“No more performative shit!” Cries a latinx antifa woman at a white antifa man, whom she accuses of not being radical enough to punch a Nazi in the jaw. But, really, it’s all performative shit. All of it. None of you have scraped even one single filing of white off the spine of capital. The beast you declare to be a skeleton encompasses every single one of your actions, and taking out your impotent fury on middle-aged dough-faced Neo-Nazis is the only emotional catharsis you have in face of the knowledge that in all the years of leftist theory-making, not one of you fucks has found anything approximating an alternative to capital.
There are many radical professors. There is so much critical theory, critical race theory, Marxist analysis, the history of Maosim, Leninism, the Cuban revolution, the socialist anarchist movements in Spain, and yet what has it amounted to but a bunch of damn useless theory?
George Ciccariello-Maher, a Drexel professor famous for his performative woke-speech in favor of Nazi punching, has a book called Building the Commune. He has a book with this title, because he is an impotent clown, and if he actually had anything approximating an answer, he would be out there right now actually building the commune. Instead, he writes about it, because he is just alienated from the fabric of reality as the workers who mop his offices are from the means of production.
George Ciccariello-Maher inculcates a special type of sickness. He sits, in his office, on Twitter, and performs a kind of radical street-boxing approach to shutting down neo-fascism. And yet, the most obvious critique of him rings the most true: his words do not align with his actions. Will this coward himself ever actually throw a punch? Of course not. Never in his life. So what he is doing is telling other people, people with nothing left to lose, to go out there and beat up Nazis, get jailed or beat up in return, and call that a victory for the revolution, comrade, raise your fist.
He lives in the broken shells of century-old ideologies that he thinks can apply to the digital consumption of all individuality, the Geohell, that we currently live in. He is a man trapped in ‘dialectic’, like all people who are truly impotent, who worship the ‘dialectic’, the ‘synthesis’ that never comes, though they assure you that you’re merely a reactionary for noting the blatant reality that their ‘progress’ of the dialectic, the conversation between liberation and fascism, has gone fucking nowhere in 400 years.
A far nobler figure on the left is Chris Hedges. Hedges, who is an ordained minister, who holds a sublime love of non-violence and doomed causes, informed by his Christianity, is a far more honest broker than a weak man who knows he is weak but invites warfare on the streets anyway.
Those of us living in reality understand that 20,000 DSA kids versus the police state and the Oathkeepers ends in a massacre and probably the instating of a total martial law police state. In fact, such a war would be the argument of ruthless acceleration into collapse and Neo-monarchy, not the argument of a do-gooder normie-Marxist looking to liberate the working class.
George Ciccariello-Maher doesn’t wish to do good. He is a prisoner of his own theories, a warped Marxist on bath salts in Geohell, trying to punch his way out of his own skin. He claims to understand violence, then advocates for individuals to lose everything over empty acts of emotional catharsis that only prove the total futility of resisting capital.
If Twitter users asking for others to punch Nazis for them is the face of the revolution, I only laugh at how pathetic the legacy of Marx, a genuinely great thinker, has become.