The campist says “conditions are not ideal, but we must conform to them and put aside ideological considerations,” as if the pressure to conform could ever escape what is latent in choosing an opposition. If you oppose a pole within capitalism, you either have ideological considerations for doing so, which necessitate considerations of praxis, or you are affirming capitalist competition by choosing one side of conflict without ever making demands.

Without what the campist labels “ideal”—which is usually what we are actually on the hook for consciously attempting to establish—their position is a non-sequitur from the communist vantage point. I may personally prefer China to the US, but it would have nothing to do with communism, as it exists only as a passive preference in relation to a process contained within capitalist boundaries. There is no communist guarantee in passively siding with one state or another, even if that state is nominally communist. Passivity and hedging do not mix with communism! For the nominal communist state to live up to its aim, they would have to in turn wait on us to become self-active. If China actually were communist, our passivity is weighing them down!

Communism is not something to be forced onto people. It has to be a mode of life that encourages active participation and responsibility. There is no imposed, top-down, state-led training program that teaches you how to take control over your life, as that would be an intractable contradiction. Nor is there an educational bar of entry for claiming power. The most beaten down of our lumpenized underclass can claim their world. That will involve a learning process, as it will for all of us, but it would be made meaningful by the initiative in taking control.

The entire premise of “things aren’t perfect, so we have to obey what exists until change magically happens” is clearly wrong. You have to be “anti-campist” to figure out where a communist politics can be developed at all, or even where a temporary alliance with a state would be feasible. No “campist” has that understanding. They are pawning off responsibility in lieu of having a developed theoretical framework. A communist framework never consigns you to spectacle, even if the odds of victory aren’t in your favor. To even begin the fight is a form of victory. The odds are irrelevant. Never in history have the odds been in our favor.

We do not even need the promise of victory to stand against this society. This world immanently begs for its own negation. All the reason you could ever have to take up the communist position are already here, and hedging around odds should be resisted. If you died opposing this system today, you would die correct. Which isn;t to say we do not want victory, but that this world only is redeemed in acting against it. An asteroid crashing into earth and killing us all before massive social change happened could not render that opposition pointless. It is always “right to rebel.” That is the only thing that gives this world any order of meaning.

Once you take the position seriously, you realize there is no “campism” that allows you to abide by communist principles. Communists would have to have independence of position first, before ever assessing any temporary alliance. But then an alliance is only an alliance if you are oriented towards communist struggle.

Campism is a byproduct of one pole of capitalism mirroring the other while entangled with it, with both holding up the necessary avenue of competition and conflict that the system relies on, even if some actors are more aggressive than others. If Iran won a war right now, they will push to further take advantage of their victory by integrating themselves deeper into the capitalist system. And then, they would continue to slaughter communists. Just because we want the US to face blows does not mean we need to tell ourselves a fairy tale about what Iran’s victory would look like. That is being absorbed by the spectator’s disease. If Iran’s “victory” could mean anything to us, we would have to re-orient ourselves right now. Stop making excuses and reorient yourself already.