Skip to paragraph 3 to hear me dish about weird communists
Every day, I’m somehow more shocked and less surprised by what I see as the catastrophic and unfortunate failure of progressives. Failure to captivate the people we claim to support, form a unified front, or get anything done on a large scale (aside from easily reversible concessions), despite all of us having these things on our to-do lists, and the consequences quite literally being life or death. I enrolled in a CUNY school a few months ago. In my labor history class, we study labor unions and how they overcame/succumbed to their oppressors and/or to the gendered, racial, cultural and political divisions in their own ranks. For context, I went back to real school because I was sick of being an ignorant art school dropout, and I’m afraid I’m unqualified to talk in depth about these issues— that said, writing helps me see patterns, and the patterns of brief union, infighting, division and oppression come up over and over, at school and otherwise. Fuck it, this is my website, read if you want to or don’t.
One of our readings was about the Homestead strike of 1892 and the American Federation of Labor. The AF of L, a sort of a union of other unions that formed towards the end of the 19th century, posited at the time that failure of past movements was largely a result of the “unskilled” workers’ supposed tendency to provoke violent retaliation with their mass strikes and destruction of property, and by extension a failure of the “skilled” workers to separate from the “unskilled.” I’ve put “skilled” and “unskilled” in quotes to emphasize how arbitrary the division was between the two groups. AFL leader Samuel Gompers believed that the labor of “skilled” workers could be leveraged peacefully, rationalizing the needs of the workers and winning concessions from the factory owners and businessmen without risking anyone’s lives. This strategy didn’t work, one reason being that the “unskilled” generally saw the “skilled” as an elitist minority who didn’t have their best interests at heart, and the “skilled” were an elitist minority who only had their own interests at heart. The Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, a union of “skilled” workers in the ironworks around the Appalachian Mountains, were hated by their non-union coworkers, and created deep divisions in the workplace. The Amalgamated went on strike at the Homestead plant, and when (unsurprisingly) failed to negotiate with the Carnegie Corporation, the Carnegie Corporation locked all the workers out of the building and brought in the goddamn Pinkerton private police force to drive the workers away. And then when the steel workers beat the fuck out of them and the Pinkertons surrendered, Carnegie got permission to bring in 4000 motherfuckin state troops less than a week later. The troops crushed the workers mercilessly, killed some people, and then the capitalists brought in some scabs to the plant. All was well for the rich and powerful, as it usually is in this godforsaken world.
On my first day in class, I was chatting with a couple of Marxist classmates, who were very nice to me. I told them I was an artist, and one of them invited me to a leftist gathering to carve stamps. I immediately said yes, of course, but when I checked the flyer they sent to me, I saw it was run by, of all people, the Maoist Communist Union of NYC. No fucking way, I didn’t believe it. My heart sank a bit, and sparked a burning question: what could possibly cause a bunch of young New Yorkers to pledge their allegiance to a dead Chinese tyrant in the year of our lord 2025? I vaguely knew about what happened in China while Mao was Chairman, and that it was pretty bad for a few dozen-million people, so I was at a loss for what anyone could see in him as a leader these days– I had to get to the bottom of this. I started by reading the entire Wikipedia page for Maoism. The more I read, the more questions I had, my most charitable one being: what does a (mostly) agricultural 20th century Chinese peasant war-movement have to do with students in modern day NYC? Less charitably, don’t these people know about the famine and the prison labor and the kidnapping and all that shit?
On the day of the stamp-carving, I took a bus to another bus to a stop close to the Brooklyn College campus, found the address of a decently large house, texted my classmate, and she let me into a room with around 20 people in it– the first floor, one of two that those living there had access to, was noticeably larger than my entire apartment, and had the largest, softest carpet I’ve ever felt in the living space of a group of twenty-somethings. After watching a PowerPoint presentation on the use of block printing in Chinese Communist propaganda, for which the presenter expressed genuine awe and inspiration, and a quick tutorial, we were led into the dining room/kitchen, in which there was coffee and pizza with peppers and broccoli on top (as an ex-vegetarian who loves greens, I was thrilled). We carved our stamps and talked. I wish I could remember the conversation better. Someone lamented that their wife didn’t read political theory and was not a Marxist like them, so these kids went back and forth exchanging tips on how to convince her to be “on our side,” or suggesting readings to introduce her to (namely the Communist Manifesto). I said, unfortunately not very eloquently, that I think it’s more effective to convince people by manipulating them, changing your language to words and concepts they already understand, rather than simply stating your principles in the terms you’re most familiar with. I also admitted, out of fear of the ramifications of Maoist Communism, and I regret admitting, that I’m obsessed with violence, and that I think it needs to be studied in order to be avoided. I was asked if I have a hard time trusting people. I said yes, definitely. I confided in my classmate that I was afraid of an authoritarian. She told me that Mao had done some writing on how to avoid one. Later, my classmate left, I stayed, and four of us had a sort of debate about the show BoJack Horseman; I firmly stated that I’ll always love it dearly and think of it as a brilliant work of art, and my opponent confidently declared it “nihilistic” and (to my understanding?) implied that the sympathetic portrayal of the horrible BoJack was bad for society as a whole. Someone brought up their hatred of Camus’s Sisyphus metaphor (I haven’t read Camus) for its nihilism, and I feared what little in this world I actually believe in. I was invited to movie night by one of the guys (some Charlie Chaplin film), then promptly kicked out by one of the girls before it started so the group could do “internal development.”
I’m afraid that most of my beliefs are actually un-beliefs– convictions that something or someone or a system is bad, and should be gotten rid of. Racism is bad, xenophobia is bad, sexism is bad, ableism is bad, trans/homophobia is bad, genocide is bad, renting is a bad living situation, billionaires shouldn’t exist, most of the people in power should be gotten rid of, nihilism is poisonous to a social movement, violence should probably be avoided etc. It’s much easier to believe something should be rid of than to dream up a good alternative. When I’ve told people about my day with the Maoists, I’ve been asked every time if they were Chinese; none of them mentioned their nationality so I really don’t know, but I’m sure that their allegiance to Maoism has nothing to do with cultural upbringing, except maybe by way of rebellion. In fact, it is by way of rebellion that one must become a Maoist, or a Communist in general, in modern day America.
These past weeks, I’ve been reading from the Maoists’ website, from Mao’s own words, from a book of Chinese history, the Communist Manifesto, the Wikipedia page for Anarchism, a history of a successful textile workers’ strike in the 1912 (which I’ll write about later when I’m in a better mood), the failed Homestead strike, some history of Reconstruction after the Civil War and the Populist farmers’ movement, and James Baldwin’s novel If Beale Street Could Talk (unrelated, I just love his books). It wasn’t as difficult to read these all things as it would’ve seemed to me a few months ago. I’ve come to the conclusion, ironically, that me and the Maoists are in agreement on the majority of our principles, but the unspoken truth is that, despite our shared goal of eliminating class hierarchy in society, the Maoists, and Marxist-Leninists in general, are authoritarians— that is, they seem to think that if Marxist-Leninist-Maoist-Communists were the only people in charge, everyone would be equal and happy. Fucking ironic, in my historically well-documented opinion. Mao believed in egalitarianism in the way of lowering everyone’s social standing to farmers, peasants and workers— everyone except for himself and his cabinet, of course (many of whom he changed his mind about later, and “disappeared” to the Laogai “reeducation” slave labor camps with the other nonbelievers). I read about the Great Leap Forward in China, and the resulting famine and imprisonments, and I read about the Hundred Flowers Campaign, and its resulting paranoia and scholasticide (a fun word that refers to the destruction of education systems & murder of scholars). I learned of lives defined by unpaid labor, starvation, fear of neighbors, fear of the consequences of contradicting a Great Leader, and I thought of Sisyphus: the boulder he was condemned to by an omnipotent force, sentenced like a prisoner to roll up and cast back down a hill every day, all alone. Then, I thought of plush carpets and pizza, stamp carving, political discussions of vanguard parties and freeing the proletariat from the bourgeoisie, all in a neighborhood with racial and class divisions so clear that I could see them in my 7-minute walk from the bus stop to the college campus to the large house. Whose side are we on, really?
After my second week of class, I brought up to my Marxist classmates how I got (politely) kicked out of the Maoists’ house. The one who was there told me that made sense to her— as she understood it, I was, by my own admission, manipulative, obsessed with violence, and distrustful of others. God, of course I came off bad! It hit me that what she saw as untrustworthy, I saw as the exact opposite— my violent obsessions motivated by peace-seeking, my view of manipulation as a sort of revolutionary tactic informed by my artistic background (art being inherently manipulative, a fact so obvious to me that it’s difficult to communicate), all shared in the interest of plain honesty, which I see as the utmost form of respect and the opposite of manipulation and distrust. But, I fear, when you say something to a group of people, especially one you don’t understand and who doesn’t understand you, the nuance gets lost, and what’s left is only the strongest words: violence, manipulation, distrust. I never remember what people tell me exactly, and I shouldn’t expect others to either. Ironically, I might have to plan meticulously to come across as an honest person if I’m to be in a room with people whose beliefs are so abhorrent to me. Most people probably don’t think it’s even worth being in such a room.
I wonder if this tragic aspect of humanity is what made Mao so effective. He borrowed language from those he saw as successful revolutionaries (Marx, Stalin and Lenin), categorized people bluntly into subsections of Proletariat and Bourgeois classes, and then further sorted these class categories into “friends” and “enemies,” “leftists” and “rightists.” He inspired his supporters, already traumatized by war, invasion, and previous authoritarians, to direct their rage and sorrow against the people around them, all in the name of a beautiful and prosperous new world. It’s ironic how an authoritarian can appeal to communists, people so inherently critical of hierarchy. Maybe I am a communist— I certainly believe in the revolutionary power of a united working class, and I know for sure that the owning class is incompatible with society as a whole. We see the truth of the Bourgeoisie-Proletariat paradigm in our daily lives— at work, at the grocery store, on the internet, at the food distributions and community centers I work with, on the walk from the bus stop to the large house. However, there’s a long history of anarchists— that is, anti-hierarchical socialists— getting kicked out of larger communist movements, overpowered by authoritarian thinkers (The International Workingmen’s Association did this to the Bakuninist socialists, for example), despite anarchists often being among the most passionate defenders of humanity.
I’ve finally decided, after years of suspecting as much but not having done the research until now, that I am an anarchist. Anarchists, despite our flaws, are allies to the people, and I believe in the tendency of humanity to take care of each other, even without a centralized state or violent rule of law. We get shit done with almost nothing— feed people with food banks and distros, run community centers, organize parties and fundraisers, make art and music, share culture, study, hang out, let nothing go to waste, care for the vulnerable despite it all, work with people to help the people. We’re angry at an unjust world, and we celebrate humanity. We care so fucking much, even for people who hate what we believe in, that it turns into rage, and we channel that rage into art, music, fun parties, raves, screaming and mosh pits, anarchy is punk rock at its core. We also, critical of the winners in the world, always seem to lose our battles, and get rejected by our allies when we’re no longer useful to them.
I think that as soon as a person or group in a progressive movement believes themselves capable of ruling a society, alone or in a vanguard party, the humanity of the movement is lost, the most vulnerable people are abandoned, and the structures already in place are doomed to remain violently oppressive, even and especially after the power changes hands. Authoritarians always win, because they’re the ones who believe in winners. I’ve never met a Marxist-Leninist at a community center. The Maoists would be insulted to know that I don’t see them as effective organizers, or as a threat to anyone at all— they’re not activists, just social climbers with bad branding, doomed to fail almost like it’s on purpose, and I wrote all this largely to get them out of my head. I need to be done with my anger toward powerless people. I’d rather spend my time figuring out what I actually believe in— honesty, empathy (ick!), education, art, community (so gay), collaboration (barf!), and safe (lame) outlets for rage. Aside from the occasional chain of command, and some interpersonal hierarchies in which those at the top are there to give knowledge and care to those below— teachers and students, or parents and their children, for example— I think the world will only get better through non-hierarchical efforts. I’ll never see a world without winners, but I’ll work for it anyway.
P.S. Leave a comment if you want me to add a bibliography
