“Communist” Influencers and the Russian Threat to Peace
Featuring The Case Study of Peter Coffin
--
Whenever a war begins, anywhere in the world, a growing segment of the western left forgets everything it said about labour conditions, the fact that virtually everyone in the world pays double for food, relative to their income, what they did in 2017, and the siphoning of wealth from one class to another under the tattered pretext of epidemiology, and immediately begins preaching, in a historical echo of the Kautskyite position a hundred and some years ago, the anti-Marxist position that international conflict, not class conflict, is the motive force of world history, and the latter must subject itself to the former. This tendency has long disgusted me, but as I am currently living in eastern Europe, it does more than disgust me to hear the ruling class of the entire world — Russia, as well as Europe and USA — speaking more or less openly about a return of a Middle East-style state of perpetual warfare to Europe, where, again I stress, I live.
For the past thirty or so years, the powers have been developing their pieces and building tempo, and the Albanians can tell you better than anyone how disastrous the switch to midgame will be with this setup, which by all sides has been focused not even on gaining control of the centre of the board as a rational player would, but simply on ruining a working class that already literally lives in the ruins of the wars of the 1990s (or “depressing post-socialist architecture”, as some call it) that were necessary to establish such a state of total foreign domination over Balkan affairs.
The recent escalation of the Russian-aligned Serbs in Bosnia as well as their long-standing open threat of renewed anti-Albanian genocide in Kosova has led to legitimate concerns that if a second front in this war — essentially a proxy war between Russia and NATO — were to open, it would be here. My main problem with this is that it means a war in my country. In such an event, the online, American-dominated left will throw itself into file and support the genocidal, Russian-aligned Serbia in its claim to “Kosovo”.
This is essentially what I said in a short statement I released on my patreon on 1 March, entitled War Is Not Good, which was made available to even non-subscribers. My intention with it was less to put forth a particular stance on what is happening in Ukraine, or who “should win”, but to establish that, at baseline, war is not good, and I criticised other influencers, including friends of mine, for not acknowledging that at all in any of their statements. I said, and I quote, that they “brand themselves using serious subjects like politics to people who like to think of themselves as smart and serious but do not actually want to be so,” that they are “influencers whose job it is to up the ante and sell [the fantasy of their and their audience’s intelligence] more than they did yesterday.”
i. Communists vs. Influencers
The modern content creator, I stated explicitly, is kayfabing as a revolutionary, but the growth of strength and organisation of the working class is at odds with anyone continuing to hold onto the above fantasy. Panel experts, celebrity clerics — we are the opposite of an organisation of the fighting proletariat, in that we attempt to legitimise knowledge which does not come from the struggles and experiences of the working class, even going so far as to call it Marxism-Leninism or communist ideology or some such related term.
One such influencer had gently criticised my article on Lindsay Ellis, calling Ellis a “class collaborationist”. “That’s the point,” I was saying with this release, which they read and wordlessly left my discord server over. “You are too, and I am too. This is truer the weaker we are. I want us to be stronger, so that this will be less true. I want this to be true even though, like all labourers in a capitalist economy, we must do things which strengthen our exploiters relative to our own class. If we can do anything to improve the position of the proletariat in this struggle from the ridiculous social position we occupy, it must start with our own living and working conditions, and that is a collective affair for which we must work together.”
That is what I want with you people. I want us to sit down and talk about what is, without the showboating, without pied pipering people into frictionless fandom consumption, electoralism, and war.
At best (worst), content creation can create a “panel expert” “Marxism”, which is divorced from the actual struggles of the proletariat, and consists of “experts” who read theory in a detached academic manner but who are incapable of really understanding it due to lack of real experience in collective struggle. Essentially what this does is create one of those life hack recipe videos for Communism — something profit-driven and useless or even dangerous to one fool enough to follow its instruction. It has about as much in common with actual Communist organising as a cottagecore blog has in common with an actual farm.
Obviously, this is something way worse than organising together, through which we could address issues like the algorithm, of our payment processing systems, of our payment models, of the severe labour overload we must cope with relative to our predecessors, say, the Bob Rosses of the world, who were free to focus on painting or whatever it was. It’s these things, not “theory”, that I’m interested in hearing from other influencers, content creators, and e-beggars on.
Putting aside the fact that this ideological shift amounts to careless agitation for a potential Iraq-style quagmire in my country, a concern which should not be sidelined is that it’s just shitty content. I could spend all day arguing a fact that is obvious to everybody reading, that the imperial aims of the Russian Federation are incompatible with the aspirations of the Albanian working class, which are, after all, to depose the bourgeoisie from their position of hegemony everywhere in the world, of course including Russia and its allied states, and that in this we are in perfect unity with the Russian working class who were smart enough in 1917 to know that the Russian bourgeoisie are not their anti-imperialist saviours, and sure as hell know it now.
But first I want to address the fact that this shitty warmongering content blows big fat chunks. None of them care at all about any of this. I think some of them genuinely believe what they’re saying, but if so, it’s because they’re naive anti-Marxists so far awash from the eastern European proletariat that they’re surprised or even incredulous when presented with the fact that bombing eastern Europe is unpopular in eastern Europe even if it’s done by an “anti-imperialist nation” like modern day fucking Russia apparently is, so the American leftists tell us. And when have the Americans ever led the Albanian people wrong? We should sooner ask a snowball about hell than listen to an American leftist about geopolitics.
American left influencers falling into line on this in order to make a bunch of stupid and ridiculous content in the name of Marx and Lenin, which earns the ire of a region of the world both deeply impacted by what’s going on and also already deeply deeply propagandised against Communism, is not a passion project or a principled ideological position held by these people — if it was, I’d expect them to have two words between them to say about Afghanistan, but they don’t — but only the proof of a market industry which dances into a single file (or double file, as an admitted majority are suddenly really into Ukraine — not peace, just Ukraine) when it needs to, despite itself.
By placing themselves into a position that there is a such thing as a good war, the “Marxist-Leninist” influencers have made an explicit, martial enemy of the working class of eastern Europe. There isn’t a gentle way to say this, or to interface with it. At this particular point in history, dying to fight against Russian aggression, to preserve peace in Europe, is a good and noble thing to do, even if you do so with people with confused objectives, even if you yourself are as naive as one must necessarily be when headed into a war. To me, this is not because I have any particular affection for Ukraine, but because I have a particular affection for peace. I do not say this with the naivete of an American protestor concerned mostly with another country such as Iraq, but with the immediate concern of a person who lives here, whose people are historic and ongoing geopolitical enemies to Russian imperial aims. Can I hold this conviction and at the same time shake hands with a fascist ideologue propagandising for an imperial power?
Let me put it another way, at this point can I say two positive words to Peter Coffin and make eye contact with anyone in a 1500 km radius of where I live?
ii. The Case Study of Peter Coffin
The west’s response to Russian disinformation, which was politicised after the 2016 election, but privatised, it seems, to social media websites, has been hamfisted and hypocritical, and, as far as I know, ineffective. The widely-publicised, much-hyped, and frankly lame actions taken have led to the impression that Russian propaganda is itself an insignificant concern, and everyone worried about it is an uncool, hysterical, out-of-touch loser. Some say it’s not real at all. But propaganda is a basic state function, in Russia and Ukraine and Albania and everywhere, and if a state has the resources to manipulate discourse it will undoubtedly do so, and on social media it doesn’t even really count as espionage. It’s literally just using a website. Putin worked in foreign intelligence for 16 years before he became a politician. You have to be stupid to think the idea never occurred to him to manipulate public opinion.
So some say it’s a violation of “free speech” to prevent the propaganda and agitation of a foreign power from reaching the people, which is certainly a take. Some think it’s good that they do so, viewing geopolitics like Yugi Moto, as if since one of the Brothers Paradox says nothing but lies the other must be telling the truth — however the truth of the working class is never sought, only of “journalists” and analysts and “experts”. Some of the mouthpieces of foreign empires, such as Chen Weihua and Caleb Maupin, have managed to attain some level of celebrity status for themselves in the same way Trump, Reagan, and indeed Zelenszkyy did, through their twitter clapbacks and connections to influencers. The liberal fantasy remains: bad politics people can be effectively countered by clap backs, and if China state-affiliated media can clap back the hardest, well, maybe they deserve it!
Russia has utilised similar tactics to COINTELPRO against the working class of the United States to manufacture acceptance of its slogans, ideas, and stereotypes of the region of the planet which it wishes to hegemonise and conquer. It has been successful to a large extent in conflating its current political hegemony with that of the revisionist Soviet Union, and in turn conflating the de-Stalinised USSR with the Soviet Union under Stalin, which was concerned with building socialism. Apparently, “anti-imperialism” is something that lives in Russia no matter what, and is therefore compatible with a developed capitalist market economy — so long as that developed market economy is run by Russians, and not Americans, because America is where the bad people live.
Not only that! Apparently, since Russia defeated fascism in Word War II, anti-fascism must live there too. Russia is not alone or unprecedented in hypermilitarising its own repressive government infrastructure against the working class in the name of anti-fascism; I am old enough to remember the refrain of “islamo-fascism” in the United States in the early 2000’s and even Biden has had whiffs of this in his crackdowns against supporters of his partisan opposition, as Peter themself said vocally and constantly around the time of the Biden inauguration. Fortunately for global imperialism, it seems “the far right” is in no short supply and happens to now be located in exactly the region that the global bourgeoisie seems to have agreed should become the next indefinite war zone now that they‘ve been expelled from an Afghanistan that proves every day that it’s a better country without them in it.
“I think that it’s pretty important to start off by saying that a lot of people have characterised this group of people that descended on the [American] capital as nazis or fascists, and while you could make an argument that there are definitely some people who are explicitly in support of fascism, wearing various signifiers etc etc, but it’s important to say that fascism is a method of exerting power”, said Peter Coffin in episode #71 of their former podcast, Low Society, recorded in January of 2021, “like you have to be in power.”
Cohost Angie continued. “It’s ironic for the people who are celebrating extrajudicial killings, want to turn society into a panopticon and a war of all against all to be screaming that these people are an existential threat when what they have is [just their opinion] at this point,” she said, still exaggerating their ideological coherence, but much less significantly, it should be said, than everyone else was at that time. “They don’t have their hands on the levers of power, these people do, the intelligence agencies, the Military-Industrial Complex, Silicon Valley, and the [Biden presidency] now, these people are the ones in charge, so why am I supposed to believe that someone on 4chan is more of a threat than people who are legitimately manufacturing consent for our civil liberties being siphoned?”
“Yes,” agreed Peter, “and on top of this, it’s not really just those people either. Like there are some of those 4chan types on there but there’s also like small-town Republicans that went down to the Trump rally. Like, several people from the town I grew up in went […] In the eyes of all the people who are trying to act like the big-time amazing leftists who know everything, these are “fascists”, these are unapologetic nazis who have the ability and are upholding capitalism and fascism. No, these people are not upholding shit. That is not how power works. […] If you have a problem with the system, but you’re saying like a group of individuals upholds it, unless you’re talking about the owning class, you are wrong. Public consensus does not create policy. That’s not how this works,” Peter concluded correctly.
Later in the same episode, Peter and Angie discuss in a very frank, human way how disgusted the footage of the extrajudicial killing of “literal Nazi” Ashley Babbit made them feel, and how hollow the justification rings when you’re talking about killing people. Extrajudicial killings, the hosts agree, are wrong. At least when they happen in America.
Europe, however, seems to be a different story. Peter, now a major celebrity endorser of the “Center for Political Innovation”, a Russian think tank pretending to be a social democratic organisation, seems to have gone all in on Putin’s “denazification” narrative, through which Putin has claimed for himself the right to invade sovereign nations if they’re “too far right”. Peter said on 16 March, only a few days ago, in a weird essay ironically defending patriotism, though again, apparently only for America:
There are Nazi supporters in the United States, some intentional and some not. The intentional ones march around with swastikas, and the unintentional ones do it with Ukrainian flags.
Quite the turnaround! It seems that now it has been conceded by the great champion of patriotism that the peoples of eastern Europe carry the stink of nazism in them to the extent that even their very national flags are a defilement. Patriotism, it seems to this “socialist”, is a right which can be revoked by the proletarian hero Vladimir Putin. I wonder what this great internationalist will have to say about my Albanian flag in the event that the war spreads to Albania, as it well may.
Peter, who once attempted to escape the labyrinth of endless online content production and consumption, now seems to have found work as Putin’s minotaur.
In an episode of their new podcast PACD, which aired earlier this month, “Center for Political Innovation” founder Caleb Maupin, the Energizer Bunny of Russian foreign policy, said as a part of an intolerable 50-minute barrage of apologetics, each point more disingenuous than the last:
“The US government has the policy of going around the world and cultivating these extremist groups, these terrorist groups, these hate groups, and then Donald Trump basically built a rainbow coalition of these groups”, to the laughter of Peter and their co-host, “ … and then they stormed the capitol on January 6 and the crowd was full of those folx. That’s who these woke folx are upset about, and that’s the Donald Trump movement, is dominated by these folx and if they’re worried about Donald Trump, a LOT of his base is these extremist groups and that includes the Azov Batallion.”
“What you described there,” agreed Peter speaking of a crowd which a year ago had included people from their hometown, “was basically Donald Trump doing identity politics with the right wing.”
iii. How different is this from historical communist precedent?
On the outset of what is now known in the west as World War II, R. Palme Dutt, a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, authored an excellent pamphlet, well worth reading in its entirety and of incredible historical importance in the current moment, called Why This War? His precedent is well worth considering here, because like Peter, he was a citizen of a major global power at a time in history when, not for the first time and evidently not for the last, the bourgeoisie seemed set on plunging Europe into war. But unlike Peter, he was a communist. How does the communist approach to war differ from that of a Putinist like Peter?
Writing in a very early stage in the war, Dutt begins by asking the question any real, actual, non-pretendsies Marxist must, a question I have not, incidentally, seen posed by a single influencer:
Is the continuance of this war in the interests of the working people?
and the answer he arrives at, which is already well-known to the working people of Europe, is excellently put here:
It is only in the interests of the handful of sharks and vultures who are drawing millions of profits out of the necessities of the people and out of the lavish orgy of State war finance. It is only in the interests of the ruling few who wish to destroy democracy and establish fascism in Britain.
For the mass of the people it brings only limitless hardships — not in any ideal cause, not in their own cause, but only in the cause of a quarrel of rival exploiters.
The interests of the people demand the speediest termination of this war.
The essay concludes with a set of demands, literally every one of which is immediately applicable, virtually without alteration, to the current situation in Europe today in 2022, because nothing has changed in the capitalist world since 1941:
The Communist Party calls for active united struggle of all labour organisations, of all sections of the working class, of all sections of the people for the immediate urgent needs which are felt by all, which must be won without delay:
• For immediate increases in wages, pensions, unemployment benefits and soldiers’ dependants’ allowances to meet the rise in the cost of living.
• For coordinated action of the trade unions in all sections of industry where demands for wage increases have been put in.
• For the restriction of hours and overtime in accordance with trade union agreements, and for the strict enforcement of all safety and welfare regulations laid down by the Factory Acts.
• Immediate measures against the profiteers to bring down prices.
• For the restoration of all democratic rights which have been removed by wartime legislation, including immediate re-election of all local authorities and the abolition of the ‘Emergency’ dictators.
• For the removal of the restrictions on the social services, the restoration of educational and health services in evacuation areas and their extension in reception areas.[…]
The Communist Party fights to end this war, not in order to go back to the old world of so-called ‘peace’, of unemployment and crises, of armaments and fascism, but in order that, with the victory of the people against the war-makers, against the criminal ruling classes responsible for this war, we may go forward to a new world.
We fight for a Britain in which there shall be no more arms profiteers, no more Means Tests, no more spending of hundreds and thousands of millions on the weapons of destruction, while the sick and the aged and the blind are cut short of the pennies for their barest needs of existence.
We call for a united movement of the people to compel the immediate ending of the war.
Rather than any of these concrete demands, which would entail an actual platform which might be struggled for by an organisation of some sort (heaven forbid!), the “Marxist-Leninist” influencers of the internet space have put forward a ridiculous, anti-communist, and frankly anti-human line of fetishism of military defeat. Without getting into the issues with their egregious misreadings of Lenin that they use to support this point, there is simply no precedent for thinking that a mere military defeat will hasten the worker’s revolution. Before they invented internet brain poisoning, Dutt himself pointed out clearly that the bourgeoisie:
fear peace, which would open the way to the advance of the working class in all countries, and at the same time give rise to tremendous economic and political problems
and that
[t]he victory of the mass struggle for the immediate ending of the war would enormously strengthen the working-class and democratic movement for further advance. It would mean, in fact, a check to the imperialisms on both sides. It would mean a check to the war machine and to the menacing process of development in Britain and France towards militarised and fascist forms. It would give the most favourable conditions to carry forward to speedy victory the struggle against our reactionary Government, which is responsible for landing the people in this war.
The west has not been in the habit of peace since the 1940’s, because capitalism at this advanced age requires frequent and plentiful blood sacrifice lest the money get sad. From the second World War launched the Cold War, and after it the period of consolidationary “police operations” in Europe, the middle east, and Africa, during the 1990s, and from there something openly marketed as the Global War on Terror. All of these were essentially the same war, the capitalist war against the system’s own entropy, and nobody in the west dares speak of peace anymore. When I was a kid it was the stuff of childrens’ media, now not even that. It’s completely left our imagination.
One of the differences, though, between a communist and these influencer bullfighters, who wave a red flag before their audience only to stab them in the back, is this philosophy towards peace. A communist understands that a call for peace is a call for communism, and makes the call anyway. A communist does so unashamedly, because a communist knows that peace is an opportunity to build the power of the working class, to groom it into the hegemonic role it has been set to inherit for over a century, a class in the throes of an ongoing revolution — a revolution that has been in retreat, but a revolution which is nonetheless ongoing and which will inevitably emerge victorious. A communist knows further that peace cannot be established in a global economic system which has been known to be reliant on war for over a century, a system which collapses entirely in its absence, a system which will know peace only in death.
So the question is, again:
Is the continuance of this war in the interests of the working people?
The reliance of the capitalist system on war, proven by over a century of constant, unremitting bloodshed, may be its greatest weakness.
Do you want peace or not?
Do you think peace will come without a seizure of power by the working class or not? Fine, try whatever you want — and when that fails to establish peace, you’ll know exactly why.
But you have to actually want peace. You have to be trying to establish peace on earth and not just representing Russian foreign policy objectives. War is necessary to sustain capitalism, and that means it will spread to Europe, and it will spread to America and Australia and everywhere and you have to want that not to happen before we can talk about how to make it not happen.
Do we want Ukraine to lose a war, or do we want the working class to win one?
The question that seems to have been evaded in all of this is what of the working people in Russia and Ukraine? Both seem to have arrived at their answer fairly quickly, despite the best efforts of the Center for Political Bid’ah: neither Ukrainians nor Russians want a war. In Russia, anti-war protesters in their thousands have been threatened with up to 15 years in prison even as sanctions destroy their lives and economy. Is this a correct policy or not? Should a Russian working class person support or oppose this war effort? Should a Russian working class person support or oppose their oligarchical government, with which any working class movement will come into conflict immediately?
I want NATO out of Ukraine as much as the next guy. I want them out of Albania too. But there is a way Communists do that, and it’s not by invading sovereign nations.
Currently, I’m pretty slow getting articles out. This is because I’ve had to put a lot of effort into begging around tumblr for money. I hope this will be my last tumblr e-begging campaign ever, and will allow me to make writing my main source of income, which means more posts for everyone.
Consider supporting me on patreon to make that possible. Supporters get commentary about these longform medium essays as well as occasional exclusive stuff like book reviews, and if anything happens to me on medium you’ll be able to easily get the updates on what I’m doing and where I’m going next, so, genuinely cool deal for you. Little bit of platform insurance.
All posters in this article courtesy of Soviet Visuals on twitter.
