Hey there. My name’s Mackenzie (or “Mac Kenzie”). I’m gonna tell you all a little bit about the recent history of this page, along with some other thoughts and context. To clarify, for those who know me, I’m not the one who’s been making the recent posts (which I have since deleted – I have also removed the admin in question).

A while back, the original owner of the page – who is very talented, was the one who made it so popular and beloved, and whom I respect even though we haven’t been on good terms for a while now – decided she didn’t want it anymore, and offered to sell it to someone who would like to try their hand at it. I offered to buy it – at the time, we were friends, and she was excited for me to take it over.

However, I soon discovered that it took a big toll on me to spend very much time putting myself in the headspace required to make fun of people with memes, and I didn’t really have it in me to admin the page properly either. So instead…

I was a hardcore Leninist at this time. Very dogmatic. Delusional, even, and dead-set on spreading True Theory however possible, constantly trying to “raise the theoretical level” wherever I was – and this was a symptom that, at the time I took over the page, was just getting worse and worse. It started to alienate more and more of my friends, confuse people, turn people against me as a result of my polemical insensitivity. During that period I tried to somehow insert formalizations I had made into memes, which, lol… it would have been better to just give up on trying to admin a meme page, but I didn’t know when to quit. Until I couldn’t take it anymore, and then I stopped. But I also invited some friends to admin the page during that time, and they continued to post to the page without me knowing.

If it’s not clear from my summary of the above, my politics have changed somewhat. I’m still a communist, but I’m not a Leninist anymore, and I don’t approve of the US Leninist so-called “parties” in the least. I don’t want a page that I am technically responsible for to be spreading political propaganda that I think is wrong-headed or even regressive and dangerous to promote on a large scale.

I do want to take this opportunity to complain a little bit about the culture of “leftbook” that draws in vulnerable youth and gives them a sense of purpose and meaning by creating echo chambers where people get to act like Lenin and Stalin were eternal heroes of the working class who bear no decisive responsibility for the direction that the Soviet Union took that led to its collapse. The argument goes that it simply wasn’t their fault and that adopting their theories today isn’t a repetition of a historical disaster but something that actually has promise for revolution. Take it from someone who tried very seriously to put those theories into practice – the same flaws that sabotaged the Soviet project will definitely be reproduced in any attempt to redeem their legacies. I see no reason to beat this dead horse when there’s very much an alternative future of thoughtful communism available for us to explore and develop.

The decisive point I want to make about why this stuff is so doomed has to do with the commandist and cultist logic of The Party and The Correct Line. Instead of beginning from actually listening to people and moving on from there to develop thoughtful (and, sure, theoretically-informed) solutions to the problems of capitalism situationally among the oppressed in the process of struggling for a better world, the Leninist model compulsively chooses a Correct Line, forms a Party around it, and mostly just tries to guilt people into accepting their dangerously underthought ideas with righteous outrage while staging action after action promoting the Party Brand as if it’s helping anything. What’s more, we don’t even have the excuse of being in a rapidly developing and completely historically novel situation of Soviet dual power with leaders who are truly at the forefront of revolutionary theory coordinating that struggle. Today, we have people who haven’t seriously thought through the limitations and failures of those leaders and their successors and think that somehow they’ll get somewhere mostly just through following the letter of the Classic Texts rather than studying new developments and advancements in political theory over the last few decades in a depth and breadth that goes beyond their local or national organizing tradition.

It was my very investment in Leninist theory – and translating it into Leninist practice – that did my Leninism in. More and more, I started to see how the commandism – including my own – of those committed to the Leninist party-form and related models was tending to undermine the development of otherwise promising workers’ struggles in my city and elsewhere.

I also think it’s important to note the serious psychic and personal toll it took on me and many, many others I know who’ve tried to force this model to work. I – and I’m far from the only one – was constantly on the edge of breakdowns, and it was only when I let myself question the compulsive political pressure I was putting on myself that I could make any actual progress in my own clinical treatment.

Wanting to understand the logic behind all of this craziness going on in my life, I studied the history of theory about Leninist organizing, focusing on its rigorous philosophical development in France, beginning with Louis Althusser and examining the failures of the old Leninist Parti Communiste Français, and then his student Alain Badiou’s more radical Maoist organization Union des Communistes de France Marxiste-Léniniste.

Unlike other dogmatic leaders, Badiou and his comrade Sylvain Lazarus instead made the effort to sum up the failures of over a decade of Leninist and Maoist organizing with the thoughtful precision and clarity due to such a serious matter. As far as I’m concerned, the theory they developed, beginning from later on in the Maoist period and leading up to and beyond the formation and praxis of their “post-Maoist” l’Organisation Politique, offers some extremely promising blueprints and lessons for revolutionary organizers today who want to make actual progress and not just spin in circles. A lot of it is actually quite intuitive, but with the benefit of confidence and rigorous justification – the revolutionary thought and desire of the masses comes before any commandist political line, submitting oneself to the discipline of an organization that isn’t always learning, sensitively developing and thoughtfully updating its revolutionary ethics in response to its experience is submitting oneself to political oblivion, we should be focusing more on establishing creative cultures prefiguring communism rather than just mimicking the enemy’s tactics in Trying To Beat Them At All Costs, and so on.

I’m more interested, though, in encouraging people to break free of the confines of a compulsively determined pre-ordained Framework. I’ve found studying history and theory incredibly useful in developing flexible political thought and practice, but once it becomes more about the past than about the future, I think we’re doomed. As Althusser put it, “the future lasts a long time” – why not take responsibility for changing its immensity in truly innovative ways rather than fearfully delegating our revolutionary capacity by hewing strictly to lines passed down from our predecessors?

I think it’s probably time to retire this page out of respect for what it once was and no longer could be.