On "MAGA Communism."

My wife and I went off the grid to a remote cabin in West Virginia for a few days to unwind over two years of traumatic stressor events, and came back feeling MUCH BETTER! Then I saw what was trending on Twitter and a few YouTube podcasts, and had another WTF moment.

Here’s young Jackson Hinkle and others talking about some sort of alliance between American leftists and MAGA supporters and calling it MAGA Communism. If you are asking yourself WTF is that?, I can only empathize. Fortunately, Hinkle himself put up this little meme explaining what he means by that oxymoronic label:

It’s a pretty good list. The only thing on there that I flat-out reject is the Antifa thing, because there is no Antifa street terrorism. There are a few others that I am undecided over because I don’t know exactly what he means by them. For example, “Patriotic Education—End Woke Academia.”

I dislike the term “patriotic education” because it makes me remember standing up for the Pledge of Allegiance every day in elementary school, and one man’s patriotism is another man’s repression. I’m all for teaching philosophical materialism in schools and am opposed to the postmodernist philosophical idealist nonsense that has led to things such as the absurd historical parody known as the 1619 Project, and wokeism is just another tool of division for the capitalist oligarchy, so I sort of see Hinkle’s point there.

I think.

And what’s with the free gyms thing? Because Hinkle and his USC buddies like to work out? I don’t know. I do know that I see free gyms but not free college or guaranteed health care or housing.

Anyway, it’s not what is on the list that is problematic for Marxists. It’s what’s not. The goal of Marxism and socialism is to eventually establish a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” which in 21st Century American English simply means that the employees who provide the labor or the service for the employers should be the ones collectively making the decisions of the organization, not the other way round as it is now under capitalism.

As Professor Richard Wolff likes to say, communism means democracy in the workplace. The workers make the big decisions, not the few people who own the company under the current system. Those who do the productive work decide where the fruits of their labor should go, not those who now reap the profits off of the surplus value of the workers’ labor.

That concept of democracy in the workplace is completely missing from Hinkle’s memed manifesto, and without it, it, whatever it is, it is not Communism.

As for what Hinkle means by MAGA, I really have no idea. The only response I got on Twitter wasn’t from him, it was from somebody else who says they are a MAGA Commie, and all it was was a vague call to make America great again by focusing on the needs of Americans as opposed to globalist capitalist institutions.

The thing is, most real MAGA people have never heard of this MAGA Commie thing—they’re not on Twitter much these days, after all—and all Republican voters I know have this very negative kneejerk reaction to the term Communist, of which they have a false, propagandized understanding in the first place.

Furthermore, MAGA deliberately focuses on identity politics and fosters a dangerous nostalgia for a time when American culture and society were absolutely dominated by an assumed white supremacy and vaguely Calvinist Protestantism. If one wants a broad populist movement for social and economic change, it seems self-defeating to me to alienate the majority of today’s American population right off the bat by using a term like MAGA.

Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but this MAGA Communism also appears to assume that capitalism should remain the dominant economic system. Communists want to destroy the capitalist system and replace it with something better, not just regulate it, which is what most of Hinkle’s bullet points are really calling for.

IOW, this MAGA Communist meme fits right in with the well-established political movement called Social Democracy. It does not call for the destruction of capitalism, so it’s not Communist. It also calls for a lot of regulations and changes that Donald Trump himself, and therefore most MAGA Republican voters, would never, EVER endorse, so I don’t see where it’s MAGA, either.

This is a conservative Social Democratic platform more than it is anything else, and an incomplete one at that. Where’s health care? Where’s housing? Where’s education? I like a lot of his proposed foreign policy, which is what Hinkle mostly focuses on in his program The Dive.

Maybe Hinkle should stick to that. Meanwhile, he should call himself what he is—a Social Democrat—not what he’s not, which is neither a MAGA Trumper nor a Communist.

Thank you for reading and have a nice day.