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Communists Should Learn to Stop Being Annoying: Tactics, Strategy, and Optics

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László Molnárfi

28th February 2025

The Communist Movement Lacks Self-Reflection

Political behaviour is first and foremost libidinal, impulsive, and chaotic, rather than rational, contemplative, and policy-based. Its discursive realm is predomindantly sociocultural, rather than economic. The superstructural realm is just as material as the base and — within discourse — the visible takes precedence over the hidden. Sadly, socialist revolutionaries seem affronted at the idea of connecting their movements to popular culture, aesthetics, and mass appeal. The rise of mechanical materialism — the drive to explain societal behaviour in purely terms of structural factors — is a symptom of the inability to face an uncomfortable issue within our movement. That is, it has become clear that the masses no longer place faith in socialism. The sweeping victories of the right wing in the past decade and a half can be ascribed to the socialist left losing the protest vote in a process of political dealignment that is driven by sociocultural considerations, rather than merely ‘misdirection’ from mainstream media, the capitalists, and politicians in response to successive economic crises. In essence, leadership cannot be absolved from blame in this tragic historical process — this much becomes quite clear upon interacting with ordinary people.

What Are the Two Trends Damaging the Movement Today?

On the one hand, liberalism is infiltrating the communist movement. Our policies and use of language does not manage to address people in an intelligible way. This is clear from the association between liberalism and socialism, a historical anomaly by any measure. Revolutionary language is now that of the ivory tower academic, filled to the brim with identity politics and exclusionary to the vast majority of people. This is present in both online and offline spaces. This is well described by Mark Fisher’s 2013 essay Exiting the Vampire Castle[1]. Each day, novel discourses emerge which fry the brain and are vastly disconnected from the real world, but fester amongst our communities. The last twitterstorm I recall was about BDSM being problematic, which is ironic because we say it is conservatives who pry in the bedroom — maybe we should retire "Republicans out of the bedroom!" and the new catchphrase should be "Maoists out of the bedroom!". Recently, there was also great uproar at a dating event organized by NYC-DSA, as the self-appointed, modern-day preachers of morality decreed it problematic that comrades should like each other; they should, rather, confess their sin of sexual desire, abstain from all such activities and serve the parish. James Connolly is correct in stating in his 1904 work Wages and other things[2] that some comrades see the movement as a "means of ventilating their theories on such questions as sex, religion, vaccination, vegetarianism, etc." and that this has no place in our party policies because socialism is about class emancipation and holds space for "the greatest intellectual freedom, or even freakishness".

On the other hand, we have the rise of syncretic ultra-leftism. Lex Von Clark writes in Ultraleftism Ascendant: Understanding the Infantile Disorder[3] in 2025 that syncretic ultra-leftism is a cross-tendency phenomenon in which activists "revel in the subcultural status afforded by their arcane ideologies and small sectarian communities, always using the most radical (and often the most opaque) language possible to distinguish themselves from ‘normies’. Rather than running campaigns based on widely and deeply felt issues, they shout only the most revolutionary slogans and demands, denigrating anything less as cooptation and compromise”. The historical roots of ultra-leftism that are relevant for our age find themselves in Maoist-Thirdworldism starting in the 1960s, when it was claimed that the workforce in the West is a labour aristocracy and that revolution can only come from the Global South. This engendered a regime of passivity, in which communists have positioned themselves on a “hurler on the ditch” soapbox where none of the revolutionary work is to be done by themselves and they can hold an attitude of liberal distrust toward the masses. Within this paradigm, all that is left to do is stand idly by, appear to support actions in the Global South, and wait for the ever-approaching revolution; it is the "original sin" of the substitution of aesthetics for substance. This fatalism has shaped the cultural dynamics of the socialist left. Namely, practices like the public kowtowing of “radical self-critique” are rooted in Maoism’s adaptation of Confucian values of filial piety, guilt, and obedience, translating into purity politics — the elevation of dogma over sober analysis. Within leftist spaces, rhetoric trumps material analysis, aesthetics take precedence over fact and links between vanguards and the masses break. This lifestyleism, which — instead of being all-inclusive — imposes a dogma in the form of radical aesthetics while castigating those who do not fit within. Instead of thinking for ourselves, it seems to be motivated by a reaction to those on the opposing side of the political spectrum, to stand out as the most progressive in absolute diametric opposition to the right wing.

It is these trends that are in enmeshment with one another, forming one assemblage, its constituent parts changing in influence from one day to the next. In turn, communists are seen as annoying, hyper-moralistic, and preachy rather than advocates from and for the working class. Overall, it is a turn away from mass-line-based politics toward adventurism and sectarianism.

Ultra-Leftism

As Vladimir Lenin recognizes in his speech to the Extraordinary Seventh Congress of the R.C.P.(B.)[4] in 1918, politics belongs to the masses. “The millions-strong masses—and politics begin where millions of men and women are; where there are not thousands, but millions, that is where serious politics begin”, he said. At the outset, it should be stated that this is the case whether socialists engage in propaganda by deed, direct action or mass action. The variations in political action are necessitated by the context of the historical moment. None of them enjoy superiority over one another. However, in all cases, political action, and its constituent parts such as optics, should resonate with the masses...

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