Housekeeping: After being paralyzed about how to keep writing without my content being subjected to the insane tornado of the algorithm , I’ve decided I’m going to start writing more frequent and briefer reflections for my paying subscribers. The primary reason is that this newsletter is the only space remaining to me that is not subject to the algorithmic pressures that influence my content on every other app. There simply are some things that I want to say to you all first, and occasionally, alone. Mutual trust that has been earned in our community here leads me to believe I can anticipate good discussion without brigading, harassment, or my content reaching audiences stripped of necessary context.
I’ve really been trying these last few months.
Trying to see “reason” and find “common ground” with a group of people who claim to be Leftists, yet seem to take every opportunity to deny solidarity to working people. By “Leftist,” “Socialist,” “Marxist,” etc., they seem increasingly to mean merely cheerleaders for authoritarian regimes that oppose the Western “Liberal” order.
The character of these governments need not be socialist for them to attract the salivating praises of this particular brand of Leftist. A brand I’ve been calling “Alter-Imperialists,” or the “Collaborationist Left.” Leftists who exhibit what the Syrian human rights activist Leila al-Shami called the “anti-imperialism of idiots.”
The reason I have been “trying” is because the advance of fascism and climate catastrophe have thrown the global movement for solidarity and socialism so firmly on the back foot that it seems like emphasizing any of the myriad divisions between Leftists–no matter how important–would be counterproductive in this fragile moment.
That has not, of course, stopped these anti-imperialists of convenience from instantly branding anyone critical of them as a Liberal, a CIA asset, a useful idiot, or a Mossad stooge. They have so thoroughly inoculated themselves from reality that they cannot seem to play nice with others even when the boot is on their own neck.
I am occasionally accused, at times mockingly, by Marxist-Leninists with Campist sympathies of making up this supposed ‘bullying’ of other Leftists by Campists in the digital agora.
“Where are all these ‘Russia-supporting’ Tankies? Are these IRGC-stans in the room with us right now? You are just paranoid and lashing out against comrades!”
I usually just reply to these people by showing them the threats in my DMs from people with hammer and sickle emojis and the flag of Palestine next to those of North Korea, Iran, Cuba, Russia, and Iran (they are never Palestinians, of course).
Or the comments Left on my page, or mentioning me in other pages, like the one from Jesse V., a self-described ‘man hating anti-imp’, vegan, and Russian expat in Germany who moved to Russian-occupied Ukrainian territory a few years ago.
She left this comment on a genuinely useless, purely clout-farming video by a different Campist creator that flippantly described Ukraine as “the Israel of Europe.”
I’d never heard of this woman nor understood why she felt the need to jump into a comment thread that wasn’t even her own to say her piece.
One might think that a ‘man-hating anti-imp’ would be horrified by the well-documented, deliberate use of rape as a weapon of war during the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Or the revanchist, expansionist positioning of the Russian state in regard to its neighbors.
Instead, this creator routinely praises the Russian armed forces on her story, declaring them the saviors of Russia in much the same way as White Supremacists and Russian Duganites invoke Russia as the defender of Christendom.
It has always amused me that Russian chauvinism seems to appeal equally to certain Western fascists and Western Marxists.
Enough about that. It was really discouraging to see that several accounts I admire followed this creator, which I understand does not necessitate allignment, but does signal some form of solidarity.
My comrade radical dumpling did a deep dive on this individual recently, but its unavailable because RD has experienced so much mean-spirited bullying from campists that they routinely deactivate their Instagram account just for some reprieve.
Their Substack is still active and always insightful.
Anyway…
I am deeply worried that if the modern Left cannot mount a meaningful counter-propaganda effort in the face of such Campist idiocy, then we are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the last century, and find ourselves no closer to achieving any sort of socialist future worthy of the name.
I have written three articles about Campism and the danger it poses to the international Left. I first expressed my thoughts on the subject (rather imperfectly, I might add) over two years ago in this article.
A year and a half later, I returned to the subject to more fully flesh out my critique of Campism after seeing a mounting fetishization of all things China meet a resurgence of support for the Islamic Republic of Iran, following wide-scale protests that enveloped the country, and an unprovoked American-Israeli assault.
“If you buy into the Axis of Resistance rhetoric,” I wrote. “If you decide to treat geopolitics as the Campist treats them, you are going to find yourself getting tangled in knots trying to remember which regime you’re supposed to support and which ones you’re supposed to condemn. You will get all mixed up with which protests you are supposed to call democratic uprisings and which ones you must dismiss as color revolutions.”
In my third article, I proposed an alternate, anti-authoritarian vision for solidarity than what appears to me increasingly to be a sort of Campist mainstream on the Left.
I prefer to call these people Campists because the word “Tankie” is a bit imprecise and too frequently invoked by Liberals to be useful any longer as a meaningful epithet. Nevertheless, the origin of this term is highly instructive.
‘Tankie’ began not as a smear use by Liberals on Twitter against Leftists who oppose Western Imperialism, but as an intra-Left insult directed at hardline pro-Soviet communists, particularly those who prioritized loyalty to the USSR over criticism of its blatant authoritarianism or frequent military interventions.
The term was conventionally understood to find its point of origin in the power struggles within the Communist Party of Great Britain following the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, but its more likely provenance relates to the political fallout of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.
It became an epithet for the members of the CPGB who supported Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev’s deployment of tanks to put down the Prague Spring. These ‘tankies’ were opposed to the anti-authoritarian wing of the CPGB who supported Alexander Dubček’s attempts to democratically reform the communist system from within, a movement Dubček described as “socialism with a human face.”
I have written thousands of words on the subject of Campism, but I think that this paragraph from this article sums up what I see as the mortal danger lurking within it.
The problem with Campism is not merely that it is analytically weak, but that it is morally disfiguring.
It trains Leftists to see only in terms of states, shifting their attention and their solidarity away from the oppressed, the invaded, the occupied, and the imprisoned, and toward the strategic anxieties of governments.
I truly do think a lot of this is unconscious for some people. Especially newer Leftists.
Many campists don’t come into these discussion wanting to participate in genocide denial and whitewashing of internal repression and imperial crimes.
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