An Open Parasocial Letter to the Marxists Provided to Me by the YouTube Algorithm
What are the requirements to be a Marxist? Do you just have to say it? What are the requirements to be a Republican or Democrat? Are these requirements physical and external, even behavioral? Or are they psychological, internal – you just have to say it?
The tumultuous years of the Trump and Biden presidencies destroyed any vestige of impartiality in nearly all available media; from mainstream, to podcasters and youtubers and talk radio. I participated for a while, coming from the artistic left. Then the team-sloganeering of CNN, MSNBC, and the bubbles of social media became so unhinged from any effectual reality that any one day any real thing I said could land me on either side of the political spectrum without regard to any consistency of ideal. I am not a centrist, yet I found myself in the middle of democrats and republicans.
So dislodged, I searched. And I searched and I searched for anyone on the left or right that could not parrot a party line or spend all available time bashing one side while saying they were impartial. Following some Bernie people, the closest thing to a non-consumer politics I had seen in recent memory, I found some weird Marxists. We’ll call them the W-Marxists. As the YouTube algorithm goes – Sublation, TiR, Pascal, Reed, Norm, Varn, Cutrone etc.. Listened to all-together they resemble a cargo-cult Voltron-looking 15-meter high Frankenstein recreation of Chomsky in the 1990s. Ok that’s probably just me. Anyway – not even the regular Marxists that basically do the angel-on-the-head-of-a-pin count with 150-year-old theories and nerd out on masturbatory obscurantist esoterica that feels designed to remove all political voice from anyone with less than 130 IQ (even the scam of IQ measures something) or a masters degree (universities are also a scam) – say anything deeply antagonistic to the democratic party line culture. Don’t get me wrong, the W-Marxists also occasionally bury themselves so deep in theory they have a perpetual excuse from much outward political action. But they take breaks and talk about actual shit – sometimes at risk and against the norms of their own socio-economic groups like Reed and Norm. Where is Norm Against the Norm? Bestseller AF no Cap. And so I found a lodge of sorts, and began to appreciate Marxism’s dialectical materialism as meta-theory to describe socio-political realities. I stop short of communist theory – Marx was no psychologist nor sociologist and to this day Marxists tend to avoid the fact that capitalism succeeds in large part because it is much more intuitive to a species of fairly violent and dumb apes when they’re in social structures suspended by hyper-macroscopic complexities. Both free-market economists and Marxists alike err in their presumption of rote intelligence, free will, and logic as general features of the human race. If only Sapolsky could join the cargo-giant, the W-golem might surpass 1990s Chomsky.
The point here, in the middle, is that I find their Marxist critiques of our geo-political landscapes to be the most clear-sighted of any political content available, period. And yet it is also the most ineffectual. It’s like dolphins advocating for air-breathing to fish. They have to swim in the water to do it, and the practical effects are completely useless to fish, if not downright detrimental.
To be a democrat, you register, and you vote. To be a republican, you register, and you vote. Even to be a socialist, you register as a democratic-socialist, and vote democrat. To be a libertarian you register as independent and vote republican. But what do you have to do to be a Marxist? Watch their videos? Buy their merch?
The W-Marxists will talk all day about Capitalist Realism and never bring up how they are trapped in it – shilling for likes and patrons or selling ad space to Marxist organizations that get you tax breaks for donations… They are air breathers in the sea and no matter how much air they breathe they will still have to swim. The only way to be a Marxist is to participate in capital exchange. It is completely depoliticized. There is no movement, there is just some product you can buy. The only vaguely Marxist thing about it is the free samples.
Now, I’m just some agro-noise artist burn-out. I’m definitely over-educated, but not in Marxism, philosophy, or political theory. I just spent enough time in universities to get a real good feel for disentangling jargon (don’t get me started on the giant scam that is quantum entanglement). But I see the picture of the world the W-Marxists are painting – a global techno-oligarchical capitalist empire with no alternatives, that seems to improve human life just enough to squeeze out more suffering while it literally destroys the planet with a fantasy of infinite economic growth all for the benefit of a tiny few. And all I have to do to be a Marxist just like them is like and subscribe, join the Patreon, buy the merch, and agree the world is burning while it burns. Right? Is there something else? What are the requirements to being a Marxist?
I’ll be clear here at the end. The point I’m driving is that there is no requirement just like there’s no requirement to be a McDonald’s fan other than you spend money at McDonald’s. There is no political movement here. Now, sure, the entire ecosystem is set up to dissolve movements, the sea is for fish, not air-breathers, and the air-breathers basically have to turn into fish. To quote LCD Soundsystem, everyone’s talking about it, no one is getting it done. If you do not require anything to be a part of a movement, there is no movement (which reminds me of the highly interviewed and regimented protesters of MLK vs. the mob social and dating scene that are modern protests). And if it’s not a movement, it’s just another product on the shelf. Thirty-odd years ago we were warned of this by comedian Bill Hicks; it’s just the anti-market market. Lotta potential dollars there.
Maybe Marxists should buy only used clothes? Maybe they should not participate in processed sugar? Maybe they should fast once a month as a symbolic rejection of capitalism’s chains of consumerism? I mean if they’re never going to field a candidate for office, maybe they should minimize their use of conflict metals? There’s no identity here. In a world of identities. There is no rite, no ritual. There’s something really empty about it. It’s wallpaper. It is masturbation with not a chance in hell to fuck. Empty release. Their positions are flags flown by pundits left and right when convenient, and otherwise (and usually) ignored or conflated with the enemy. Which is disappointing given the clarity of analysis it offers when dealing with a globalized society facing possible climate collapse within a few decades. Not to mention the unfathomable amount of needless human suffering happening right now, as you read this, simply because of the grotesque distribution of resources in our global empires of capital.
In a sense, I feel its very structure is a palliative placebo to any real-world socialism or Marxism. It is the dream you have of pissing, when you can’t wake up to pee.
I wanna know: is there any god-damned way to be a Marxist other than buying shit? If not, can we even imagine such a thing? And no, I ain’t doing it. The Agro-Noise prevents me.
The revolution will not be subscribed. But I will remain so; with non-logical, socio-economically determined, and unintelligent, hope.
-Roesing Ape
Weirdos Mentioned:
Sublation Media: Douglas Lain, Ashley Frawley,
This is Revolution Podcast: Jason Myles, Pascal Robert, M. Toussaint, Deep State Kuba, Djene Bajalan
Adolf Reed
Norman Finkelstein
C. Derick Varn
Chris Cutrone
Noam “Father Gnome” Chomsky
Chuck Marx
LCD Soundsystem
His Holiness The Reverend Bill Hicks
Capitalist Realism via Mark Fischer, First Martyr of the Order
And Special Thanks to Brianna Joy Grey for being the tiny entrance to this weird Marxist rabbit hole.
And Bernie Sanders for getting me to her and ending my footsie with the democratic party
THE END
FIN
Go away.
Fuck off.
wtf.
