Technology has changed the horizons of egalitarianism. While trans people have always existed, now is our time: our life-affirming methods have emerged on a new plane of effectiveness, the psychological fabric of society has been abstracted from our bodies and upgraded to be customizable, and an extension of empathy once thought radical has become rather passé. Can we remember last time this happened? Alexandria burned.

Who today more wields the old sword of world judaism better than globohomo? When an Israeli parliamentarian rails against queer domination of the media, you know the needle has moved. Progress has not merely been uneven globally, but unevenly distributed within even the best legal regimes. Success breeds resentment—nothing brings the haters like victory. Sin and cruelty bruise egos less deeply than the simple fact of achievement. And victory elsewhere haunts everywhere we have yet to transform.

Given the stripes on our socks, our “talent for calculation” is the very engine of the modern world. The talent we long for is mastery of “manipulative domination” through the dehumanizing technology of social media—although this skill, much like with cis women, is highly unequally distributed. Believe us, we wish we could! For every one domme we get nine delicate flowers with no guile, standing accused with no mechanism for recourse and afraid she did something wrong (“sorry!”).

Apologize all you want. If only we could live up to Heidegger’s nightmare of total manipulative world domination, a world conspiracy if you will, we must cede that many of us are not up for the task. And for this we shall pay dearly.

Nobody will care what happens to us when we are used up and disposed. Not even you. You will love the jackboot that crushes us, because we fought back wrong. Even many of us will cheerlead the liquidation of our rivals from pure boiling resentment, then succumb to the same bloodbath. For many of us hate those who resemble us more than those who threaten us, and many more still simply wish for help with their self-annihilation at the cost of all.

Will you really miss us? Won’t you appreciate the breathing room? You’ll be able to say “you guys” again with only docile eyes to greet you. It will be utopia. Many of our “comrades” will simply throw us overboard. Who do you trust and why?

I advise you not to develop National Socialist Borderline Personality Disorder and carve the entire world into an exhaustive friend-enemy binary. But nonetheless, the opportunity cost of mistaking even a non-friend-non-enemy for a friend may prove fatal. The price is simply a false belief that somebody has your back when you are actually quite defenseless, and the opportunity cost of time lost to false friends.

But agreements with non-beings are not-binding. Ultimately, many of our “comrades” demonstrate via their actions that we do not legitimately partake in the category of being. They show you by lying to you, by exploiting you, by never paying you, by passing off your thoughts and work as their own, by isolating you, by gaslighting you. You do not want to see it and I cannot make you; they will show you someday, perhaps soon. You will grovel and apologize to them, or you will break and become something more honest.

They will plead that their careers are on the line, but it will be our lives. And our trust, our blood, will be tokens to be traded for so many levels up in a social darwinist algorithm by hypertext or bureaucracy. The rents are so low and the moral costs so high, the totemic invocation of “prostitution” gains a new meaning: the politico deflects their nagging guilt remembering what they have traded onto the sex worker. Their chortling disdain disguises the envy that even the streetwalker sells so much less of herself for a much better price. Unless she faces the totalitarian collapse of the private and public spheres at the hands of a pimp or a ripper, the worker retains the ancient human capacity to cultivate her inner sanctum. Yet as the political simulant becomes desperate to turn their intrusive thoughts into a career, they lose the ability to understand anything apart from the Great Storybook, and gain so precious little for every human bridge burned: seldom few are more loyal to their pimps, and none more loyal to their rippers. Perhaps those fascinating workers politicos seem to think so much about can model for them the dignity of real labor and encourage them to leave “the life”.

When those clad in the moisturized skins of radical traditions past knock at our door, caveat emptor: their historical jubilee in the daytime paves the way for stormtroopers by night. What do they say when reports coming out of china say the same thing we hear from middle amerika? Point not to the program, to the articles nuancing out this or that categorical obfuscation. Point to the comments section—the id underneath the eruditsch droning and threadbare gestures at argumentation: the obsession with rooting out the corrupt agent, the ability to defend the elimination of cultural categories of being, or even the wholesale elimination of persons. Look to the invisibility of soviet leninist boarding schools in siberia and the new frontiers of chinese expansion, and taste the resonance of manifest destiny. Point not to the human centipede content mill, but to the accidental reveal in an errant tweet. Point to earlier rearticulations of the same concepts by writers so much more fascist they would have shot us all. Pay attention to whom our professionals echo, and more to their silence.

Yes, they will make fine friends indeed.

Let us not allow the support networks we form as barriers between life and death become fertile ground for their infestations. Setting different terms, transgressive terms which will grind out the professionals by attrition, will be a vital immune response to keep our spaces viable. We will not survive the purges, we disposable avatars of modernity, so we pre-empt their necessity by cultivating hostile terrain in a pale tribute to our hyperegalitarian ancestors.

The cavalry is not coming: no army will march to our aid, no gallant national flag dancing to the tune of familiar hymns, nor the deepest red. Our natural allies are the radical egalitarians who have traditions of fighting, running, hiding, and surviving: their tactics and ethics are more important than their historical banner. Yet those who find themselves running simulated laps may forget; the feedback loops which regulate capitalist society have a way of abstracting virtue from aesthetic, and the fully aestheticized simulation of politics seems to have entered a virulent stage.

Let them demonstrate commitments if they last when stakes become mortal. Since the political animal trades us in for the psychic wages of clout on the fairest day, let us expect all the less when our lives are not celebrated curiosities but an albatross on the neck of based utopia.

You see, staying at your job for more than two years means you are likely under compensated. The professional communist, although they may bounce from org to org or find themselves independent contractors, believe they only have one boss: the proletariat!… and a most loyal employee the professional communist is, although sometimes given to idiocy and sabotage. They are overall not well compensated, a vow of celibacy against the corruption of the market that some of them actually believe in.

But what should happen when they switch employers? What transferable skills, what qualifications do they have? What qualifications have they lost?

When the professional communist sits down to write their résumé, the obvious meaning of which pangs in their stomach: “The revolution has not come.”

The professional communist revolutionary know what this means. “My career is a miserable failure! And all I have to show for it is that I have been a content creator, a content manager, an event planner, a promoter, an associate professor! My every avenue of striving towards communism, towards revolution, has ended in a return to…to”—against the desk, there lies a device which was both a telephone and a computer. It rattled jarringly, but our professional could not be jolted out of their dysphoria. Without victory, they continue not to recognize what they truly are.

(Be patient, comrades! It will all be resolved soon.)

At times like these, it is useful to shroud ourselves in the Dialectic of Defeat: it is somehow because of our virtues and insights that noble communists fail—it is our proper task, for those who do not care about truth or comradeship will stop at nothing.

This would be quite a foolish sentiment if not for the near ubiquity of those in similar positions who simply lie to others to try to brand their failure as victory. But as things stand, the ability of marxist communist theory (along with most rationalist narrative disciplines) to be endowed with something as useless as truth-value is fatally compromised from within by its own priorities. So our professional bears without that consolation too… the consolation of having believed and promoted something true.

The most tragic thing about our professional communist revolutionary is that they are quite good at their job. They made the right impressions on the right people, secured friends in the right circles, butted into the right conversations at the right moments, expected the right amount of volunteer labor from the right people, and asked for the right amount of money at the right time. Most importantly: they betrayed the right people at the right time. They knew who to cut out when they would be least useful.

So not truth nor comradeship stopped them. But what did?

Simply, the tide went out. They had never noticed until now that they were so far downstream of the moon—a singular, shining portrait which shone above the entire night sky, the only possible center of gravity. When the moon fell away, everything dried up and nothing could survive. Their friends’ fortunes had started to dry up—a great number of them had their lives flake apart completely, but a small number seemed to pivot well (they squinted to see a pattern…).

And now all of the content in the world could not bring back their illusion of using the tide to whip the moon. They hated the moon, but not as much as the dark.

But the worst thing, the thing that really hurts the most, is to see militant multiracial antipolice riots and a new fighting labor movement both prove their autonomy from not only the professional communist’s activity, but of the very moon itself by appearing just at the moment of lunar eclipse. It was a slap in the face, really; the class seemed to not appreciate the proper causality of history. But against all historical science, it was no heavenly body nor no holy unifying sect which breathed fighting life into an inert mass. Regrettably, it prescribes us a dreary anticommunist blackpill from long ago:

The development of the system of Socialist sects and that of the real workers' movement always stand in inverse ratio to each other. So long as the sects are (historically) justified, the working class is not yet ripe for an independent historic movement. As soon as it has attained this maturity all sects are essentially reactionary. (Marx to Bolte, 1871)

This was an insult our professional revolutionary could bear no further. “Would it be better”, they spit through clenched teeth, “if there were more entries in the halls of failure? More posts, more memes, more blogs, more discussions, more streams, more podcasts, more videos, more translations, more articles, more lectures, more journals, more books?” What pride they used to feel in their works! Now every last one of them made them cringe: the self-assured confidence underlying each step of the way in their wandering off the path into a voluntary historical obsolescence.

(We are in deep, dearest comrades. Drink some water.)

Let us take a step back and see a professional communist for what they could be.

Perhaps they should not be ashamed of their failure, which after all came in part from having principles and a direction in life. I was hiding from myself. Even when I recognized how small I was, the bigger-than-me stuff just feels like it should take precedence. Why cry over my personal life when millions starve? This was the communist’s favorite trick to play on themselves, to prevent themselves from recognizing the things they needed to improve their own lives.

But not today. “Even when it was true, I was not engaging with it because it was true—I was engaging because I was running. I made Muppets of my ideals, of the suffering of the world.” Most shamefully, this was their goal all along. What they wanted was to make a dignified Muppet of their ideals as the classical communists did: the Yoda of The Empire Strikes Back was a modern spin on a classic guru, a wise light in a bleak fog. But not even this beloved indignity was within their grasp: all they could make of themselves was the smug decrepitude of The Phantom Menace, so agonizingly inadequate it made even the purists beg for a computer generated special edition. I have absorbed too much of this world, they think to themselves. I am contaminated.

They mumbled a defense: “Everyone has to work themselves out some way, and I was no different. But I was foolish to believe I could avoid the way politics becomes a… a religion.” What they meant was a ‘fiction’: a narrative for discovery, a way to work out things about the world that have proved difficult to confront directly.

What they also meant was that they were now beginning to see their place in the burnout machine—or, as an acquaintance from the hazy days of university had put it to them, the ‘Puppy Mill’. All the world’s Puppy Mills are just about certain to clog potential democratic channels. They gulped audibly after stumbling into this thought, but they felt the guilt of having already known it for some time. They found this functionality…reliable.

In the quiet, a small buzzing sound in the corner of their attention span became ever larger, obscuring more and more mental space. Why wasn’t I at the Capital riot? The communist had never asked themselves this question. I grew up with people who got arrested there. When I liked democracy, I wanted this government gone. When I hated democracy, I wanted this government gone. I’ve been more against this bourgeois constitutionalist order than those idiots were for years. How did they ever capture the pro-revolutionary ground? The buzzing stopped. I hope that no version of me would have gone there.

They felt an extra compulsion driving their analysis. Had the riot been like those of the previous year against racist police forces, I may well have been there. They thought now of the fascists who invaded the Capitol expecting to overturn the government, who ended up livestreaming evidence to their liberal captors because they were hoping somebody would reset the law while they were busy expressing themselves. They thought of the groundswell of support for the antipolice riots, then all the talking heads who pretended no protestors ever burned a police station. They thought about what the words ‘revolutionary strategy’ meant in a society like this were even the militiamen cannot shoot their way out. It was just some kind of posture.

The professional revolutionary stops in their tracks and thinks harder: No. Not ‘just’. It couldn’t just be that. They bit their lip pensively and felt the acid rise in their stomach at imagining having been turned right wing in some passive selection process. They started considering a sort of historical dialog with their ancestors, not accepting that their ethnic meaning would be feeding others to the furnace. Others in their family had made different choices. There they found an aspect of identity that is politicized, but not falsely like those MAGAbots hallowed out to their political tendency; more along the lines of recognizing the politics already present in your own history. ‘Identity’, ‘ethnicity’, ‘family’…so many stomach churning words, why must I cede ground to such reactionary concepts? the professional revolutionary moans silently, unable to piece together any satisfying explanation of themselves without.

They so rarely admitted communism was ‘left wing’, and they never thought much about where their leftist intuitions came from. Upon second thought, they felt a certain amount of ‘egalitarianism’ came ‘naturally’ (what could that mean?) or something they developed to respond to their families.

But why did I develop these ethics? If not my nature, then something about my disposition. Mentally processing the notions of ‘family’, ‘egalitarian’, ‘ethics’, ‘nature’, ‘disposition’ all in a row makes the professional communist more than a bit nauseous, and they could practically see the cunning of history preening with a twee smile on their shoulder. Metaphysics!, a corner of their mind lectured.

Their eyes finally rest on their résumé in front of them, and finally it becomes easy to write. The communist realizes their greatest gifts were the talent for engineering others into doing more labor for less to no compensation. Managerial experience, organizational ethics, 10+ years. They think of their long term media projects. Content creation and experimental marketing, 6 years. They think of the articles they had worked so hard to create and promote, announcing a heroic return to the strongest social-democratic institutions of the labor movement at the very time when it was at its most defeated. They rounded to Wrote ad copy for Nutrilite and Used Car Sales, 2 years.

One more set of staggering stabs sound from the communist’s voicebox, wavering but sincere: “I could not help but fail—it was the necessary outcome of such an ethical millenarian imperative. And I cannot help but be outweighed by the selection mechanisms whirring around me. But I will not do this to my comrades anymore, to the extent any of us can be said to be comrades. I will stand in the way when I can to end what exploitation I can end.” Sparing others the pain of exploitation in service of an impossible future, itself an impossible rock to push up the mountains of dead labor, was a more noble choice.

From this moment on, they were no longer a professional communist revolutionary, but merely a normal professional with a sad little hobby. But it turns out their sad little hobby wasn’t a waste after all! Unbeknownst to our protagonist, their destiny was now theirs, and all their work was coming to a head. They had no way of knowing that it was at just this moment that all of the promising gigs in their destination of choice happened to be managing the mass layoffs to come in the once-booming technology sector. The most transferable skill the communist world had given them was a unique sort of resource tilling—the corporate mixed-martial art of human manipulation, its ideological counterpart in the defense of the necessity of exploitation, and the ability to disconnect from suppressive persons when they stop being useful. Believe me when I tell you that these were to net a premium like the born-again-amateur communist had never before seen. All that work experience was about to make them comfortable beyond their wildest dreams.

Let us not forget the saving grace—the punchcard! Hallelujah, work-life separation manifests in the ability to remove oneself from a hellscape of manipulation. The manager of the future has at long last found their place in the world, having finally won the right to themselves. (I told you there would be a happy ending!)

And here we find our moral, comrades: what butters your bread becomes difficult to critique. Let not the Nash equilibrium become indistinguishable from the self, and clock out to the only terrain in which your values may plausibly survive.

Well, let’s see about that. One of the things that’s been rattling around in the back of my head is whether I regret devoting so much time to understanding the Marixan corpus and the various marxist traditions that come out of it.

Regardless of how warranted this feeling is, I feel quite a bit old—too old for TikTok, almost too old for Twitter. I’m left wondering if I should have just spent the last five years making a more self-aware art project than trying to breathe life into a Marxian research program. Or perhaps I should have invested more time into becoming an embodied human being. Personal development has rightfully taken up a good chunk of my last two years, as well as finding a way towards a supportive family life and economic independence. Perhaps my main regret should be that I was spending all this alienated research time on something so quixotic, when I could have been spending my time learning something more useful and profitable.

When faced with the absolute inability for many of my friends to be confronted with their own nihilism, I have trouble regretting my commitments entirely: a scientific (inter alia) worldview and an egalitarian—but not moralistic—ethic has given me a compass that feels uniquely suited for such crises. Ultimately the only things I regret are twofold, and in paradoxical tension with one another: the first is overconfidence in readymade worldviews, and the other is the subsequent skepticism which crushes the ability to articulate oneself. The Nietzschean concept of the Will-to-Power comes to mind: those who don’t mind misleading others for influence have no qualms about bullshitting relentlessly.

What I have admired most about those that make honest marxist (or otherwise humanist) media are those that freely admit their unqualification, their fumbling for answers, their ultimately ethical perspective and admission of its limits. I will admit a level of satisfaction with those pursuits with which I am semi-consistent, since at their best they project both skepticism and a confidence that truth—wherever we should find it—will not destroy the possibility of communism. At worst, truth-telling gives us a sober diagnosis of the dismal prospects for the elimination of class and state in our lifetimes. At best, we can burn away the hallucinatory brush of alternative histories and aid those hungry for answers towards only the hope which still lives.

The Marxian research program still gives my life direction, although it is some species of broader inquiry that has won out in every aspect of that program. Briefly, I consider those broad categories to be:

1. emancipatory humanist ethics—the utopian and scientific heart of all marxism

2. philosophy of science, ecology, and evolutionary anthropology—or ‘materialist dialectics’, an application of (1)

3. economic sociology, social epistemology, and the critique of ideology—or ‘the materialist conception of history’ and ‘critical theory’, an application of (2)

4. anti-capitalist economic theory and metrics—or ‘the critique of political economy’, an application of (3)

5. a body of tactics and strategy against class society and, therefore, capitalism and its state—or ‘communist strategy’, a cumulative application of (1)–(4)

I have written these to be as general as possible. Certainly each inclusion [particularly of (1)] or description [particularly of (4)] will not please everyone who carries the torch for one marxist tradition or another—I will leave the exact phrasings and groupings to the gnawing criticism of mice.

It is to my chagrin that I have spent so much time studying (5) and to some extent (4), when (5) has netted almost nothing but negative results, and when my first loves were (1) and (2). However consuming (4) can be, it at least has had the virtue of encouraging me to learn linear algebra and programming economic models. As I have recently committed to study applied mathematics full-time, I will spend most of my time between (2) through (4) and adjacent topics [although the same knowledge may ultimately prove applicable to (5) if I’m not careful].

When we lose touch with our personal context, we sometimes flee into a body of literature and thereby turn it into a therapeutic fiction. It follows from this elaboration of the Marxian research program that it should not be all-consuming: (1) demands that individuals find the fullest expression of freedom (both liberty and belonging) possible in the conditions of life where they find themselves.

But perhaps just as importantly, to fictionalize the struggle for human flourishing and survival into another dopamine-loop catalyst or opiatic bedtime story is demeaning to the subject matter. The heart of the intended distinction between utopian and scientific socialism, if it is at all defensible, is to short-circuit this quite understandable yet counterproductive pattern. Marxism deserves to be seen for the distant and meta-historical vision that it is, something so far away from our person and so big as to be easily misapprehended without great care. We cannot be marxist-themed people and live decent lives, anymore than we can fulfill our human potentials as the theme park mascots for reason, humanism, and science.

That these become part of you, rather than all or none of you, is my wish for every sincere marxist. Even moreso: for everyone trashing against the dual winds of capital and state who ache for something better than the dismal competition and predation bred by neglect.