Je ne suis pas Marxiste

It has been said that my work is “politically schizophrenic”. What if, however, this was a guardrail against dogmatism? The Communist movement is like a white light dispersing through a glass prism, splitting itself into different strains: anarchist, council communist, Maoist, Trotskyist, Marxist-Leninist, left-populist and so on. The life-world of each brings certain tactical and strategic demands on their bearers. So, there is an expected way of interacting with the world, a shared belief in the correctness of the accepted political line. This poses issues. Mistakes in politics come from the fetishization of a particular method. If an activist is an anarchist, they will rightly criticise bureaucratization but be encouraged to reject elections; if a Trotskyist, they will engage in elections, but favour vertical State-centric governance structures à la vanguardism; and in turn, both reject nationalism as reactionary, which a Marxist-Leninist would disagree with, highlighting that its progressive use is viable. These dictums come in specific thought-terminating pairings (horizontalism - anti-elections, verticalism - elections, internationalism - anti-nationalism, anti-imperialism - nationalism), each coupling presenting itself as a self-enclosing totality investing the libido while foreclosing other possibilities.

What if we were able to travel the entire circumference, from the left-deviation to the right-deviation, in one fell swoop, forbidding a singular interpretation of Communist ideology from overcoding our political consciousness and installing a despotic signifier, therefore introducing a permanent destabilizing force in politics which holds contending signifiers in a state of flux and achieves a syncreticism which fits the local, national and historical context? This halts the halting of differentiation imposed by ideology before it can totalize, striate behaviour and leave activists in the stagnated rut of an enclosed group-fantasy. A schizoid line of flight becomes necessary which escapes the trap of ideology’s parasitic takeover of the mind. Destabilize the symbolic order, do not let it quilt, let the Real seep in through the cracks [1]. This is the issue of concretization. Each question demands a practical answer. Communist methods do not prescribe a set list of policies, rather serve as a heuristic guide to analyse the unfolding of history. Therefore, for each issue, a different framework, a fresh answer.

After all, is this not what the Bolsheviks did, before the map preceded the territory, before their ideology became reified as an image, as simulacra, mimicked? Lenin shifted from the left-deviation to the right-deviation all throughout his life according to the conditions at hand. It is known[2] that the Bolsheviks refused to totalize their newspaper around a singular line, letting ideas flow freely, and subsequently, the mass line to emerge thereof. The organisation of the Party itself was fluid [3], with different levels of centralisation and de-centralisation throughout the years as historical events demanded, being constantly fractured and reconstituted due the intensity of Tsarist oppression which hailed the schizoid line of flight into the organization. It was only when the “official” Zinovievite historiography of the Russian Revolution arose in the 1920s that the myth of the dogmatic, tightly-knit and controlled Party became widely accepted.

This is why Marx said: “Je ne suis pas Marxiste”[4]. Marxism is only a heuristics guide to aid in analysis, a form without content, and it is its form which becomes an ideological investment of desire, which, consequently, displaces the possibility of its filling with content. This severs the connection between the method’s form and content. Hence, too many Communists today reverse the relationship between reality and ideology, trying to fit a square peg in a round hole, in what is known as ‘worldview Marxism’. This is because ideology comes to override reality once it begins to feast on the libido and uses it to reproduce itself.

[1] Žižek Slavoj, "Repeating Lenin", 2001

[2] Draper Hal, "The Anatomy of the Microsect", 1973

[3] Bookchin Murray, "Listen, Marxist!", 1969

[4] Heinrich Michael, "Je ne suis pas Marxiste", 2015