Communist realism

Against fatalism and scale chauvinism in revolutionary thought.

Photo by Abinash Jothimani on Unsplash

A young person spends most of their time reading fiction novels, or getting lost in their hobbies.

This young person has the vague anxieties most young people have. There are moments in their life that feel unbearably important followed by long stretches where it feels utterly aimless and repetitive.

They talk with friends and family, procrastinates far too much and spends time thinking about things that ultimately go nowhere. They have arguments that later replays in their head while trying to sleep.

I realise that this sounds like… well, almost everyone.

In my particular childhood, I remember hearing about an event that circulated through news reports, on 15 October 2007, more than 300 armed police officers executed roughly 40 to 60 search warrants simultaneously across multiple towns and cities across New Zealand against political activists.

What struck me was not, suprisingly, the callousness and cruelty of the police and the politicians (as a Māori, you become accustomed this kind of behaviour and suppression). What struck me was something more banal.

I would constantly hear everyone, from mainstream media, to anarchists themselves restate variations of:

“Māori and anarchists collaborating” or “Māori and anarchists working together” as if inherently distancing Māori from anarchism.

Even one of the Pākehā (New Zealand European) anarchists affected by the Tūhoe raids said:

“There is the natural link between anarchism and anarchists, and Tino Rangatiratanga, and Te Mana Motuhake o Tuhoe, insofar as anarchists are supportive of the ideas of sovereignty and self-determination for all people”

That “all people” is doing a lot of work here, and it’s a disappointing habit on the left, where, at best, our fights as indigenous people feel tacked on. Can Māori not be anarchists? Or are Māori anarchists treated as some rare anomaly? Why is “all people” spoken with such an emphasis? So many questions went through my head after hearing variations of these over and over.

It appeared to me that best, our struggles are treated as supplementary to “real” revolutionary politics. At worst, we are treated as counter-revolutionary altogether. I remember a particularly uncomfortable experience with a Marxist-Leninist who suggested that water protectors are not revolutionary, and downplaying Māori activism as being ineffective for not having a “successful” revolution. Māori are routinely treated as something you “engage with” rather than a source of political thought in itself.

It became particularly clear to me that many anarchists and communists alike have not yet abandoned “great man theory” nor what I call “great theory” as much as they would like to think they have.

I saw one criticism from Reddit of my most recent article called “Marxism is Childish” where I talk about how Marxism brought me back to my childhood and made me look at the world through fresh eyes, a habit I had lost as an adult.

In one small part of it I critiqued Lenin's use of the term “Infantile” to describe dogmatic Left-Communists

One of the critiques I received from this was:

“This article is silly. It's like the author just read the title of Lenin's book, leftwing communism an infantile disorder, took immediate offense at being called infantile and had to write this article to soothe themselves.”

What this critique misses (besides the fact I don't consider myself a Leftcom) is why I brought up the apparently universal experience of being a young person in the intro. The description in the intro does describe most of us. However, the person I was describing in particular was young Lenin. If judged only through the lens of pre-existing revolutionary legitimacy as shown by some of the communists and anarchists I have encountered then Lenin could have easily appeared politically insignificant or unserious early on.

I don't feel bitter or personally attacked about Lenin's choice of terminology in “Left-wing communism” nor do I believe fiction-loving young Lenin is somehow lesser or detached from revolutionary Lenin. On the contrary, Lenin’s flaws, contradictions and normality are precisely why he's respectable and relatable to me. The contradictions make him feel like a real person, not a caricature, and not a transcendent deity. After all, if contradiction drives history like we suggest, why should a person be any different? If Lenin is a person, why should he be any different? Why do we hold him up to unrealistic standards he, and we, will never meet? His humanity is what makes his theory useful. That goes for many other revolutionary thinkers too. Holding them to the same messy, contradictory standards as everyone else is the only way for their work to stay grounded and practicable, if their theory and lives were infallible how can we ever meet those standards?

Once you start splitting humanity into the ordinary versus the revolutionary, you begin giving yourself permission to be a mere observer. I’ve looked at my own messy, repetitive, and anxious life in the past and concluded that because I felt insignificant, I lacked the legitimacy to intervene in the world. It was only when I realised that people who changed the world were just as contradictory, lost in hobbies, prone to procrastination, and caught up in late-night mental arguments as the rest of us that I realised supposed insignificance, or an action not being “grand” enough is not permission to do nothing. In fact, it's the vector when doing something becomes the most valuable.

While I am speaking a lot about Lenin, the thing that taught me to see the world this way was an event from my own culture:

Wairaka: The Lady on the rock

Around 700 years ago the Mātaatua waka (canoe) arrived in Aotearoa. The men went ashore, and the waka began drifting out to sea. Wairaka, the daughter of the captain, defied the tradition that forbade women from handling the paddles and cried:

Which in english translates to “I will act as a man” or “let me make a man of myself”

She saved the waka by taking hold of the paddles and getting everyone back to shore. The town was named Whakatāne to commemorate this act of leadership and defiance of tradition.

Wairaka hardly abolished patriarchy as a world-historical structure. She saved a single waka. Her action was situated and bounded by circumstance. But that does not make it meaningless. In fact, the story survives precisely because the act mattered within the concrete situation it emerged from.

“Kia Whakatāne au i ahau” was by no means a claim that the situation is stable or controllable. It was, instead, a refusal to treat instability as permission to do nothing or to become detached. Action is taken within that instability rather than deferred until conditions are ideal or “resolved.”

The fact that the waka can be lost is precisely why action matters. The instability is not an argument for stepping back into interpretive distance, it is the immediate context that demands interaction.

If something must only be done when success is predetermined, guaranteed and grand, then — like how people treat Lenin — it makes it such an enormous threshold that almost all concrete action appears meaningless in advance which traps us in a perpetual state of fatalistic inaction.

We need to meet Wairaka, Lenin, Makhno, Luxemburg and so on kanohi ki te kanohi, tangata ki te tangata. Face to face, person to person.

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed my article please like and share and leave a comment telling me your thoughts.

If you have any good faith critiques or disagreements I would love to hear them too!

Ngā mihi.