The Brahmins of Democracy
The Brahmins of Democracy
Bolshevism versus Menshevism
[…] molded in the criminal brains of the leader of the Paris Commune and sanctified in the brains of an oriental fanatic, Nicolai Lenin. - 1930’s Taryn raising the alarm bell on the famous Red-Brown Duginist Nazbol, Huey Long.
The rumors were embarrassing enough for the Communist Party. Now, they openly platform the paranoid delusions of Taryn Fivek, the infamous wrecker of the Worker’s World Party, who has now moved on to wreak havoc within the Communist Party.
Taryn is known for possessing the paranoiac fantasy that the ideas of Rasput-I mean, Aleksandr Dugin, have managed to somehow infiltrate segments of the Western left. The rise of the so-called ‘red-brown’ alliance - which Taryn associates with the likes of Jimmy Dore, Slavoj Žižek, Glenn Greenwald, and Caleb Maupin - all stem from the nefarious and magical influence of the renowned Russian thinker. Taryn is known to be the main enemy, within the Communist Party, of any trace of ‘socialist patriotism.’ In her view, this basic Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy must be flung overboard, due to the uniquely evil nature of the United States as a country founded by slave-owning white, cis-gendered and ably-bodied males.
Echoing the sentiment of the 1619 project (endorsed by the National Committee), Taryn believes that the founding of the United States was essentially reactionary - and that in fact, the British Empire was at the time of the declaration of independence ‘progressive.’ How very democratic! Only, for all her fixations on the threat of ‘patriotic socialists’ infiltrating the party, it is Taryn that shamelessly and uncritically repeats a time-and-tested tradition unique to this country: That of philistine snake-oil salesmen fearmongering about mystical and malign threats from the orient. Taryn repeats the uniquely American historical tradition of attributing to social and cultural phenomena the ideas of intellectuals they haven’t read - either because they’re too dim-witted, lazy, dogmatically philistine, or all three.
From the red scare of the 1920s and 50s, to the fear-mongering about ‘cultural Marxism,’ ‘postmodernism’ and now ‘critical race theory,’ Taryn effectively carries on the torch of American grifters drawing from the vast intellectual content of fringe (often academic) trends so as to induce feelings of hysteria and paranoia in their target audiences. Naturally, this fear-mongering always contains with it a grain of truth - there is an infinite wealth of intellectual content to always present out-of-context, and the paranoid mind takes care of the rest.
Could it be? Dugin directly speaks about grand Eurasian ambitions, surely he is responsible for the Russian geopolitical strategy we now witness!
The idea must be responsible for the reality, because they mirror one and another. What the dim-witted American philistine cannot seem to come to terms with, however, is that thinkers like Dugin take the very same reality as their own object, that Taryn tries to. Dugin is just as much an innocent bystander speculating about the same reality Taryn attributes him causal responsibility for. Paranoiac philistines cannot possibly grasp this openness of ideas and ideation before material reality, since, in their idealism (which is inevitably and always paranoid), material reality is itself conditioned by ideal forms.
Dugin’s ideas, Taryn alleges, are responsible for the new generation of Left-Wing figureheads who prioritize the struggle against liberalism and ‘democracy’ instead of the ‘fascist threat.’ And by liberalism and ‘democracy,’ we know Taryn could not possibly be referring to any abstract ideals.
Surely she doesn’t mean that, since such ideals have already long been abandoned by the ruling class! That is not only in terms of their actions, which was true even for the period of classical liberalism stemming from the 19th century up to the Great Depression, but even formally. Let us recall Stalin’s last speech, delivered to the Communist parties of the world:
Earlier, the bourgeoisie presented themselves as liberal, they were for bourgeois democratic freedom and in that way gained popularity with the people. Now there is not one remaining trace of liberalism. There is no such thing as "freedom of personality" any more, - personal rights are now only acknowledged by them, the owners of capital, - all the other citizens are regarded as raw materials, that are only for exploitation. The principle of equal rights for people and nations is trodden in the dust and it is replaced by the principle of Full rights for the exploiting minority and the lack of rights of the exploited majority of the citizens. The banner of bourgeois democratic freedom has been flung overboard.
After the creation of the deep state (which we can imagine the leaders of the Communist Party view as a ‘fascist myth’), the rule of the military-industrial complex, the rise of three-letter agencies capable of acting with total impunity, the transformation of bourgeois-democracy into the shameless and open dictatorship of the Wall Street financial class and the complete abandonment of the democratic principal of the right to the self-determination of nations with the United States’ foreign interventions, which possess zero democratic sanction and which even violate the US Constitution - can we not laugh and scoff at the notion that there remains any semblance of ‘bourgeois democracy’ to defend?
The NGO-Think Tank-Media-Academic complex, the self-anointed brahmins of democracy, entirely unelected network of social engineers, ideologists, public policy influencers and lobbyists - maintains only the veneer and appearance of democracy. It only excuses the various transgressions against American formal democracy by the deep state, and calls this ‘the defense of democracy.’ To point out the violation of democracy, the violation of law and the constitution itself ‘threatens the legitimacy of democracy.’ By pointing out how the ruling class has abandoned any semblance of democracy, one risks being targeted by the likes of Taryn and other brahmins of democracy as a ‘Duginist’ or ‘fascist’ menace to democracy.
It is clear what they mean by democracy: White lies and unspoken truths! Who better undermined the sanctity of democracy than Julian Assange, who pays the price for his ‘crime against democracy’ to this day for exposing otherwise concealed war crimes and the way the Democratic National Convention (democratically) stole the nomination from Sanders. Russian agent! Duginist! Fascist! How dare one challenge the smokescreen of democracy, nevermind the real thing!
Indeed, perhaps there remains a core foundation of ‘bourgeois democracy’ within the United States. But it is precisely the so-called ‘red-brown’ figureheads, in addition to libertarians like Ron Paul - who set this foundation against the veneer of democracy projected by the mass-media-academic-NGO complex, or the Brahmins of liberal democracy. It is precisely the so-called ‘reactionaries’ and ‘red-brown crypto-fascists’ which attempt to defend any semblance of principled, formal democracy against the excesses of the deep state and the ruling class, which regularly transgress, openly and shamelessly - the core foundations of the republic and of democracy. It is precisely the Jimmy Dores and Glenn Greenwalds which elect to defend the civil liberties of the people against the ‘defenders of democracy.’
But what of Dugin, and his critique of liberalism and democracy? What relation could Dugin possibly possess to the likes of, say, Jimmy Dore or Caleb Maupin?
Dugin and His Relevance
Let us peer into the origins of the so-called ‘red-brown’ alliance and the fundamental reason liberal fanatics have raised the specter of ‘Duginism’ against the resurgent populism we now witness in the United States.
The Russian people first became acquainted with ‘democracy’ and ‘liberalism’ (in its current form) in the aftermath of the Russian constitutional crisis of 1993, when Boris Yeltsin democratically dissolved the Supreme Soviet and Russian Parliament (without any constitutional sanction) by use of military tanks, heavy projectile ammunition, and assault rifles. What followed was the near open dictatorship of the Russian oligarchs and the Westoxificated former Soviet managerial class, ecstatic and drunkenly fanatical about the promises of enlightened Western liberalism. In this glorious triumph of democracy and liberalism, an entire civilisation was nearly destroyed, the will of the Russian people broken, and mortality rates came to rival wartime conditions.
Naturally, one comes to understand the context that gives rise to Dugin’s fierce critique of modernity, liberalism and democracy. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the question of which way forward for the Russian people inevitably came to the fore of every independent-minded Russian intellectual. Although Dugin recognized Communism as an alternative and heretical form of modernity, he viewed the collapse of the socialist bloc as proving its ultimate unviability. Traditional Soviet Marxism-Leninism was not equipped to make sense of the new era. After all, it was incapable of preventing the overthrow of the Soviet Union itself! It was not enough, for Dugin, to challenge the catastrophe that was Western liberalism and so-called ‘democracy’ for Russia. He found it necessary to go to what he considered the very roots of this evil, namely Western modernity itself.
Within Russia, a multitude of different political tendencies came to find a sense of unity in their struggle against the liberal dictatorship of the 1990s despite their ideological differences. Self proclaimed monarchists, Communists, and ultra-nationalists joined together in their struggle against the democratic looting and robbery of their country, the democratic suffocation of their people and the democratic surrendering of Russia to American imperialism. The cold war, which was the fundamental axes around which ideological differences had been defined, was over. Ideological differences began to dissolve into a heap of confusion, and a more fundamental opposition - between authentically popular forces on the one hand, and an establishment aligned with global American imperialism (and its aforementioned ruling class, institutions and networks) - was starting to become intelligible.
Amidst this confusion lay a lack of ideological and theoretic clarity. A more broad historical meta-narrative and meta-politics became necessary that pierced through the narrow and now-relativized ideologies of the 20th century. Martin Heidegger, who Taryn criminally mentions only in passing as a ‘Nazi’ (as if that is even a fraction of what has propelled him into significance in the Western canon) would present a similar question as the over-arching question of being, now known as the school of ontology. In short, the ideologies of the 20th century dealt only in the language of particular beings, but not being as such. They lacked the self-awareness to situate themselves within a reality more fundamental than described within the narrow confines of the ideology itself. Enter Aleksandr Dugin, the most renowned Russian disciple of Heidegger, who sets this question on a new basis within the context of Russia’s unique historical and geopolitical situation.
As a discipline of Heidegger, Dugin was able to recognize the material and objective reality of Russian civilization and geopolitics beyond ideology. The Soviet Union was a strictly ideological project, that took Marxist-Leninist ideology as the sole foundation of its existence. Yet even after having officially abandoned Marxist-Leninist ideology with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the deeper reality of Russian civilization that inherited Soviet geopolitics continued to persist, proving that Soviet realities were not entirely conditioned by one particular ideology. Here lies almost the entire basis of the mystique and terror Dugin’s likeness evokes in Western liberals trapped within the confines of classical modernity: Dugin, following Heidegger, recognizes the fundamental and latent ambiguity of material being, as something that gives rise to a multitude of ideologies - while being conditioned by none of them. This material ambiguity is nothing short of chaos, which the whole of rationalistic modern philosophy, beginning with Descartes, set about to foreclose any acknowledgement of (an attempt first challenged by Marx).
This is something Taryn, in her neurotic idealism, could not possibly understand about Dugin. The more Dugin gives expression to the ambiguity of material reality, the more she paranoiacally casts this immanent ambiguity as the disguise of fascist or Nazi ideology. Paranoia, after all, is a cope in the face of ambiguity. For a lonely person, it’s easier to believe that everyone is conspiring against you than accept the traumatic realization that no one cares about you. In the same way, it’s easier for the liberal to believe people like Dugin - and myself - are secretly fascists rather than accept the loneliness of reality before it gets represented by an ideology. What Dugin does is refuse to privilege ideologies as the most fundamental means by which a thinker may inquire into the nature of being, reality and the world. A certain pragmatism is even inherent in the whole field of geopolitics itself: Relationships between geography, statehood and space in the abstract are indifferent to ideologies - they refer to realities that are inevitable notwithstanding them.
The key to the recent fearmongering over the ‘rise of fascism’ lies only in a broader breakdown of Anglo-Saxon liberalism, or more specifically the transition into a new historical era. American ideologists are coping with the decline of their empire - the recent fearmongering over ‘fascism,’ Russiagate, bizarre delusions like the Havana syndrome, and even Qanon - alongside Taryn’s own witch-hunting over ‘Duginists’ - all represent an attempt to finding meaning amidst the destruction of American unipolar globalism. The liberal American mind cannot comprehend the end of the unipolar world order - they have to impose the idea that Russia and China are conspiring to take America’s place. It cannot accept the breakdown of the establishment in resurgent populism, it has to impose the idea that fascist ideas are secretly behind the phenomena. This pattern reflects an inability to be reconciled with the loss of an idol; the idol being the Eidos of rationalistic modernity, the Substance of Spinoza - the object of modern metaphysics. Today’s anti-fascism is mere copium in the face of materially political chaos…
Materialism and Mao Zedong Thought (MZT)
Amidst Taryn’s deranged and venomous pile of dogshit screed the leaders of the Communist Party decided to embarrass themselves by publishing, we find only a single attempt to ground the attack on Dugin in Marxist phraseology. You see up until that point, Taryn had based her attacks in explicitly and shamelessly liberal language. Let us read the brilliance of Taryn’s words, the pre-eminent Marxist philosopher of our time, and her critique of Dugin:
Therefore, when it comes to what must be rejected from Communism, Dugin says the first and primary rejection must be of historical materialism, along with “materialist reductionism and economic determinism.”
Taryn elects to one-up her ideological enemies (that is, ourselves) by pointing out that Dugin has made negative comments in regards to materialism, an obviously integral and essential component of Marxism. Further, she attributes the short-comings of Dugin’s thinking to this explicit rejection of materialism. Ladies and gentlemen, we are walking in the midst of intellectual giants! Witness the brilliance of Taryn:
Dugin say bad thing about thing Marxists seem to talk about a lot. Since Taryn Marxist, everything bad about Dugin is because he say bad thing about thing Marxists talk about. Everyone brainwashed by dugin: ‘Na-na-na-na boo-boo, Dugin signal against Marxist word u ar less authentic Marxist then me!!!
Yet the problem is twofold: One, by materialism, Dugin does not, whether he believes it so or not, mean the materialism of Marx. Secondly, from an actually informed Marxist perspective, Dugin can only be challenged as being too materialistic, that is, vulgarly and one-sidedly materialistic and not dialectical. It is typical, upon expounding the tenants of Soviet Marxism-Leninism into the language of philosophy, for Soviet and Russian thinkers to interpret materialism strictly in the terms of French materialism or Spinozism. There is ample historical precedent for this, too. The great Soviet philosopher Evald Ilyenkov, a faithful adherent of orthodox Soviet Marxism-Leninism, could go no farther in his conception of materialism than that of Spinoza’s substantialism. All modern philosophy is incapable of conceiving the brilliance of dialectical materialism - it wavers between the one-sided materialism of Spinoza, or the idealism of Kant.
The dialectical materialism specific to Marxism-Leninism has never been successfully expounded into the terms of modern philosophy (the tradition of Marxism itself, after all, began with a definitive break with modern philosophy). It has remained a science whose province has always been practical and political rather than contemplative and speculative. So-called ‘reactionary’ and conservative (including religious) critiques of materialism have in mind that reduction of all being to substance, the reduction of every essence to sensuous and already measurable realities. Marx, in his critique of German idealism, never returned to this one-sided and vulgar materialism of a “metaphysically disguised nature separated from man” and moreover did not, by the word material mean a substance. Material better translates to essential, and for the first time in the history of thought, Marx conceives of an essence that is itself essential rather than formal, that is to say, the real essence of form; the materiality of the ideal.
Every philosophical conception of essence beginning with Plato conceives of essences as forms, ideals or discrete definitions of thought that possess privileged significance in the determination of reality - but for Marx, the essence is itself the essence of forms, ideals, and definitions of thought. Reducing this essence to a specific form of material reality - like ‘economics’ - entirely misses the point, and only repeats the error of idealism. For Marx, to inquire into the nature of the essence, or of material reality is the province of practical science - no dogmatic or readymade form of what material reality is, is to be presumed. The material essence is not a substance, since it is not already latent with phenomenal or ideal form. Thus Marx’s materialism is referential rather than metaphysical, it points toward a way of relating to the world without prescribing the content of this relation. For instance, Marx writes that man is the highest essence for man. But what does he mean by man?
Does he mean Feuerbach’s ideal man for himself? No, for the question is itself a matter of practical inquiry. What man is, Marx writes, is the world of man, state, society. It is the ensemble of the social relations. Material reality is something one can only point toward, but knowing what it consists in is itself the province of science. To work for humanity, to participate in the world of humanity, is to take man as the highest essence for man. An essence is not a hidden appearance, but the appearance whereupon it passes through its opposite, returns and arises again from its own premises. And the entire purport of materialism is that: Such premises cannot be dictated by the terms of the appearance or the form itself. According to the vulgar materialists, a one-sided material essence determines appearances without regard for them. All returns to the abode of Substance. For the materialism of Marx, the material essence is the reconciliation and sublation of all appearance and form. It is the real process of their reproduction, a process that is by no means readily evident in its output (hence the significance of criticism).
For this same reason, no ideology - including materialist ideologies like Soviet Marxism-Leninism - is capable of grounding its own truly material premises. This is precisely one of the dilemmas Soviet Marxism-Leninism in its mature stages was confronted with: On the one hand, Marxism-Leninism is materialist - on the other hand, materialism cannot be reconciled with the way in which Soviet Marxism-Leninism (nevertheless itself being an ideology) attempted to consolidate and fully ground its own premises, up to the very structure of the Party and Soviet statehood. For Soviet philosophers like Evald Ilyenkov (who ranks among the mightiest thinkers of the 20th century), this dilemma was expounded in the form of the contradiction between the cosmological forces that give rise to the thinking spirit, and the latter’s attainment of universal self-consciousness. The parallel is clear; Ilyenkov represents real geopolitical, social, and historical forces in the form of cosmological nature, and represents Soviet Marxist-Leninist ideology in the form of the thinking spirit, or Hegelian self-consciousness in general.
For Ilyenkov, the dilemma takes the form of the second law of thermodynamics. The thinking spirit is the highest culmination of the development of matter, yet the arrow of time points in a direction no longer conducive to this development. The thinking spirit arose from conditions of less entropy, and in the heat death of the universe, all cosmological development ceases entirely. Facing this, Ilyenkov arrives at the provocative conclusion, illustrating the relationship between Soviet ideology and its material premises: Thinking beings, in the highest point of their development, will assume as their cosmological duty the unleashing of a cosmic catastrophe; an act of all-encompassing apocalyptic self-immolation that will at once lead to the fiery rebirth of the cosmos, reversing the process of matter’s thermal decay. In this collective act of self-sacrificial heroism, the thinking spirit may yet again give rise to the conditions that enabled its own development in the first place - spirit, then, may condition the development of matter as matter had conditioned the development of spirit.
It is often believed that the late Soviet period is primarily defined by decay and the replacement of sincere ideological belief with cynicism. On the contrary, it was marked with the same eschatological-apocalyptic anxiety that can be found in the works of Ilyenkov. Struggling to reconcile its founding ideological mission with the geopolitical realities that would come to actually define it, the real vigor and ideological power of the Soviet Union was such that its mere existence evoked the atmosphere of a world that was always on the precipice of thermonuclear annihilation. Gorbachev’s uskoreniye (acceleration) was in actuality a desperate attempt to forestall and slow the winds of fate. The Soviet Union was destined to become something that its leaders were not equipped to adjust themselves to or make sense of; they had inherited a geopolitical monstrosity which they were too weak, corrupt and complacent to be worthy of. As with Ilyenkov’s thinking spirit, for Soviet Marxism-Leninism to be reconciled with its premises would amount to nothing short of the destruction and rebirth of the world anew (i.e. the destruction of the postwar global order and the end of American hegemony).
It is precisely these material premises that Dugin’s work seeks to give pure and undiluted expression, freed from the dogmatic straightjacket of official Soviet Marxist-Leninist ideology, specifically in a traditionalist and even mystical form. Following Heidegger, poetry and mythos are the privileged mediums for the expression of an authentic material being freed from the reductive presuppositions corresponding to the seinsverlassenheit (forgetting of being) unique to Western rationalistic modernity. For Dugin (like Soviet Marxism-Leninism itself), following Russian Orthodox eschatology, the dialectic between the ideal and material takes only singular form, and moreover the form of a final sublation located only in the end-times (i.e. like the Soviet ‘reaching of communism’ or ‘global proletarian revolution’). On the one hand lies the dark, boundless depth of eternity, and on the other the golden, peerless radiance of logos. This dualism is a common theme of Dugin’s works: from his famous distinction between Atlanticism and Eurasianism, Thalassocracy and Tellurocracy, the multiple and the One, etc. Yet these pairings remain entrenched within the vernacular of a dark, subterranean insight into the true essence of material being, bellow the watchful eye of the high-minded liberal, rationalistic modernity.
We must not go down the path of Icarus; we must return to the lowlands, along the path of Orpheus (it is possible that we must turn and look at what they did with Eurydice …); return, but illuminated by light, pierced by fire, consumed by lightning. Only then will we be able to understand the secret dimension of Heraclitus the Dark: all is one – logos is chaos. Darkness is light. THERE is here.
Pseudo-Marxist dimwits like Taryn, for whom Marxism is nothing more than an encyclopedia of virtue-signaling and career climbing, interpret all language that falls outside the rigidity of Anglo-Saxon ‘science’ as ‘idealist,’ but for someone minimally educated in the history of idealism and materialism - it is not idealism, but a one-sided materialism that Dugin is guilty of. As already pointed out by thinkers like Georges Bataille and their predecessors (Nietzsche), it takes no great effort to recognize that modernistic materialism is actually idealist. Modern (English empiricism & French substantialism) materialism attempts to straightjacket material reality to definite ideal forms, effectively attempting to condition any relation to the material world according to a rigid ideal (that of the form of measurement, or a pre-defined notion of materiality; substance). Although this relation has produced results, it does not afford real precedence to material content over form (here lies the key to the entire crisis of modern science, specifically in the realms of physics and biology). A philistine could not possibly be a materialist - it is only through acculturation, through absorbing the treasures of mankind and possessing well-rounded literary sense, that one can give true expression to material being, which does not conform to the narrow parameters set by modern science & logic.
Dugin’s shortcomings parallel the shortcomings of late Soviet Marxism-Leninism itself: only it is but its scandalous and occult obverse. Soviet Marxism-Leninism confined itself to an official ideology - Dugin’s writings confine themselves to their real material premises (i.e., in the form of geopolitics, the unconscious realities of Russian civilization, etc.). Dugin’s principal scandal for Marxism-Leninism has only ever been an insistence on the precedence of a material reality not conditioned by a particular ideology. It is common to view Dugin’s Fourth Political Theory as a re-branding of the fascist Third Position (as to be expected from an ignoramus philistine, Taryn precisely attempts to draw this conclusion, and fails pathetically). But the third position was merely a rejection of capitalism and ‘Communism.’ The Fourth Political Theory is not principally defined by merely rejecting the others, but by opening an inquiry into the real origins of 20th century politics itself, freed from the ideological prejudices inherent in them. The key lies not in the rejection, but the relativization of all three ‘political theories:’ that there is a reality more fundamental than can be described within their terms.
A certain agnosticism is inherent in the ‘Fourth Political Theory.’ All prior theories are definite, determinate and particular: Liberalism, Communism, and Fascism. The name of the Fourth remains ambiguous and left for further inquiry. The entire point is for there to be a fourth, discovering its content is the entire purport of the project. However, what if this ‘Fourth Political Theory’ is none other than Marxism-Leninism itself? What if it is precisely and only Marxism-Leninism, and its specifically dialectic materialism, which enables the possibility for reconciling its own ideology with its real material premises? Dugin was only ever exclusively familiar with Marxism-Leninism in its officiated, stagnant late Soviet form, but never did he - and other Russian thinkers of the late Soviet period - absorb the brilliance of Mao Zedong Thought’s contribution to Marxism-Leninism, the same brilliance to which Chinese Communism’s vitality and success owes itself to. The overwhelming majority of Soviet thinkers ignored Mao’s re-invigoration of Marxism-Leninism entirely, insisting that the choice lied only between stagnant, official Soviet Marxism-Leninism or Western liberalism. Yet given the way in which China was able to avoid the fate of the Soviet Union, Mao Zedong Thought is self-evidently at the very least worthy of examination.
To paraphrase Alain Badiou, Mao’s principal contribution was the introduction of a notion of infinity to Marxism. Not only the adoption of a fourth, but a fifth, sixth, seventh, etc. political theory are already integral to the constantly self-revolutionizing, self-reforming and self-restructuring nature of Chinese Communism. The context that gave rise to Mao, who ranks among the greatest political leaders in the history of mankind, lied not in the commitment to an ideology, but in the commitment to a people, culture and civilization. The primary material context that defined Mao’s political life was never premised by ideology, but by the aspirations of the Chinese people, and the rejuvenation of their 5,000 year civilization. In a sense, Mao was a ‘Duginist’ before Dugin was ever even born. Mao was already well-acquainted and deeply immersed in the geopolitical, literary, civilizational, traditional, unconscious, demotic, national, even mystical etc. realities that had to be scandalously exhumed by Dugin. The overwhelming majority of Mao’s literary education, for example, came not from the modern West, but from the classics of Chinese literature.
Forcing the ideology of Marxism-Leninism to confront, survive, and re-adapt to its real, material premises in the Chinese people defined the entirety of Mao’s political life and the life of the Communist Party of China to this day. Mao’s On Contradiction already evinces a materialist view on the contingency of ideology and politics in the face of material reality: This is clear in the distinction between primary and secondary contradictions. For Mao, in the midst of the Japanese invasion of China - ideological and even internally political differences are relegated to secondary significance (much in the same way that they were in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse and in the so-called ‘red-brown’ alliance!), the unity of the country against Japanese aggression becoming the primary contradiction. This is not the unity of shared ideas or ideals, but a unity based on the material and geopolitical conflict between the Chinese nation and Japan. For Mao, this conflict is objective, whereas the differing political ideologies are subjective articulations of this objective conflict. It was Mao’s view that Marxism-Leninism would prove itself the best equipped interface with the objective conditions, but that had to be proven in the wilderness of material reality (war), not presumed.
Dugin’s error lies in his rejection that the contradiction - between official ideals and the deeper, darker esoteric truths of reality - itself takes determinate form, and reproduces itself across the whole fabric of being. Yes, Marxist-Leninist ideology cannot condition its real premises - but neither can one go about giving expression to these premises without acknowledging what it is they premise. Dugin remains agnostic about this, which is why his thinking, despite its brilliance, creativity, and insight - never transitions into a science, that is, a form of thinking that produces real knowledge (as opposed to ambiguous sense) and practical insights. For Mao, that Marxism-Leninism cannot condition its own premises is already a superfluous insight, an insight that is already contained within the essence of Marxism-Leninism itself. Materialist dialectics are precisely about reconciling the contradiction between content and form, the content being nothing more than the very essence of the contradiction itself. The entire body of knowledge and insight proper to Marxism-Leninism consists not in officiated dogmas, but a repository of accumulated wisdom in the face of these precise contradictions.
Marxism-Leninism is not just an ideology, it is an index of definite concrete and historical experience. It is a repository of practical, working insights that are pragmatic in nature, and which do not necessarily lend themselves to a given ideological orientation. The insights of Marxist-Leninist science are pragmatic and objective, what one makes of them is the province of a competing multitude of ideological orientations. Hence at any given stage of the history of the Communist Party of China, there remain right, left, and center orientations, with the party’s survival depending on the victory of the left-orientation (not to be confused with ultra-left). Xi, for example, has initiated this ideological orientation in the form of a spiritual and moral revolution in culture, literature, arts and media. What Dugin does not understand is that, notwithstanding the multitude of political ideologies that material reality gives rise to, ideology plays a part in affecting the determinate form of material being. This is proven by how, despite Marxism-Leninism being officially abandoned, Russia and other former Soviet states remain unconsciously affected by it, from culture to intuitive ways of thinking.
This does not mean that Marxism-Leninism can replace or condition geopolitical, civilizational, national, cultural, etc. realities, only that Communism (led by Marxist-Leninist parties) has irreversibly affected, and become a part of those geopolitical, civilizational, national and cultural realities - even well after being abandoned ideologically. This is precisely what Dugin misses in his critique of modernity: Yes, modernity was the greatest apocalypse experienced by mankind - but the only path to the revival of the great Asiatic land empires lies not in rejecting or resisting it, but rendering it superfluous and merely a single chapter in a vastly older story, feats which the Soviet Union and China had actually accomplished. Dugin does not think beyond the threshold of apocalypse - and perhaps that is not necessarily a shortcoming. It is an inherent feature of Russian literature to remain permanently enamored by an apocalypse always on the horizon, forestalled only by the katehon. Such a perspective has produced some of the most brilliant, beautiful and insightful works in the history of mankind. However so far as Marxism-Leninism is concerned, it could not confine itself to the narrow Soviet perspective - but this does not mean it has been outmoded.
Marxism-Leninism has no meaning in the 21st century, insofar as it has not integrated the contributions of Mao Zedong Thought. And nowhere outside of China has any Marxist-Leninist party successfully integrated these contributions. Psychotic perversions of Mao’s thinking, which can be found in Western Maoism, ignore the rich depth of the Chinese civilizational context that informed Mao’s thought. As for the official Communist Parties that have survived, not once have they humbled themselves before the lesson of the Soviet Union’s collapse. The Communist Party of the United States, which the philistine Taryn writes on behalf of, has yet to acknowledge the contributions of Mao Zedong Thought over thirty years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union! In its arrogant inertia, it appears the Communist Party would rather dissolve than accept the Chinese side having been vindicated after the Sino-Soviet split. It clings to a corrupted and liberalized form of Soviet Marxism-Leninism that has been entirely defanged of its occult cosmo-apocalyptic tendencies. The party is ruled by a pro-Gorbachev wing that clownishly pretends Gorbachev’s treachery has not been already been proven indisputably catastrophic.
This same decadence, corruption and inertia is also responsible for the Communist Party’s erroneous conception of the Popular Front and Anti-Fascism, which underlies the entirety of Taryn’s rallying call to the mental pygmies, weaklings and traitors of the party against the ‘patriotic socialists,’ ‘red-brown infiltrators,’ ‘Duginists’ and ‘fascists.’
The Real Origins of the Popular Front
Taryn writes:
Dugin says that in the 21st century there is no “left” and “right,” only those who oppose the status quo and those who support it. He clears out these historically rooted distinctions because his intention is to consume the left completely, to negate it. He wants to wear the skin of the Communist Party like the mystical huckster he is to summon his neofascist demons.
Let us, for a moment, put aside the fact that Dugin has not once made pretense to ‘wearing the skin of the Communist Party’ (?). Let us, for a moment, put aside the fact that here Karen - I mean Taryn - evinces all the Anglo-American racism typical of the paranoiac white-supremacist whose eyes bulge with venomous, hateful fear of the Asiatic-Slavic Rasputin ‘conjuring up his demons.’ This is typical American racism: When one does not understand the other, you simply accuse them of sorcery.
This is precisely what we witnessed during the Russiagate scandal, where liberal white Karens like Rachel Maddow went on live television, with a deranged, twisted look on their face - and screamed about the ‘Russian sorcery’ that stole the election from their idol crooked Hillary. We can imagine that Taryn imagines a similar situation is imminent as regards to the very powerful position she acquired within the Communist Party - Rasputin-like sorcerers are going to ‘conjure demons’ and remove her from her position, just as they stole the power from Hillary.
Dugin has no intentions with the Communist Party of the United States, Taryn - I can assure you of that. The person you are looking for is actually me. It is I, alongside the rest of the Infrared collective, who have the fullest intention to restructure the Communist Party. We have made no secret of this, nor the methods within our employment - so there is absolutely no need to talk about ‘conjuring demons’ and ‘mystical sorcery’. And the reason I have revealed our plans so openly, is because we already made sure of the fact that there is nothing - and I mean nothing - you can do to stop us.
However, Taryn’s broader point speaks to a very clear liberal pathology in regards to ‘fascism,’ namely an association of fascism with ‘ideological ambiguity.’ The famously illiterate Youtube streamer called Vaush - who amasses an audience of around 5,000 concurrent viewers - when pressed with the question of how to define fascism, will often say that fascism is intentionally un-definable. By fascism, liberals like Taryn and Vaush are referring not to an actual ideology, but an affect of ideological chaos. Liberals believe that political phenomena is ultimately premised by ideals, principles, axioms, concepts, rational precepts, etc. - this rigidity of the object, which I have before termed as the ‘Anglo-Box’ - is further ‘practiced’ in ‘reality’ within institutions and establishments.
Institutions and establishments are not actually real societies, but parodies of the real society. Social-engineering is very easy within the confines of institutions; it’s much easier to ‘change culture’ in academia than on the street, because there people’s behavior is conditioned by consciously legislated rules. By contrast on the street, people’s behavior is determined by factors which cannot be premised by ideals. This is why the label of ‘fascism’ is much broader in scope then mere political phenomena for liberals. Every expression of human spontaneity, every manifestation of the unconscious, every instance of chaos - is crucified as ‘fascist.’ For some, even eating meat is ‘fascist.’ After all, from the perspective of idealist ethics, the way we consume food is quite scandalous. We kill animals for food, and only later make up rational justifications for why. The truth, however, is that why we do it isn’t premised by ideals in the first place.
Fascism, one is told, is ‘ideologically un-definable,’ inherently vague and ambiguous, since it is not consistent with any precepts. One thus must take refuge not only in the liberal institutions, which are at the very least ‘definable’ and ‘consistent,’ - one must pass beyond the threshold of cuckoldry, and excuse the transgressions of these liberal institutions, and the ways in which they themselves violate their own principles, in the name of ‘protecting democracy from fascism.’ One must rally behind an un-electable establishment which has no sanction even by the liberal institutions themselves, but is a dirty secret everyone is supposed to look the other way in the midst of. All this, to defend us from ‘fascism!’ Labeling political opponents as domestic terrorists, COVID authoritarianism, violations of the right to political expression by big tech platforms accountable to no one - all to defend us from fascism! Fueling the drums of war against other countries - turn a blind eye, it’s all to protect us from fascism!
This, ladies in gentlemen, is the lesson the traitors running the Communist Party have drawn from the popular front: Enabling the transition from liberalism to something actually comparable to the conditions out of which arose fascism, all in the name of anti-fascism! Witness the paranoid mind of Taryn, Vaush, et. al who label all instances of vague, intuitive, spontaneous anti-establishment and populist sentiment as ‘fascist’ - they take the very fact of its ideological vagueness not as a deficiency of their description, but on the contrary as proving it! For them, vagueness is not an indication of a definite material contradiction that takes precedence over ideological narratives, but the indication of a secret, super-ideology that is so powerful it manages to avoid disclosing its existence in any discrete way. If the irony is not dawning upon readers, that the Communist Party has premised its paranoiac ‘anti-fascism’ on the basis of the history of the popular front, allow me to spell it out clearly:
The popular front was precisely an acknowledgment - which was principally necessary among Western Communist Parties - of materially political contradictions that take precedence over ideology! No ideals, principles, precepts, concepts, or even ideological common-ground united the forces of the popular front, nor could they. What rather united them was a common structural positioning, and a contradiction between a rotting establishment teetering on the brink of open dictatorship and authentically and genuinely popular forces. The popular front was genuinely supposed to be popular, that is, representing the material will of the people at the expense of ideological purity. If there is any ‘ideological vagueness’ to be found, the historical popular front is the greatest example of it. Populism was an integral notion to its original conception and most of its execution. Today, most people interpret the ‘popular front’ as an attempt to rally behind a liberal establishment, and defend it against the ‘threat of fascism.’ Yet this is nothing more than a falsification of history.
Within the American context, the New Deal coalition had freshly risen to power as the literal successor of the People’s Party (the epitome of American populism) in the early 1900s. It shook up the then existing form of the American establishment by representing a broader strata of the population than had ever been given representation in the government. The anglophile ruling class found itself being ruled by cabinet members hailing from families and backgrounds of small farmers, from the very heartland of the country. Roosevelt, contrast to the Democrats of today, was an authentically popular president who shook up, rather than represented the then status-quo. The predecessors of the deep state, and the dynastic families of the current American establishment opposed him bitterly. In 1933, military officer Smedley Butler uncovered a plot by this same establishment - including none other than Prescott Bush, grandfather of neoconservative George W. Bush ( an ‘anti-fascist’ hero who ‘bravely stood up to Trump to defend our democracy’) - to execute a coup against Roosevelt and establish a fascist dictatorship directly answerable to Wall Street.
Notwithstanding the various contradictions faced by the Roosevelt’s government - including the political emergence of the professional managerial, later conflicts with populists like Huey Long, etc. - it is necessary to establish this context so as to point out that the anti-fascism of the 1930’s has nothing to do with today’s ‘ANTIFA.’ The ‘fascist threat’ was not coming from populist forces challenging the establishment, but from the very rotten core of the establishment itself. The popular front was not a concession to the status quo, it was a concession to national populism: That there was a material contradiction at hand that could not be premised by the terms of ideology, and that the goal of Communists was to seek to lead by example, as the most effective representatives of the popular forces - rather than establish the terms of struggle on ideological terms. This was all superfluous for the Bolsheviks in the Soviet Union who had already risen to power on the basis of taking this for granted, but it was a genuine breakthrough against the dogmatic ultra-left infantilism and sectarian factionalism that had plagued Western Communists since the demise of the Second International.
The ideological ‘vagueness’ associated with fascism consists in nothing more than the self-destruction of the classical liberal order in the aftermath of 1929, which gave rise to a general atmosphere of meta-politics. All political factions became relativized in the midst of this historical change, hence fascism’s appearance of novelty. But fascism was not some ‘mystical,’ atavistic resurrection of the wealth of substantive realities long kept at bay by the cold abstractionism of liberal modernity, but the final conclusion of the latter - an abstract negation for itself. Far from representing the chaos of ‘occult’ or ‘demonic’ forces, fascism was nothing more than liberalism plus emergency powers, powers that completely transgressed the foundations of 19th century classical liberalism while at the same time safeguarding them from the ‘chaos’ of ‘Asiatic-Jewish Bolshevism.’ In actual fact, Taryn’s ‘anti-fascist’ pretenses bare more in common with the pathology of anti-Semitism, which recoils at the liquefying chaos by imposing a false sense of order (that is, a Jewish conspiracy), than with the anti-fascist popular front of the 1930s.
Despite being objectively outmoded by the winds of history, fascism was the attempt by the Anglo-liberal order of the 19th century to secure its foundations absolutely against the chaos of material change. Fascism aspired to resolve the entire scandal of modernity, that is, the inability for the Cartesian cogito, or modern rationality, to ground its own premises. Anti-semitism, as well as European colonialist racism, depicted non-Europeans as ‘subhumans’ who ‘contaminated’ the purity of abstract liberal modernity, who represented the chaos of material antecedence which obstructed the ability for modern Forms to ground their own premises and establish its own history. ‘Civilization,’ for fascists, was synonymous with totalizing subordination to the abstractly contrived precepts of modernity: The ultimate safe space for what was the equivalent of today’s SJWs, white liberal Karens, and institutionalized social engineers. This is why for all its aesthetic pretenses, fascism was never able to establish itself as a popular, rural movement. Its only rural basis lied in monopoly landowners - beyond this, its rank-and-file were urbanized to the core.
By contrast, the popular front was - in tandem with Stalin’s resurrection of Russian civilization and elevation of the Russian peasant as the primary subject of Soviet politics and culture (and it is this which is meant by democratic, not conformity to liberal institutions!) - authentically national. The triumph of Stalin and the complete repudiation of Trotsky took the principal form of the way in which Communist parties the world over, and especially in the postwar period, began to embrace the national culture, tradition and history of their respective countries. It is with the popular front that Communism, for the first time, became deeply national in the cultural and demotic sense. This veneration of national culture did not simply extend to perceived ‘modern’ aspects. Figures like Ivan the Terrible, Alexander Nevsky, Martin Luther, Vlad Tepes, etc. became celebrated as national heroes by ruling Communist parties. And nowhere did the popular front gain as much sweeping significance as in China, forming the definite context out of which arose Mao Zedong Thought in the first place.
The idealist confusion of the present Communist party strictly arises from the erroneous view that the popular front was united by an opposition to an ideology, rather than a definite political phenomena. It is not the ideological details of fascism that were of any significance to Communist theorists of the popular front - it was a new political stage the established liberal order was entering to, that discarded the most minimally democratic liberties outright and shamelessly. The bourgeoisie as a class ceased to possess any material incentive to defend or uphold any semblance of democratic order - the task fell upon popular forces to do so instead. But this democratic order was not the ‘idea’ of democracy, political correctness, or the veneer of democracy - but the formally plain rights guaranteed to the people by the state: Basic liberties like free expression, political association, and due process. Yet these are rights that are being curtailed today not by ‘fascist populists,’ but by the liberal status quo itself! And again, the most passionate defenders of these plain, formal rights are precisely those condemned as ‘red-brown infiltrators’ by the likes of Taryn.
The ‘anti-fascist’ pathology of today’s liberals has permanently sealed off the foundational critiques of modern liberal capitalism that Marxism itself arose out of. Instead of viewing ambiguous thinkers like Dugin, et. al as fascists - why not recognize them for what they are: Belonging to the very broad canon of spontaneous, non-Marxist socialists & Communists. The Communist manifesto describes nearly half a dozen different socialist tendencies in its time, the most prevalent of which being reactionary - feudal and petty-bourgeois tendencies. Communism, or socialism - in its spontaneous, unelaborated and unscientific manifestations - represent vague, inconsistent, dissipated, and even obscurantist rejections of the prevailing order and establishment. This does not mean they can be dismissed as ‘fascist,’ as fascism was the tool of an entrenched industrial, imperialist and international financial bourgeoisie. It was not an authentically spontaneous or popular phenomena.
The popular front was precisely an acknowledgement, by Western Communists, of the need to recognize the meta-political realities ushered in in the aftermath of 1929. A reality more fundamental than premised by specific political ideologies became clear, namely the minimum of formal, democratic rights. But as to their actual content, they are profusely national in character, democracy referring not to some ‘abstract’ or ‘ideal’ people, but the people as they really and actually existed, inclusive of all their historical traditions and national character. The defense of these rights against fascism was not in the name of defending the ideology of liberalism, but defending the rights of the people. This is why it was called the ‘popular front’ and not something like the ‘liberty front.’
How does today’s Communist Party, by contrast, interpret the significance of the popular front? In purely ideological terms, as a need to ‘rally behind the Democrats’ against the threat coming from the ‘right’ or the ‘Republican party.’ There was far more merit to this argument during the Bush era of the United States, when the Republican party was led by neoconservatives who did indeed threaten the democratic rights of the people through the Patriot Act, increased surveillance, etc. Yet even this would have still been a completely erroneous conception. After all, the Clinton and Obama administrations arguably did more to make inroads in encroaching upon the constitutional rights of the American people than Bush did. Indeed, not any principled politico-theoretical error, but purely ideological pathology can be blamed for the Communist Party’s revisionist veneer of maintaining ‘continuity’ with the Popular Front; a pathology related to the emergence of mass-media in general.
As pointed out by theorists like Jean Baudrillard, the era of mass media has imposed a new relationship between individuals and reality, including the reality of politics. Politics is indistinguishable from the appearance of politics, democracy from the appearance of democracy, etc. - and with the rise of mass media there has emerged an ‘ideological bloc’ instantiated in what is today known as the establishment. The intuitive clarity of concepts like the ‘professional-managerial’ class stem not so much from the technical functions carried out by members of this class, as much as the work they do to enforce ideological cohesion and consistency. They are the ‘brahmins of democracy,’ who assume the enlightened role of projecting a veneer of democracy and knowing when to look the other way in the midst of its contradictions. They uphold a discourse of collective lies (political correctness, wokeness, etc.), in the name of ‘defending’ democracy against disorder, chaos, instability - and ‘fascism.’
Taryn wants us to believe that corporate America has merely ‘hijacked’ authentic ‘democratic’ struggles and pushes its ‘white-washed’ progressive agenda due to popular pressures ‘coming from bellow.’ Should we hold our laughter? What popular pressure? There is nothing more outrageous, unpopular, and scandalous to the American public than the so-called ‘progressive agenda’ being pushed by corporate America and the media. Big tech platforms have to resort to forms of mass censorship in order to repress authentic popular expression in regards to them. YouTube even had to, hilariously, remove the dislike counter because of how ‘popular’ the wok- I mean ‘democratic’ agenda is among the American people. Leftists nervously respond to this with anxiety about how ‘popular’ fascism truly is, fueling their anti-popular, Menshevik sentiments. But the truth is, these are the sincere and authentic democratic sentiments of the people, and any honest person electing to interpret them can see that imposing upon these sentiments the conclusion of ‘fascism’ is an act of grotesque bad faith.
Indeed, the ‘popular pressure’ Taryn is referring to has always been imposed from above. If corporate America’s ‘progressive agenda’ came from bellow, why do you not find enthusiastic supporters of this agenda among the ‘lowest’ segments of the people in the chain of corporate America’s information-institution complex? The more rural people are, the more they possess reservations, skepticism, and outright hostility to all manifestations of the so-called ‘progressive agenda’ - the more educated, urbanized and institutionalized they are, the more they are on board with it. And why? Because the latter are the prostitutes of corporate America, while the former more or less don’t have to make a living through demonstrations of ideological conformity or loyalty to it. A rural American can say ‘kiss my ass’ to the ‘progressive agenda’ and still feed their family. Yet if one of these purple-haired urban kulaks so much as questions the so-called ‘co-opted’ progressive agenda, they will have no way of funding their expensive Vegan diet or monthly subscription to Chapo Crap House. Does that sound like ‘democratic pressure’ from bellow, to you?
She, alongside the leadership of the Communist Party, interpret ‘democratic struggle’ as the uninterrupted continuity of time under the reign of the establishment. ‘Progress’ simply means the latest fad, ‘reactionism’ means attempting to interrupt the continuity of the ever-evolving corporate agenda disseminated by mass media. Such is the cuckolded, shameful and cowardly line the Communist Party is attempting to enforce on bond of expulsion! And yet there exists real precedent for this erroneous conception of ‘progress’ and ‘democracy:’ It is none other than the essential split and distinction between the Bolshevik and Menshevik factions of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party. The majoritarian Bolsheviks - who wagered their faith in the ‘backward’ Russian masses, and the minoritarian Mensheviks, who believed that the duty of Communists lied in tailing the urban bourgeoisie, so as to ‘protect’ the ‘progressive and democratic’ movement from the ‘reactionaries.’ The Communist Party repudiates the very same Bolshevik line, that gave rise to the existence of the Party in the first place!
Democracy - Bolshevism verses Menshevism
The Communist Party has made a habit of excusing its treachery, its prostitution to the Democrats and its tailing behind the agenda of corporate America in the name of defending ‘small d democratic struggles.’
Taryn writes:
Some even see the January 6th fascist riots at the Capitol as an effort to overturn the bourgeois democratic process, and they become excited. They see history in motion and think it’s good news. They say that the worker is fed up with bourgeois democracy! What they want to put in its place is not perfect, but they imagine it could be negotiated on. Whatever this new system is, it must be better than liberalism, whatever that means to those who say it.
Absolutely fucking nobody who has expressed sympathy to the events of January 6th, has framed this sympathy in terms of ‘opposing bourgeois democracy.’ I challenge Taryn to produce a single example of a fucking person of any significance on the left doing this. Just one! You will find that she can’t, because she’s making this fucking bullshit up to set up the context for her argument:
‘We need to be pearl-clutching liberal Karens because January 6th was an assault on bourgeois democracy, and while bourgeois democracy is bad, it’s better than fascism!’
Instead of just saying this stupid bullshit, she has to set up a complete strawmen of leftists ‘celebrating the destruction of democracy.’ The only people who are, to the laughter of the American public, framing January 6th in terms of ‘democracy’ are the Democratic party and their lickspittles, including the leadership of the Communist Party. There is probably not a single fucking person who attended the January 6th protest, who believed that they were ‘undermining democracy.’ There is not a single person who expresses the minimum of sympathy or outreach to the protesters there, who does this on the basis of thinking that democracy was going to be overthrown.
So heaped-up in the ideological narratives of the Democrats, that Taryn has not even bothered to pay attention to the fucking rhetoric of the other side. January 6th didn’t happen because Trump’s movement believed that it was time to overthrow democracy, but because they - sincerely and genuinely - believed that it was the Democrats who had undermined democracy by rigging the election in favor of Biden. Now, regardless of what you think as to the factual merit of this allegation, the fact stands that in contrast to actual fascist movements, the protesters at January 6th genuinely did believe they were protecting the constitution and the democratic will of the people. Is this simply because they whimsically decided to reject the results of the election?
Or perhaps, the sentiment, even if mistaken, can actually be forgiven. What reason did Trump’s supporters have to trust the media, and ‘trust the process’ being carried out under their auspices? Wikileaks, a great ‘fascist menace to democracy,’ revealed the way in which the Democrats rigged the primaries in favor of Hillary. The ‘credibility’ of the established process was already destroyed by the way in which the media, the institutions, and the Democrats unfairly targeted and lied through their teeth about Trump for the entire duration of his four year term. This led to a process of all trust being broken with the establishment - and rightfully so. The American establishment has repeatedly transgressed American democracy, the constitutional rights of the people, etc. - and rules at its expense. It doesn’t take a genius to recognize that the status quo has no basis in any democratic legitimation.
The Democrats claim that January 6th was an ‘assault on democracy.’ In reality, it was an assault on a ‘symbol’ of so-called American democracy, the Capitol. In no substantive or materially political sense was ‘democracy’ at any point ever imperiled. A mob of protesters threw a party in the Capitol building. Boo hoo! The veneer and prestige of ‘sacred democracy’ was challenged. Nevermind the actual reality of democracy having already been trampled upon by the successive Clinton, Bush, Obama, etc. administrations. Nevermind the reality of democracy being dissolved by the emergence of a corrupt establishment, which rules on the basis of open corruption. The real problem, the so-called leaders of the Communist Party want us to believe, is that images of protesters running around in the Capitol hurts their feefees! This is the sweeping materialism of Taryn and other leaders of the Party, who replace sober materialist analysis with wishy-washy ideologically liberal sentimentality.
However the ways in which Taryn and the Communist Party use the word ‘democracy’ does appear very curious. Taryn appears to equate ‘democracy’ with ‘liberalism,’ and moreover, ‘democracy and liberalism’ with ‘the corporate-media-academic-Democratic Party complex.’ Both of these equivocations reflect her embarrassingly air-headed ignorance of the meaning of these words historically, and specifically by Communists. Lenin, for example, in no way equates ‘democracy’ with ‘liberalism.’ In his analysis of the Black Hundreds, Lenin identified a certain ‘democratic’ current. Did he mean a ‘liberal’ current? Did he mean a ‘forward-thinking’ or ‘culturally-progressive (by Corporate america’s standard or otherwise)’ current? Let us see:
[…] Bishop Nikon, quoting a letter from a peasant, does write: “The land, bread and other important questions of our Russian life and of the region do not appear to reach either the hands or the hearts of the authorities or the Duma. These questions and such solution of them as is possible are regarded as ‘utopian’, ‘hazardous’, untimely. Why do you keep silent, what are you waiting for? For moods and revolts for which those same ‘undernourished’, hungry, unfortunate peasants will be shot down? We are afraid of ‘big’ issues and reforms, we limit ourselves to trivialities and trifles, good though they may be.”
That is what Bishop Nikon writes. And that is what very many Black-hundred peasants think. It is quite understandable why Bishop Nikon had to be removed from Damn affairs and Duma speeches for such statements.
Bishop Nikon expresses his Black-Hundred democracy in arguments that are, in essence, very far from correct. The land, bread and all other important questions do reach the hands and hearts (and pockets) of the “authorities” and the Duma;
As you can see, Lenin does not identify ‘democracy’ with any of the qualities presumed by Taryn in her stupid shitty article. Lenin identifies ‘democracy’ with the way in which Bishop Nikon attempts to give expression to the authentic aspirations of the demos, or the Russian peasants - namely in the form of the question of land reform. The entire essence of the Bolshevik-Menshevik split lies in Lenin’s unique view of democracy. The Mensheviks identified democracy with the continuity of ‘historical progress’ that began in Western Europe, and saw the urban reformers of the Cadet party - as well as the the urban petite-bourgeoisie and big bourgeoisie - as the basis of the ‘democratic movement’ within Russia. In other words, just like Taryn, the Mensheviks viewed any challenge to this ‘movement’ to be ‘reactionary,’ since time only flows in one direction, the direction of ‘progress.’
Lenin had a different, dialectical view of historical time. In his work 1899 work ‘The Development of Capitalism in Russia,’ Lenin viewed the ‘democratic veneer’ of the urban bourgeoisie as just that - a veneer which disguised the impotence of their class in the face of Tsarism. To exhume the future, Lenin did something that is awfully reactionary by today’s Communist Party’s standards: He looked to the most backward and under-developed segment of the Russian Empire, the peasantry, in order to predict how capitalism would come to develop. In other words, he more or less completely ignored the urban bourgeoisie and urban petite-bourgeoisie as worthless parasites with absolutely no historical future, and immediately decided to ‘go down to the countryside’ (influenced by Herzen and the Narodniks) to derive the long-term political strategy of the Russian Social Democratic Party in relation to the overthrow of Tsarism.
‘Stageists’ believed that Russia first needed a ‘bourgeois-democratic’ revolution before socialists could rise to the task of their true historical mission. Lenin, in his genius, rightfully castigated this as an undialectical view of historical time. ‘Progress’ is not led by the ‘most advanced’ sections of society, but arises from within the most backward, since the most backward are not yet consolidated or established, but dwell in circumstances of oscillating, historical chaos. The class antagonism was not strictly to be found in the already-established differentiations that were to be found in the cities, but within the interstices of the peasants in the countryside. Lenin, in other words, made a wager upon chaos while the Mensheviks played it safe tailing behind the already-established urban liberal bourgeoisie. He would have been castigated as a fascist by the likes of today’s Communist Party, if only for the reason that he assumed the ultimate populist, anti-establishment position without regard for being consistent with any dogmatic ideological precepts (which are by nature undialectical).
For Lenin, the essence of the democratic revolution lied not in the enlightened, educated urban bourgeoisie toppling the Tsar - a laughably unlikely scenario - but in the peasant striving for land reform. Democratic revolutions not only establish all citizens as equal before the law, they imbue the state with the character of the people, and set each individual on a new basis - the basis out of which capitalist class distinctions arise. Some sell commodities, and others sell their labor, the very source of commodities. However given the power of the Russian landed nobility, land reform was the only path to this ‘democratic equalization,’ which paradoxically was not even possible on capitalist terms. Lenin rightfully recognized that the democratic revolution was not to be a ‘stage’ that would ‘precede’ the socialist one, but one that would occur simultaneously with it, in an alliance of the proletariat and the middle-peasantry. An alliance with the urban bourgeoisie was opposed not in the name of ideological purity, but because they were in fact a reactionary class who gained all of their wealth under the rule of Tsarism - the aspiring small bourgeoisie in the countryside, meanwhile, had everything to gain by a democratic revolution.
The Communist Party precisely repeats the error of Mensheviks, by identifying the ‘democratic struggle’ with the already-established avenues, institutions and outlets of ‘liberal-democracy:’ leading to the utterly stupid conclusion that the woke cultural agenda is today’s equivalent of ‘democratic struggle.’ They do not elect to go down and seek the material essence and origins of things, but teeter-totter at the level of the most superficial appearance. They have not even so much as interrogated the question of: Is there an equivalent, within the United States, of a land-owning monopolist class that obstructs democracy? Of course there is! Lenin identified it in his work Imperialism, the Highest Stage - proving that ‘bourgeois democracy’ never actually ‘overcame’ feudalism, and that aspects thought to be unique to the latter merely re-emerged in new ways. Lenin recognized that Imperialism had already destroyed the basis of bourgeois-democracy among the bourgeoisie. What is the basis of the ‘bourgeois-democracy’ Taryn seeks to ‘defend’ against fascism? And why are her sentiments echoed by the deep state, the mainstream media, corporate America, and the most rotten sections of the imperialist bourgeoisie?
They frame all struggle between the ‘reactionary rednecks’ of Trump’s movement and the ‘enlightened urbanites’ of ‘bourgeois democracy.’ They completely ignore, cast off, and are blind to the more ambiguous developments in rural America, shown in the article bellow:
https://theconversation.com/populist-alliances-of-cowboys-and-indians-are-protecting-rural-lands-114268
Or the disconnect and break Trump’s movement now has with Trump himself over vaccines, a contradiction not dissimilar to the one Lenin identified among the Black-Hundreds. If Trump’s movement is today the equivalent of the Black-Hundreds of the past - which is already a stretch - then to repeat Lenin’s stance would not be to fear-monger over them as the foremost threat to the party, the movement and the people, but to scoff at them as vain, misguided romantics condemned to failure. Which is precisely what Lenin did! In writing about the treacherous alliance between the Mensheviks, and the urban-liberal Cadet party, Lenin says:
Under such circumstances, the cries about the Black-Hundred danger are the result either of absolute ignorance or of hypocrisy. And it is those who conceal their real aims and act behind the scenes that must play the hypocrite. The Mensheviks are raising an outcry about the Black-Hundred danger in order to divert the workers’ attention from the game they, the Mensheviks, are playing, or did play recently, by joining the petty-bourgeois bloc and bar gaining with the Cadets.
Are ‘cries about the Black-Hundred danger’ not eerily reminiscent of ‘cries of the fascist danger of Trump?’ The difference lies only in the fact that while the black-hundreds were a tool to prop up the Tsarist establishment, MAGA genuinely was a populist challenge, however misguided and inconsistent, to the status quo. And even then, Lenin was still able to not place the ‘danger’ of the Black-Hundreds as the principle or primary contradiction facing the socialist movement. He even recognized ambiguously democratic currents within the Black-Hundreds - a socialist doing this for the Trump movement would risk immediately getting labeled as a ‘red-brown’ or ‘fascist'.’ Moreover, to say that the Communist Party has ‘joined’ with the Democrats is already too generous, when the Communist Party has made itself even less than a prostitute of the Democrats (a prostitute is at least paid for services rendered), but an outright unwanted lickspittle which the Democrats themselves consider an embarrassment.
It is clear what the democratic struggle amounts to in the present American context, drawing from the lessons of Lenin: Going down to the country, and establishing a broad coalition of popular forces united by their opposition to the increasingly undemocratic and extra-constitutional establishment. The two-party duopoly is no way an immortal or invincible feature of ‘American democracy,’ and its foundations have already been entirely shaken by Trump. The time for an authentic third party of the people, which any competent Communist Party would preponderate hegemony over due to the uniquely correct insights derived from the science of Marxism-Leninism, has now come. The rise of Silicon Valley and the so-called ‘big tech’ monopolies pose the greatest danger to any semblance to the foundations of the republic and any semblance of democracy, that is, the formal rights and liberties of the people, since fascism swept Europe in the 1930s. The struggle to restore the democratic-republic and a defense of the liberties of the people from the deep state-establishment is the principal task of Communists within America.
The Democratic establishment has already allied itself with the Ukrainian junta propped up by the fascist thugs of the maidan, aggressively positioning itself alongside NATO against Russia to complete Hitler’s genocidal vision of enslaving, exterminating and subjugating the ‘Asiatic Slavs,’ and now seeks to whip the American public into a frenzy for war against China over the Taiwan province. The sweeping and long-term ambitions of the world’s elite were made clear in Davos, as we already witness them make preparations for their ‘Great Reset.’ The forces of production have already transformed - is the superstructure of ‘bourgeois-democracy’ (and not in Taryn’s sense, but in the real sense) going to survive it? Have the prerequisites not already been made for the open dictatorship of the ‘tech elites’ and totalizing repression of the people? All of this happens while the Communist Party elevates the squabble over toilets and abortions as the epitome of ‘democratic struggle,’ while denouncing any trace of populist sentiment as ‘fascist’ and ‘reactionary.’
But beware! The bogeyman of Dugin! Red-browns! Fascists!
Epilogue
Liberalism’s Self-Destruction
A degree of confusion may arise as to the significance of ‘liberalism’ and the corresponding Communist stance.
Karl Kautsky famously remarked, and I am paraphrasing - that Communists oppose liberalism from the perspective of presupposing its achievements, while reactionaries oppose liberalism ‘from the past.’ This is more or less the sentiment shared by all Western Communists, despite being entirely undialectical and untrue.
As Domenico Losurdo pointed out, the question of liberalism is not a question of any ‘progress’ to be situated within a vector of historical time. Liberalism itself is inherently contradictory, and comes with it a double-edged sword. Often times, forms of resistance against liberalism were forms of resistance against liberalism in its most anti-human, genocidal and bloodthirsty of manifestations. Phenomena like modern slavery, sanctioned by liberalism - as Losurdo points out - were the most barbarous, savage, and inhuman in the history of mankind. The notion that liberalism represents ‘progress’ in the history of humanity does not belong to Marxism, but to the whig conception of a linear, progressive history.
In reality, liberalism does not so much represent ‘progress’ as it does a certain inevitability, that inevitability being the abstract negation corresponding to the rise of bourgeois subjectivity - which humanity experienced as a complete apocalypse, from the land-enclosures of England to the barbaric genocides of colonialism. The way in which Communism sublates liberalism does not lie in ‘supporting’ liberals or accepting manifestations of liberalism, but by sublating the essence of what makes liberalism inevitable: namely the development of the forces of production. By mastering the science of the forces of productions, the anti-human catastrophe which is historical liberalism can be avoided entirely - which it has, in countries like China. Russia, for its part, is still suffering from ‘progressive liberalism’ that nearly destroyed the country entirely in the 1990s.
However it’s also mistaken to confuse ‘liberalism’ in its broader historical sense, with the ‘liberal globalism’ of the 21st century. Dugin’s analysis here is quite insightful: Historically, liberalism ‘opened’ avenues of freedom at the expense of repressive traditions, parochial cultures, archaic laws, antiquated morality and pre-existing norms. By the time of the counter-culture, when more or less everything is ‘on the table’ and the people of the West are free to do whatever they want, liberalism entered a new stage of its development - namely, that of ‘totalitarianism.’ The very same ‘freedom’ guaranteed by liberalism has turned against it: This freedom, for example, manifests in people’s preferences for a more traditional lifestyle, religious expression, and ability to not have to be politically correct.
In this new stage of liberal psychosis, which is surely laying the ground for a real fascism of the 21st century, liberalism is attempting to finally fully ground its premises by annihilating any trace of human, substantive content. Even humanity in the literal sense is becoming challenged with the rise of transhumanistic ideas (which will surely remain only ideas - the scientific capabilities are extremely over-exaggerated). Unconscious norms and realities are now decried as manifestations of secret structures of patriarchy and white-supremacy - liberalism is no longer synonymous with freedom, but forced affirmation. Liberalism itself, after all, gave rise to this contradiction: Having exhausted its historical mission, the last obstacle to liberal freedom, turned out to be liberalism itself.
Yet in contrast to Dugin’s view, there is a way to preserve liberal freedom without entering into the 21st century genocidal liberalism of the modern West. That is precisely what states like Russia, China, and others have already done. Their ‘illiberalism’ does not lie in the repudiation of 19th century liberalism, but its sublation into a higher form of statehood, a form of statehood that is the inheritance of 20th century Communism’
Identity politics
Finally, Taryn and the Communist Party make a point of privileging the question of ‘black lives matter’ as the principal political question, and matters of race the foremost integral components of the ‘democratic struggle.’ This again stems from their racist, patronizing view toward those groups within the United States that are not represented by the state. Stemming from a lack of materialist analysis, they do not place to the fore the land question, which is almost single-handedly responsible for the racial antagonism has persisted within the United States up to the present day. Moreover, the hostility of the Communist Party toward authentically popular black nationalist leaders and organizations - while heaping praise upon the corporate and George-soros sponsored ‘black lives matter,’ eliminates the whole of their credibility so far as questions of ‘racial oppression’ are concerned.
The Communist Party has nothing to do with America’s black people, has no leadership over America’s black people and no popularity. Point, blank, and simple. As for the emphasis on the point of America’s ‘multi-racial’ working class, what exactly is the point? Not even Trump’s movement cares to depict itself as exclusively ‘white,’ so where does this liberal idiocy come from?
It comes straight form the paranoiac fantasies of the identarian liberals, who, in their obsession with race, elect to chase ghosts where there are none. Certainly the media’s over-emphasis on Charlottesville, etc. has led to the view that Trump’s movement is inevitably ‘white-supremacist.’ The truth is that Trump’s movement is very racially ambiguous. It has led to an unprecedented degree of support for the Republicans party among the black population, and Latinos make up a very strong component of MAGA even in counties close to the Mexican border, in Texas. Needless to say, a deeper, superior materialist analysis is necessary than the one copy-and-pasted straight from the mouths of the commentators of MSNBC, CNN, New York Times, and other academic philistines and parasites. By no means does their assessment reflect the reality on the ground.
A new beginning, beyond the false polarization of the Democrats and Republicans, and their respective discourses, is necessary. Materialism, after all, begins with the sobriety of accepting the possibility that everything you already think about the world - is wrong.
Haz's brilliance never seizes to amaze me.
CUNY needs a major sacking, if literal professors like Taryn, are allowed to have such Myopic views on phillisohpers Heidegger.
She probably thinks Plato is a fascist aswell.