Maga Communism
Discussion
Daniel Tutt:
"On the online parasocial left, the “MAGA Communist” movement typifies the political irrationalism of a Gen Z alienated from the existing left. It is not clear whether MAGA Communism is a fringe Internet movement, as reported by CNN, the New York Times, and reflected in an investigative report on this movement conducted by The Guardian. MAGA Communism began as “Infrared,” a parasocial community started by Haz al-Din, a Lebanese American law student who dropped out of law school in 2019 to “preach” Marxism full-time on the Internet. Haz is not an ordinary influencer in the age of the parasocial left. His message draws support from the same vulnerable demographic Jordan Peterson attracts, namely the dejected young man, or the figure liberals mockingly call the “basement dweller.” Haz peaches a message that has many of the same qualities of Peterson’s bootstrap self-help rhetoric, but he situates his thought squarely in the Marxist tradition.
In the early period of Infrared, Haz built a loyal following based on a cage match approach to the wider online parasocial left. His strategy was to approach each day online as a battlefield amidst a wider war to defeat what he names “leftism,” which he and his followers define as the collective ideological tendency of the existing American left. In a founding manifesto of MAGA Communism, Haz and Infrared argue that a new “metaphysical” alternative to leftism needs to emerge to usher in a new multipolar imperial arrangement of power in which American hegemony is “dis-aligned.” Haz’s followers are known as “The Guerillas,”[6] an homage to the task of making guerilla warfare on existing leftism and an admission that their community is centered around the silverback alpha of Haz himself. Infrared argues that the primary schism of politics is not between left and right. Rather, it is between a nascent “partisanship” ideology, which draws people into a general antagonism with the status quo, and “leftism,” which represents all expressions of the existing left, and which is in total embrace of the status quo. In the manifesto, they write:
The distinction between left and right is displaced by the distinction between Leftism (which increasingly takes, in political reality, the form of an ‘apolitical Center’) and Partisanship, the latter including all manner of eclectic, wild, fringe ideologies which appear ‘all over the political spectrum.’ It appears as such, not because of any mystical ‘Nazbol vortex’ or profound metaphysical significance of fascism – but because it represents, in the final analysis, a denial of modern political form itself. In contrast to ‘third position syncretism,’ partisan political ideologies are properly chaotic, being defined only by their unpredictability from the standpoint of modern political consciousness.
The strategy of MAGA Communism is thus to promote a radical “hyperstitional” disruption from within the MAGA base of followers, whom they see as the antagonistic agents capable of disrupting contemporary leftism. But this idea that inside the onion of the Trump MAGA movement is the beating heart of the American proletariat leads Infrared to positions that effectively tail the Republican Party. This is precisely because so much of the content of their political controversies revolves around the embrace of the very same culture war positions the mainstream Republican Party champions. Most detrimentally, this culture war pandering to the right leads Infrared to adopt a narrow empirical definition of what constitutes the working class, leading them to deny, for example, that baristas or service workers are part of the proletariat.
But despite these basic contradictions in its understanding of the working class and MAGA, Infrared’s core problem is that it only measures its success by the performance of their leader. In his bios, Haz curiously describes himself as a “comedian” and the “undefeated Tankie Warlord.” Haz hosts nightly streams for a loyal following of between 600 to 1,000 “Guerillas” consisting of lighthearted comedy to armchair theory, to the occasional cage match debate with a leftist. Haz sees himself as a Marxist theoretician and at the core of his idiosyncratic blend of Marxist-Leninist thought is the reactionary thought of Russian philosopher Aleksander Dugin. Dugin is the master thinker who most importantly provides the strategy for thinking civilizational “multipolarity,” or the emergence of a post-unipolar, post-American-dominated world scene. Dugin argues that war and violence are necessary to initiate a break from leftism and liberalism. Dugin thus gives Infrared a global perspective on the wider aim to destroy leftism and, as a result, they frequently celebrate and embrace repressive and authoritarian regimes such as North Korea, and they understand Putin’s Russia to be in line with a wider socialist and communist vision.
In the last two years, Haz has teamed up with Jackson Hinkle, a shady social media provocateur who mysteriously grew his follower count on X following the Al-Aqsa Flood on October 7, 2023, to over two million. Haz and Hinkle have such outlandish squabbles with leftists that they become parodies of themselves. They openly celebrate Stalin, they advocate a return to patriarchal authority, and they refer to LGBTQ as a “social fascist” movement. In the “The Rise of MAGA Communism,” they make it clear that, “today’s LGBT pride parades, or the 2020 BLM protests thus have more in common with the ‘mass politics’ of Fascism than today’s MAGA movement.” All these provocative and chaotic politics have, unsurprisingly, led the left to view Hinkle, Haz, and MAGA Communism as at best a “patriotic socialist” movement destined to only tail the Republican Party. But at worst, they are viewed as a fascist rightwing movement."