninists—over the mode of revolutionary praxis, chiefly in the form of duelling models of insurrectionism vs people’s war, may appear to be somewhat novel, having emerged out of the re-consolidation of Maoist forces in the wake of the collapse of the first wave of internationalist Maoist organizing in the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement, they are in fact simply a set of old conversations disguised as new. In particular it is a re-asking of the decades old question for communists of the Leninist variety over which is the most correct, universal model of revolutionary action: the Russian or the Chinese. The scalar jump between a programmatics of revolution that cannot wake itself from the dream-state of its gloried past and the ultra-niche distillations and instantiations of a labourwave aesthetic come clearer into focus under a flood of hammer and sickle kitsch and a repetition of Bolshevik slogans.
While there may indeed be a level of importance placed upon these questions for any contemporary anti-capitalist movement, the way that they are engaged in by these modern day leftists are deeply necromantic. The communist horizon (Bosteels 2014; Dean 2018) has been lost, replaced as it is by a communism of ghosts. The vision of a world of unimaginable hope (Bastani 2019) replaced by a communist necrotopia and the sorcerous attempt to, over and over again, rouse the spirit of Lenin from his tomb in the Red Square Necropolis—or Mao from his—to ask them the answers to today’s questions. Questions of a today that would in all likelihood be unrecognizable to the revolutionaries of old. It is safe to say, we think, that Lenin, Mao, Guevara and others could not have possibly have foreseen the totalizing domination of today’s newer modalities of power that are deployed in higher and higher resolution in the form of biopolitical control, the techno-surveillance apparatus of the state, and a First World working-class that has gotten rich on the parasitizing of most of the world alongside its nominal class antagonists, the bourgeoisie, and which has been all too happy to see its everyday life colonized by a continuous cycle of new smartphones, augmented-reality interfaces, virtual assistants, autonomous delivery drones, self-driving cars, and the general promise of an easier, more convenient life (Kelly 2015; Greenfield 2018).
Perhaps most ghostly though are the Trotskyists, a sub-sector of the Leninist left whose myriad organizations have long been a source of regular parody for their endless production of party newspapers that no one reads beyond their core membership. For many an activist it is easy to recall memories of a time that one was at a social or political action and a Trotskyist organization, perhaps more than one, was present in the crowd attempting to push their newspaper. But what even is the battle over the so-called Iskra Principle today? Why would the alienated and exploited working class, those people that are these organizations claimed constituents, exchange actual currency for an overpriced, low production value physical newspaper proposing the idiosyncratic political vision of the organization responsible for it as the one true distillation of reality when they could more easily speak into a wrist-mounted device linked to their smartphone and call up the latest high-production video analysis from one of ‘LeftTube’s’ main thought leaders.
In a time and a place such as this, what is this kind of political theory and praxis if not necromancy and the ritualistic repetition of inherited models? Indeed there is something simultaneously comical and depressing about the site at a protest, activist conference or movement meeting of seeing Marxosauruses attempting to hand out or sell their flimsy, paper newspapers to a crowd seething with general indifference to what they have to say about the latest imperialist war or cut backs to labour benefits.
The entire scene is supremely hauntological. These are visions of left-wing theory and praxis that can only be derived from ghosts. It is a communism not unlike Bruce Willis’s character Malcolm Crowe in The Sixth Sense, unable to see that it itself is collective of walking-dead people that others are able to see and perceive. And indeed the shock of recognition upon realizing that one is part of a small army of revenants may be far too much for many.
There is something always religious in this manner of thinking. Indeed the late Cedric J. Robinson made this charge against the mainstream Marxism current and its mode of thinking quite specific, noting it to be a secular re-configuration of older Judeo-Christian messianic apocalypticism. In both Marxist futurism and its concurrent theory of history, eventual paradise is promised as the fulfilment of history, where communism takes the place of the new heaven and the new earth to come, and the proletariat the role of the returning Christ, poised to usher in this new world (2019). However the connections between Marxist visions of the future and the return of Christ and the promised resurrection of the dead in the bible are deeper still.
Communist futurism, the promise of an earthly utopia today often memed in retro and vaporwave fashion as ‘Fully Automated Luxury Communism,’ is itself premised on the necromantic resurrection of the dead. But in this case it is not a physical resurrection of revolutionary leaders and martyrs long since passed on, but the resurrection of the cancelled futures of now dead states and zombie socialisms that in actual practice evince more of a hyper-capitalist nightmare of actual proletarians in industrial conditions so poor that suicide prevention nets must be placed outside of factory windows than anything on the road to communism.
Regarding the later of these ghostly and undead socialisms, the propensity of the Marxist-Leninist left in particular to uphold the People’s Republic of China and its ruling Communist Party, as already mentioned, is a case study of a left more enamoured with the ephemeral and aesthetic trappings of socialism than with the actual liberation of the working class from the exploitation of capital. Chinese socialism is a simulacrum par-excellence and the Marxist-Leninists of the Global North are more than happy to live in that hyperreal world. For while there might be an image of Chinese socialism, and indeed one can reach out and touch its workers’-blood red flag, feel its statues proclaiming the “Victory of Mao Zedong Thought” and study “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era” on the latest smartphone app, there is nothing really there. There is no meaningful truth that official Chinese state capitulation to capitalism since Deng Xiaoping hides an inner core of socialism. For the Marxist-Leninists of the First World it is a dream-state from which they are unable to wake. Only more ghosts and more ruminations over the past.
There is, as the Africana existentialist and Fanon scholar Lewis Gordon would put it, a “failure to understand failure” (2018) endemic within contemporary left theory and praxis. This failure to confront the leftist past leads only to a political cul-de-sac, endlessly looping around in a hauntological return to the forms of past communisms that ultimately backtracked into capitalism or monarchy-like single party states, or simply ended up in their own utter ruination. We must recognize that the socialisms of the past were failures, and that they were failures not just because of imperialist encirclement, and an inability to quell the growth of bureaucracy, revisionism or capitalist roaders, but also because of their own inherent and internal contradictions. To recognize the latter is to see their failures as failures and thus open up new avenues of assessment so that we can learn from the past, but also move beyond it, as we envision the future. To engage in the former, to believe that the problems of mid-twentieth century socialism were caused solely by capitalist forces from without or treasonous forces from within can only lead to a place of assessment where we tell outselves “well it was all good, if not for…”; and the necromantic cycle repeats.
The contemporary First World left, choosing to engage in the option of not seeing failures as failures is thus unable to envision a way out of its own self-imposed theoretical and practical impasse and only digs itself deeper and deeper into empty performativity and endless revivalism. Today’s early-twenty first century communist movement, especially as evidenced by the growth of certain online Marxisms, has become seemingly more about having the correct, most properly communist aesthetic; the right ratio of ceremonial configurations of disembodied floating heads to Soviet-style hammer and sickle imagery and, sometimes, macho infused photo ops with semi-automatic rifles.
All of these, but especially the latter is linked in particular to the militant posturing-as-organizing visuals of a certain brand of Maoism within the larger movement of the northern bloc of settler colonialism. To begin this paper we quoted from one the principle organizations representing this tendency within Maoism—sometimes known as ‘Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, Principally Maoism’ or more simply ‘Gonzaloism’—the Red Guards Los Angeles, itself part of the wider network of autonomous and decentralized Red Guard cells across the United States, and indeed, to speak of the political hauntology of the modern left, the constant Maoist refrain of the imagery of the Red Guards of the so-called ‘Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution’ with all of its disorganized chaos in pursuit of bombarding the headquarters, is a prime example. Today’s Red Guards—as well as, it must be said, their erstwhile allies, now rivals, if not enemies, north of the border, the Parti Communiste Révolutionnaire-Revolutionary Communist Party of Canada—proclaim their political and organization goal to be that of forming a people’s liberation army and engaging in armed struggle against the state, capital and the bourgeoisie.
However thus far the organizational praxis of the Red Guard Maoists/Gonzaloists has produced nothing more than empty slogans about how the “the proletariat’s soldiers are invincible,” armed photo-ops and ultra-sectarian combat with their rivals on the left, who they decree will either be converted into comrades, or converted into dust (Red Guards Austin 2018). We do not hide our suspicions about whether any of these disparate, socially isolated, micro-Leninist organizations actually possess—either within themselves or in their self-presumed social base amongst the embourgeoisefied working class of the United States and Canada—a serious capacity to actually actualize the formation of a people’s liberation army and the waging of protracted people’s war against the settler colonial capitalist techno-surveillance state.
It is to us, in our theorization, more akin to the generation and maintenance of a game world, a simulated hyperreality, than to any kind of serious political movement. And like any game world, whether digital or table-top, it requires the formation of a structuring mythology. In the case of the Red Guards and other organizations of the same kind, this is a world where Stalin simply made mistakes, a tiny clique within the Chinese communist party was able to somehow seize control over the entire apparatus of the state following the death of Mao, and where their Fourth Sword of “revolutionary science,” Abimael Guzmán/Presidente Gonzalo and the Sendero Luminoso of Peru, never engaged in alienating criminal acts against the people they claimed to fight for, and whose capitulation at the end of that country’s civil war was simply state propaganda.
But, of course, none of those things are true, and it is not to swallow the blue pill of capitalist propaganda to recognize that. It is a communist hyperreality, where the simulation of the world that they wish was is, to them, more necessarily real than the world that actually is. Beyond the Red Guard Maoists/Gonzaloists, one of the principle theorists of the Canadian Maoist tendency, philosopher J. Moufwad-Paul tells us in his work The Communist Necessity that:
The word communism remains and will always be re-proclaimed and reasserted as long as capitalism remains. More than a hypothesis or horizon, communism is a necessity that will never cease being a necessity for the duration of capitalism’s hegemony; all successes and failures need to be appreciated and even claimed in this context. If we understand communism as a necessity we can comprehend not only the need for its renewal and re-proclamation, but why it cannot simply actualize itself outside of nebulous future horizons. We must speak of a necessary communism grounded in the unfolding of history, a communism that is simultaneously in continuity and rupture from the past, a communism that is a new return (2014: 23).
On this we and Moufwad-Paul are perhaps traveling along a singular trajectory; one that seeks the unshackling of the anti-capitalist tendency from the ghosts of its past, that recognizes failures as such and attempts to see new ways of actualizing a future beyond capital. However we must fundamentally question whether the Maoist movement, which elsewhere Moufwad-Paul philosophizes as “the most recent theoretical terrain in this unfolding science of history and society” (2016: 22) is a meaningful site of the agreed upon necessity of renewal, re-proclamation and new return. While he may argue that “history is a mausoleum of those revolutionary movements that failed to strategically implement their politics,” and that “our duty as communists is to escape this crypt and return to the necessity of actually making revolution” (2016: 226) one cannot help but look out upon the spatiotemporal terrain of the contemporary northern bloc of settler colonialism and see a politics, echoing Fisher, where “the past is present, and the present is saturated with the past” (2014: 49). Marx, in his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon that that history repeats itself, “the first as tragedy, then as farce.” To this the Intergalactic Workers’ League adds and “… Third Time as LARP.” Nothing could be a more true appreciation of First World communist theory and practice in this era.
Works Cited
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