I have been a communist for a decade. Others have been around longer, and I even came to it late in life. But it has been enough time to become disillusioned that the worst resistance I get for being a communist is actually from middle-class people who fancy themselves communists in a limited but moralistic way. The usual move among these moralizers will be to demand that we think of people generally as being non-radical in some kind of way that is insurmountable. The communists are only supposed to be in a little book club together. The only way being in that club matters is if we refuse the outside world.

Which would be fine, if that starting premise was refusing the assertion of the relations that precede us in the world. It would be fine if we aimed at changing those relations, but the importance of exclusivity and novelty is asserted for the opposite reason by these moralizers. When it comes time to think about how to escape our situation, we’re supposed to say, “these fucking pig masses deserve to suffer. They aren’t worth our time. We did our work and they failed fulfilling their obligations. We must refuse them on absolute terms.” As if this could ever be more than some melodramatic reaction stemming from their own neurosis and resentment. Sure, never investigate the fact that your own relationship to theory, which is supposed to be about changing the world, has made you miserable, resentful, and passive.

Social democrats are ridiculous when they suggest an absolute goodness at the core of the worker. But the flippant response by the moralizers, where they suggest that the average poor and working class person chose this world in a conscious, deliberate way, when they are more so victims of it, is a disgusting, but also plainly unhelpful, way to think about the situation. The fact that it is always people from the upper class who present this as the case, so they can refuse solidarity with poor people, gets a little old!

They will selectively use abstractions in a reactionary manner. They will refuse such abstractions when they’re doing a fun little intellectual exercise defending Foucault or Deleuze, but then have no problem filing even billions of people away as disposable through the use of abstractions. They will always protect the great master Foucault from being assaulted by abstractions, and they salivate through abstractions when thinking about how much people deserve to suffer generally. They will find a spoiling essence of human nature when they need to, even if they otherwise avow an understanding of the impossibility of such a fixed essence.

The question of politics is pressed on them, however, in a way that it isn’t to just anybody else. Politics were pressed on them in implication through their very relationship with theory, and they repressed that in order to maintain an aesthetic, libidinal, individualistic relationship with academic pursuits. Maybe they feared those pursuits might be spoiled by practice. At any point where reality presses them to think of theory in active, practical, social terms, they refuse, and they hunt for scapegoats to help explain why it would be foolish to subject themselves to any demands of political solidarity.

“The world is this way because people don’t read” they will tell themselves. Except they’re supposed to be reading to figure out how to intervene in the world, where most people go without that form of political education. Really, more than education, it is space to reflect that aids change. The moralizers are the ones with the resources and the time to read, and they will tell you with a straight face their refusal is the fault of some abstract, totalized, immoral entity, who isn’t smart enough to value revolution, and is encompassing of the whole society in some fixed sense.

But then a) they still want the label communist for some reason and b) when the masses don’t act, they’re like “look, I told you. The pig masses all need to be destroyed! We must let the masses die as a punishment for consciously choosing this exact state of affairs!” But these theory fandom types are implicated in the problem and had it pressed on them that they should act, and they have opted for an aesthetic relation instead. The question the theory poses to them continues, even if they only want theory to be a fun aesthetic hobby. I don’t think they should now die in a cleansing fire because of their choice, but if ghettoized populations in the US have to take blame for “consenting” to America while they’re getting their heads kicked in, I’m not sure why the moralizers escape implication just because they read the right theory. As if both they and the masses were assigned a group project around theory in a class they were both taking, and the irresponsible masses just refused to do their homework.

A reaction from the “masses” is missing in the US like it is missing elsewhere and has always been missing, except for fleeting revolutionary flashes. In understanding this reality, the moralizers are more on the hook than people in the US who grow up in project housing and endure violent conditions. The country itself is designed to lead millions of people to prison slavery. To trap a few million in prison slavery, it has to subject hundreds of millions to conditions that lead people to crime. The moralizer does not have a right to lump these people in with the very class that is dominating them, in order to render them a single abstract scapegoat figure they can offload their anxiety onto. If they picked apart the abstractions and discovered their contradictions, they would again be pressed to act. The actual hard thought about prevailing conditions would reveal a humanity in the very figures they want to render as disposable refuse.

There’s also the small matter that the ruling power disguised by these cheap abstractions has all the power to doom the entire planet, included those trapped by their system in the US and beyond. There is no shared class project between pedophilic sex traffickers and prison slaves, nor any of the millions who just barely escaped becoming prison slaves. It’s also an impotent gesture to wish death on an abstraction. It’s merely another way to avoid responsibility. Still, the theory fans are more responsible than those who grows up in conditions that were leading or led them to prison slavery.

It doesn’t have to be oppression olympics, but the abstractions conceal reality to give the person making them leeway to refuse acting. Their insistence on the social other’s blame is pretty obviously them trying to dodge how they feel about their own culpability. That people attempt to conceal this reality while demanding everyone treat them like they’re renegades is grotesque. They should not be suspended in some guilty state forever due to this failure, and no one needs their self-flagellation. But at some point it should become transparent that they don’t really have the space to evade blame while blaming.

There is barely a left in the US. Any given left in history was inadequate to the task of ending capitalism. The task of revolution does not just appear to all. Just because the theory fan had the question pressed on them reading theory does not make the same question appear for others. There are endless hurdles in the way, most of all that brutal social reproduction does not ever relent. You are forced back into it every day before you get any space to think. To act like this isn’t the case everywhere on earth is a lie, and the only people who believe it are rich people who want to excuse themselves due to supposed insurmountable ignorance among “the masses.” That is the kind of degraded thinking that you would hope someone reading nothing but philosophy all day long would be able to avoid! There is no place in history where it could be taken for granted that we’d secure the defeat of capitalism. I do not think the theory fans are on the hook for our collective failure. I think, deep down, they do think that, though, and they’re trying to run from addressing it. Meanwhile, as long as they refuse addressing their own relationship to struggle, they will continue to blame some abstract entity and impotently try to condemn it to death. What this does is force us all back to a state of atomization and distrust, and gives the right-wing space to dominate.

Yet my point here as always remains that we must intervene, precisely to end the state of affairs that subjects poor Americans to degradation and even more assaults the international working class. The US working-class is not politically forged and is thus not acting, and my responsibility is to help make the situation clear to as many people as possible, and demand they act with me. Nobody has a static essence. Everyone is a product of their conditions. We are trying to foment political struggle among workers who globally exist in very different environments, and yet all these fractions of workers face the inevitability of the class relation nonetheless. Nothing can be taken for granted. The fact that nobody is acting is your cue to act, not an excuse for you to do nothing and scapegoat. I think it’s fair to say you have even less excuse if you have the free time to read political theory all day long.

But anyway, hell should be other communists, because “communists” are a thing that should not exist. I say that because I avow the necessity of communism coming into existence as a movement and ultimately erasing the conditions that force us to speak its name. It only must be named because of the reified state of capitalism. Capitalism asserts itself as eternal, so we must name what dissolves that lie. Please, become a communist, so we can abolish communists.