Recently, I put out a video called Peter Coffin is a Contrarian, which addressed the more generalized viewpoints I am attributed with online (I addressed some specifics in my recent post “How People Criticize Peter Coffin”).
It’s been getting a great response (not uncommon with the new batch of videos, weirdly enough). Not only from people who already know me and are positive towards me but also from people who seem not to completely understand where I am coming from.
Someone left a comment I thought was very worth addressing in a more public manner because I think it asks the right questions about what I do:
I love consuming your content and agree with 90% of what you say, but one of my main sticking points with you (and I might be completely wrong here), is the idea that converting more people to communism and organizing them is how you build working class power in our society. Not saying it's bad to do that at all, just questioning whether it's something that actually builds power in effective ways.
My first issue is with the idea of converting people in the first place. From my personal observations, it seems like the actual number of “effective” “real” Marxists who stick to real applications of dialectical materialism and actually do things about it is fairly stable over time; due to the fact that propaganda works, and there are a wide variety of countering forces, both deliberate and emergent, that ramp up as Marxist ideas become more popular, causing more and more proto-Marxists, or even genuine Marxists, to fall out of the pipeline at various points, whether it's completely turning then into socdems, or sprinkling just enough idealism into their ideas to make them mostly non-threatening to capitalism.
Secondly, and this is the one I'm less confident in: to me, assuming that enough people who all think the right thoughts lumped together in the same group is going to create meaningful power to challenge the capitalist order, kinda feels idealistic? Under capitalism, power comes from one source only; the exploitation of labour and the accumulation of the proceeds of that exploitation into significant quantities of capital. The Russian revolution only survived against the feudal-agrarian tsarist regime in a technological backwater, because Stalin went out and robbed some banks. We're now looking to fight a global hegemony that is 1-2 stages (depending how you count it) ahead of that, and an armful of guns and a couple banks worth of cash isn't going to cut it anymore. We need to find a way to accumulate real, meaningful quantities of capital, while maintaining marxist views, and without succumbing to capitalist ideology. Which, won't be easy, but I don't think it's completely impossible, and personally I don't see any other option we haven't already tried 🤷♀️
- @alexpfw9896, comment on “Peter Coffin is a Contrarian”
️I agree with a lot of what the commenter is saying here. In fact, I say many similar things, and it often makes “Leftists” dislike me. I don't attempt to spread understanding with the assumption that people will simply become Marxists. I would, of course, like that, but it’s more important to me that people just see some example of how their interests work with a coherent basis.
I am not on Twitter telling people “the new Marxist movement is growing strong” (Midwestern Marx and Infrared do plenty enough of that, and I think it looks silly on both of their parts) and the org I am part of (CPI), although we are a Marxist organization and attempt to do Marxist education, we don’t operate on the delusion we are the vanguard. Again, it’s about spreading information and understanding. Human beings are dynamic and have the ability to make informed choices, and knowledge can help us better see our material interests as we make those choices (it can also divert us from them).
Addressing the second point, I completely agree what this commenter is outlining is idealistic, but I think this also identifies an important starting point for conversation. In one of my recent videos (the Green Day one), I asserted the reason a lot of MAGA people are that way is that it's “anti-woke,” and they perceive the ruling order as “woke” (which more or less it is currently, I wrote a book about it called Woke Ouroboros: Segregation and Essentialism; pick it up). To counteract it, they engage in the consumer mode: “What else is on offer?" They look for other options being sold to them and support the one they like most.
Many of today’s “communists” are doing exactly the same thing over various issues; see my documentary Marx For Sale.
But I view things this way: the most important task is to remove obstacles. Many of our obstacles are ideological; in fact, all of the ones people currently engage with are. My work is “doing what I can to dismantle obstacles.” That means ideologies, for the most part. Ultimately, I want to see a better world, and if the forces that demand and act on it understand the contradictions in the way, I don't really care what they call themselves because resolving those contradictions will, in fact, make the world better.
People will band together; that is unavoidable because it is what people do. We have seen it endlessly throughout history. Will it be to demand communism? I don't know.
That said, I am a Marxist and a communist. I am upfront that I am those things because I am an honest person. However, my belief is that “communism” is the process of resolving those contradictions. When one says “a classless, stateless society,” one is declaring a hope. This is idealism, the defining of an end point to strive for – a material reality that comes from one’s mind. I don’t think it’s necessarily always a bad thing to be hopeful for something (or to strive for a classless, stateless society), but I don’t define communism that way at this point.
I see it more as a living historical process, and I think attempting to inform people and ask them to engage using that new understanding is, in a way, doing much more to progress the goal of a better society than trying to “convert” them to communism.
My new videos are coming out on youtube.com/@Peter all the time, and my next documentary will be Plato is a Bitch: AI and Bomberguy. Stay tuned for more info. Thanks for your time, and I hope you have a great day.
Amen! We should start calling our ideology Livingwageism. Or maybe we call it Skalabadooey. Just a combination of consonants and vowels so people have a label. Then we can move on to important shit like waking people up to the notion that society can be organized for the benefit of the people instead of profit.