What is represented in ideology is therefore not the system of the real relations which govern the existence of individuals, but the imaginary relations of those individuals to the real relations in which they live.
- Louis Althusser
One can be a Communist without necessarily being a Marxist. Communists existed prior to Marx’s theoretical interventions. I was a Communist before I was ever a Marxist, and I’m presently unconvinced if I’m really even a Marxist. But, so far I’ve only present a preoccupation, common to many of our age, with titles and self-identification. Such a fixation is more than unnecessary. I’ve begun this writing to clarify my relationship to theoretical terrains under the long historical banner of Marxism. Some vital, some decaying. But first, a long detour.
2014. I graduated from high school. Unlike the theoreticians and scholars I now look up to, I was a terrible student with consistently abysmal grades. I was a terrible person, and suddenly, I was face to face with the void. The nebulous future gazed at me and I resisted its stare. But, something else could command my attention, it was the summer of GamerGate, and I was hot. At present, my relationship to nascent fascist politics is difficult to write of because I’m unsure of the appropriate amount of blame I should take responsibility for. Broadly speaking, I consider that relationship mediated not only through my poor choices and abhorrent beliefs, of which I accept as part of my history, but part of my complicated relations with the Internet itself, that I believe is parcel of a larger problematic that requires further investigation. Secondly, I’ve been distant from social media for so long that it’s difficult to understand the headspace I was in when I chose to drift towards reactionary anti-feminist politics through 4chan and Facebook pages dedicated to memes and the ongoing culture wars. At the time, I was also actively browsing shock sites which traumatized me further into extreme directions. A final aspect that, looking back, I now consider important, was that it occured during a time of my own non-existent capacity for intellectual labour. The only paragraphs I read were in memes. Here you see my first sin, but perhaps the least infuential.
Ultimately, it took the help of a good friend to pull me out of that entanglement. If I recall correctly, I was complaining on Facebook about Anita Sarkeesian and Zoey Quinn so he called me out through clever argumentation and, being older and smarter than me, forced me to clarify to everyone that I was justifying harassment and made me feel like a hateful idiot, which at the time I think I needed. The experience wasn’t pleasant, but it was the jolt I needed to start distancing myself from habits I had regarding my use of the Internet that I now consider, quite simply, poisonous. In summary, I was young, irresponsible, and trapped within a broader ideological context of the anti-communism I was inundated with in public education alongside an Internet barreling head-first towards futher radicalization, all while seriously questioning my future after I was released into the atomistic world. Because, more importantly, I had to get a job.
2016 was a difficult year for many reasons. We are present in its shadow. The ascension of Trump had already taken its effect on me, due to my personal hatred of anti-immigrant rhetoric, and I was to never return to the misty-eyed liberalism of the Democrats or the all-bark social democracy of Sanders. At the time, I was working in fast food and already developing an interest in Leftist politics and theory. But, through an aleatory encounter at a bookstore, I was first referred to the anarcho-communism of Peter Kropotkin. Then, my non-relationship to anarchism began. And what a non-relationship it was! I never finished The Conquest of Bread, nor The Ego and its Own, nor anything of Emma Goldman. But I pontificated about them all. In short, I was insufferable. Alongside the anarchists I read about various post-structural and post-colonial theorists, all the big names (usually French), but my analysis never progressed beyond the superficial or aggressively unhelpful. My second sin, an occasional presence. Completely unused to, and unprepared for, patient ideological and theoretical engagement with these texts, I drift from one cursory interest to another, this one more formidable.
The first text I ever managed to read to completion was ‘A World to Win: The Life and Works of Karl Marx,’ which I picked up from the local library. This was my first encounter with the figure of Marx, but only from the sight of the shadow he cast. To be perfectly clear, my recall of the details of that biography are scarce, I only seem to remember the impression it made on me. Marx, far from the horror he’s normally presented as, appeared as a writer, a prodigious reader, and in the last instance, a fighter. I remain thoroughly impressed by, above all, his unrivaled capacity for theoretical invervention mediated through his direct political involvement in the class struggle of his time. Although that book secured my interest in Marx, unfortunately it didn’t prove to be a catalyst for a deeper engagement with his writings. I remained within the trap of my second sin. My interest in Marx was, after all, counterposed to a stubborn rejection of anything to do with Lenin, Stalin or Mao Zedong, who I regarded as deviant aberrations, gleaned from my downright pretentious lionization of anarchism, which, I must add, says more about myself than about anarchism. For this, I even have to apologize to the anarchists. But, at the same time, I must recognize that my interest in anarchism had more to do with seeking a path towards an emancipatory politics unmoored and tranquilly uncontaminated by the perceieved baggage of Soviet and Chinese history than a seriously held belief in the validity of anarcho-communist organizational practice, which I think is broadly characteristic of the anarchists I associated myself with at the time. Anything to avoid confronting the so-called terror of 20th century Communism; for that, another detour is necessary.
2020. Covid. I was a dishwasher. Nothing was improving in any respect. A crossroad appeared to me. After a cursory appraisal of J. Sakai’s infamous ‘Settlers,’ I developed an interest in the theoretical terrain of Maoism-Third Worldism, a few moments of Wikipedia surfing later and I came across Moufawad-Paul’s ‘Continuity and Rupture: Philosophy in the Maoist Terrain,’ a book I was unprepared to read for 3 long years. On the very bottom of his Wikipedia article you can find an unassuming sentence, “J. Moufawad-Paul's work received a negative reception among some circles of Maoist activists in the United States,” cited with a single article. The effects of this article would dominate my life for years. A sacred name appeared to me from the mist. GNZL, invoked by the high priest Kavathal. My third sin.
The manuscript breaks off here. Accounts have yet to be settled. The function of theory-fiction is almost purely ideological, its only objects are ideological abstractions with a material presence.