Trolling as Marxist praxis

The Brimstone Band

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Introduction

There is a kind of leftist who believes politics becomes more serious the less funny everyone involved is allowed to be. They treat mockery as a contamination of theory, trolling as evidence that somebody has abandoned politics for spectacle, and public humiliation as something fundamentally beneath serious organizers. The ideal revolutionary, apparently, speaks exclusively in the cadence of a nonprofit annual report.

This is historically ridiculous.

Marxism was built by people who spent enormous amounts of time insulting one another, parodying each other’s books, publishing replies whose titles were themselves jokes, inventing factional names designed to make opponents sound weak, writing songs that mocked preachers, and occasionally devoting hundreds of pages to somebody almost nobody remembers anymore.

That does not mean cruelty is automatically revolutionary. Marx was perfectly capable of aiming the same viciousness he used against political enemies at people beneath him, including through racism, and the history of socialist polemic is full of men who learned the pleasure of contempt without learning any discipline about where to point it. There is also an obvious difference between a joke attached to an organization capable of acting and a joke posted because an algorithm rewards conflict.

That distinction is what this essay is about.

The left did not invent trolling on Twitter. It inherited a political tradition in which ridicule, naming, exaggeration, parody, spectacle, and public confrontation were regularly used to alter the terms of an argument. Sometimes they clarified theory. Sometimes they recruited people. Sometimes they destroyed organizations that should have survived. Sometimes the person doing it was completely right and still managed to make being right cost far more than it was worth.

The point is not that trolling is secretly revolutionary activity whenever somebody with a red flag emoji posts something funny. The point is that polemic has always been part of political practice, and its usefulness depends on what it is attached to, who it is aimed at, whether it can be answered, and whether there is anything left after everybody finishes laughing.

That is the Brimstone Band tradition.

1. A year of your life for a man nobody remembers

In 1860, Karl Marx spent a year of his life on a man named Karl Vogt.

Vogt was a naturalist and a former delegate to the Frankfurt parliament, and in 1859 he published a pamphlet claiming Marx ran a blackmail operation out of London. He called Marx’s circle the Schwefelbande, the Brimstone Band, and said they squeezed money out of German exiles by threatening to expose them as police spies. It was a lie, and it was the kind of lie that sticks because it was specific and funny and landed on people who already thought Marx was insufferable.

Everybody told him to let it go. Lassalle told him to let it go. Engels, who had spent fifteen years watching Marx get pulled off course by lesser men, told him to let it go.

Marx wrote two hundred pages.

Herr Vogt came out in December 1860, and it is one of the funniest things Marx ever wrote, and it is completely deranged. He audits Vogt’s money. He reconstructs the travel schedules of exiles nobody had thought about in a decade. He goes through the minutes of committees that had four members. The family was broke the entire time. Jenny copied out the manuscript by hand. Marx wasn’t working on Capital, which he had already been failing to finish for over a decade and would keep failing to finish for another seven years.

Then the Second Empire collapsed, and in 1870 the papers found in the Tuileries were published, and it turned out Karl Vogt had been paid forty thousand francs by Louis Bonaparte in August 1859.

So Marx was right. He was right in the most expensive way a person can be right, which is to say he was right in public, ten years late, about something that had already eaten a year he was never getting back, and by then most of the people who read the accusation had never heard about the correction.

I think about this every time somebody quote-posts me to explain that posting isn’t praxis. They’re not wrong about the word. They’re just using it as a vibe instead of a theory. In 1845, in a notebook he never got around to publishing, Marx wrote that philosophers had only interpreted the world in various ways, and the point was to change it. That’s the whole doctrine of praxis in one line: a theory that never risks anything in the world, never goes and gets tested somewhere it can actually lose, isn’t praxis. It’s just a nicer kind of talking. Herr Vogt is a year of somebody’s actual life spent finding out, in public, whether a theory about how ruling-class smears operate was true.

Posting isn’t praxis, and neither is spending 1860 on Karl Vogt, at least not by itself. Yet the man who did that also wrote the book half of you own a tote bag about, and he didn’t do those two things in separate rooms with different hands. It was one temperament. He was a hater. The hating and the theory came out of the same place in him, and if you cut the hating out, you don’t get a purer Marx. You get Kautsky.

2. He put the joke on the cover

The first thing to understand about the Marxist canon is how much of it is titled like a subtweet.

In 1846, Proudhon published The System of Economic Contradictions, or The Philosophy of Poverty. In 1847, Marx published The Poverty of Philosophy, in French, in Paris, so that Proudhon’s own readers could watch it happen in their own language. He took the man’s subtitle, turned it around, and put it on the cover. That’s the whole gag, and it worked so well that a hundred and eighty years later you can’t say the name of Proudhon’s book without saying the name of the reply.

In 1845, Marx and Engels published The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism. Against Bruno Bauer and Company. They took the Young Hegelians’ favorite self-description and repeated it back until it sounded stupid, which is a technique every girl in a group chat already knows. You say it again with the same face and let the phrase attend its own funeral.

Then there’s The German Ideology, written across 1845 and 1846, in which the section attacking Max Stirner is titled “Saint Max” and runs longer than The Ego and Its Own, the book it exists to destroy. They wrote a reply physically larger than its target. They never published it. In the 1859 preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx said they had abandoned the manuscript to the gnawing criticism of the mice, and that they didn’t mind because the real point had been to get clear for themselves.

There’s a reason none of this is only cleverness. Decades later, Antonio Gramsci was arrested by Mussolini’s government and sentenced to more than twenty years, a fascist prosecutor telling the court the point of the sentence was to stop that particular brain from working. From his cell, sick and filling notebook after notebook he wasn’t sure would ever be read, Gramsci worked out that a ruling class doesn’t hold power only through armies and elections. It holds power by controlling what everybody already assumes before an argument even starts, which he called hegemony, and the slow work of contesting that common sense he called a war of position, set against a war of maneuver, the single decisive battle for the state itself.

Putting your rival’s own subtitle back on your own cover, making Bruno Bauer’s circle sound like a cult it can’t disown, or running your reply longer than Stirner’s own book just to be sure nobody reads one without the other does not decide an election. It decides what a reader picks up second and who that second book already sounds like it’s laughing at before the first page.

The first complete statement of the materialist conception of history exists because two men in their twenties wanted to be book-length mean to Max Stirner and couldn’t make themselves stop. The theory is downstream of the beef. You don’t arrive at the argument without the fight because the fight is the thing that forces you to say what you actually believe instead of what sounds correct at a meeting. Almost nobody builds a position from scratch in a calm room. People build positions when somebody they can’t stand says something they can’t let stand.

3. The catechism was a reply guy

In the mid-1870s, a lecturer in Berlin named Eugen Dühring started picking up followers inside the young German party. He had a system. He had opinions about everything, which is the actual qualification for a following, and young socialists were reading him with enthusiasm. Liebknecht kept writing to Engels asking him to do something about it.

Engels didn’t want to, and he complained about it. Answering Dühring meant following the man into political economy, philosophy, natural science, mathematics, and the history of socialism, because Dühring had an opinion waiting in each of those rooms, and you can’t leave one of them standing or the followers will point at it forever.

So Engels went into every room. The result ran in Vorwärts across 1877 and 1878 and came out as a book titled, more or less, Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science, which is the same joke as The Poverty of Philosophy delivered with a flatter face.

For an entire generation of European socialists, that book is how they learned Marxism. Not Capital. Not the Manifesto. Anti-Dühring. Engels pulled three chapters out of it in 1880 at Lafargue’s urging and published them separately as Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, which went into more languages and more hands than almost anything else either of them wrote while alive.

The standard introduction to Marxism is a reply. It is a man getting dragged into an argument he didn’t want, against a guy he considered a crank, at a length nobody requested, and it turned out to be one of the most effective pieces of political education the movement produced in the nineteenth century. Eugen Dühring is remembered largely because Engels couldn’t let it go.

Every single one of you has an Anti-Dühring in your drafts and deleted it because someone in your DMs said it wasn’t a good look.

4. Lenin lost the vote and took the word

At the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in the summer of 1903, which opened in Brussels and finished in London because the Belgian police got curious, the party split over the definition of membership. Lenin wanted a member to participate in an organization. Martov wanted a member to give regular assistance under the direction of one. The vote went to Martov.

Lenin lost. That is the part people skip when they tell this story. He lost the substantive fight over what the party was.

Later in the congress, the Bundists walked out, and the Economists walked out after them, and on the remaining votes about who controlled Iskra and the central bodies, Lenin’s side had the numbers still sitting in the room. So he called his faction bolshinstvo, majority, and the people who had beaten him on the actual question got menshinstvo, minority.

They answered to it for the rest of their political lives, through years when they had more members, more money, more of the working class, and more of the intelligentsia, and they still never got the word.

This is the war of position in miniature, and Lenin fought it exactly as seriously as he fought any other kind. A word on a masthead recruits. It tells a printer’s apprentice in Baku which side is winning before he has read a line of theory, and by the time he is equipped to evaluate the theory he has been calling himself a majority-ist for two years and his friends are all majority-ists too. Lenin understood that a faction is partly a branding problem, and he wasn’t embarrassed about it. The men who were embarrassed about it lost.

5. The margins

Lenin’s titles are a hate crime against his own comrades, and I say that with total admiration.

Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, 1909, is four hundred pages accusing Bogdanov and the Machists of smuggling God back into physics. Bogdanov was one of the most capable organizers the Bolsheviks had, and Lenin called him a priest at book length, in print, with his name on it.

The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, 1918. Renegade, in the title. Kautsky had been the pope of Marxist orthodoxy for twenty years, the man who kept the sacred texts, and Lenin put the word renegade on the cover beside his name and let it ride into every socialist household in Europe.

“Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder, 1920, is a book asking the ultraleft to come and work with him, and the title calls them babies. He is recruiting and insulting them inside the same six words. There is also a short piece from 1911 called Judas Trotsky’s Blush of Shame, which he didn’t publish in his lifetime, and six years later he and Judas ran a revolution together.

He was worse in private. He annotated books the way an angry woman annotates a screenshot before forwarding it: exclamation marks, “ha-ha,” sic, and the occasional single word of contempt parked in the margin beside a paragraph he considered beneath answering.

What all of that abuse has in common matters more than the abuse itself. Every instance of it has an address: a named person, a stated position, a date, and a claim somebody could go and check. Bogdanov could answer. Kautsky did answer. The ultraleft answered so hard they were still answering in 1968. Lenin’s contempt was bolted to an argument capable of losing, delivered by a man who then had to keep turning up at congresses where the people he had insulted were sitting in the third row with their own delegates.

6. Twenty-seven years old, in a hall full of men who ran the largest party in Europe

Stuttgart, October 1898. Rosa Luxemburg had been in Germany for months. She had a Polish accent, a hip that made her walk badly, no standing in the party, and a body that every man in the hall had already reached conclusions about.

The question on the floor was Wolfgang Heine’s compensation policy, the proposal that socialist deputies trade votes for the military budget in exchange for concessions on civil liberties. It sounded reasonable, which was the problem with it. Rosa got up and compared it to a wife who agrees to let her husband beat her a little in exchange for something she wants.

She took a debate about parliamentary tactics among serious men and dropped a domestic scene into the middle of it. Every deputy in the room became the husband, and the party became the wife. She did it as a joke, in front of the leadership, at twenty-seven, in her second language, and the reason Bebel and Kautsky had to deal with her for the next twenty years is that the joke was correct.

The following year, she published Social Reform or Revolution against Bernstein, and the argument is that credit, cartels, and the world market don’t smooth capitalism’s contradictions out. They concentrate them. A party that quietly drops the conquest of political power doesn’t get a slower road to the same destination. It gets a machine that has started mistaking its own institutional survival for progress. She was right about that too, and in 1914 the party she was arguing with voted for the war credits, and in 1919 men acting under that party’s government beat her skull in and threw her in a canal.

I want the girls to hold onto this one. The most feared polemicist in the Second International was a small disabled Jewish immigrant woman who got funnier every time they patronized her, and every organizational instinct those men had was to manage her. Now each of them is a footnote in her biography.

7. The funniest pamphlet in the canon, and what its author’s father-in-law called him in the mail

Paul Lafargue was born in Santiago de Cuba in 1842, into a family carrying African, Carib, and Jewish ancestry through Saint-Domingue and Jamaica before it landed in France. He married Laura Marx. In 1880, much of it written from Sainte-Pélagie prison, he published The Right to Be Lazy.

The argument is an act of aggression against his own side. The workers’ movement, he says, has adopted the boss’s religion. It demands the right to work. It celebrates labor as dignity and calls that socialism, when the actual content of proletarian demand should be less of your one life sold off, fewer hours standing inside somebody else’s building, and the machines running so that people can stop. He calls the love of work a mania and a delirium, and he is saying it to socialists.

It got translated everywhere. It was read by enormous numbers of people who never finished Capital and never planned to. It is still one of the funniest things in the tradition, and it is a shitpost, and it did real work because it named the thing the movement’s own moralism had made unsayable.

In private letters, Marx used racial epithets about Lafargue. Repeatedly. The same man who wrote two hundred pages defending his own name against a slander used slurs about his daughter’s mixed-race husband in the post to Engels, and did the same about Lassalle in a letter from July 1862 so vile that his defenders have spent a hundred and sixty years explaining that it was private correspondence, as if the girls haven’t heard that one before, and as if the private letter weren’t exactly the place where people keep what they actually think.

Everything I have described so far is a tradition of extremely gifted haters. The hating produced the theory, and the same faculty produced the racism. It is one faculty. Contempt doesn’t arrive with a targeting system pre-installed. You have to install it yourself, deliberately, and Marx didn’t. The tradition he founded inherited a polemical style with no direction control on it whatsoever, which is how you end up with a hundred and fifty years of socialist men who learned from Marx that viciousness is a political virtue and never once checked which way they were pointing.

8. The Hague, 1872, or: he would rather kill it than lose it

The International Workingmen’s Association was founded in London in 1864, and Marx wrote its inaugural address. People remember it now as a debating society, which is a slander. Its actual work was material and boring and effective: raising strike funds across borders and organizing so that, when English employers tried to break a strike by importing workers from the continent, the continental sections got to those workers first and told them what they were walking into. That is the thing that existed. That is the thing that was at stake.

Bakunin joined in 1868, bringing his Alliance of Socialist Democracy with him. The political disagreement was real and enormous. Marx’s side held that the working class had to organize as a political party and take state power. Bakunin’s side held that the state had to be abolished as the first act, and that participation in politics was already a defeat. That argument is still live. Nobody has settled it.

What Marx did was investigate. He and Engels and Lafargue put together a report on Bakunin’s Alliance, published in 1873, and a great deal of it was correct. Bakunin really had run a secret organization inside the public one. He really had been entangled with Sergei Nechayev, whose circle murdered a student named Ivanov in 1869, and who had sent a threatening letter to a publisher to get Bakunin out of a translation contract he had taken the advance for.

At the Hague Congress in September 1872, Marx’s side expelled Bakunin and James Guillaume. Then, having won, Marx moved that the General Council be relocated to New York.

New York, across an ocean, out of reach of the federalists and out of reach of every working-class organization in Europe that the International had been built to connect. The European movement never got it back. The federalists met at Saint-Imier a week later and carried on for a few years under their own steam, and the body Marx had built formally dissolved in Philadelphia in 1876.

He deleted the server. He was right about Bakunin’s secret Alliance, he was right about Nechayev, he won the vote in front of the delegates, and he would rather have shipped the whole apparatus three thousand miles to die than watch it get run by a man he despised. Every one of you has watched this happen in a Discord. An admin loses control of the culture and, rather than be in a room she doesn’t run, she archives the channels and posts a statement. The difference between her and Marx is that the strike funds were real and the workers on the docks at Liverpool were real, and what got destroyed was somebody’s leverage over their own employer.

Being right isn’t the same as being worth it. That is the bill for a polemical temperament with no institutional discipline attached, and it came due in 1872. The tradition has been paying it in installments ever since.

9. The dustbin acquires a lid

October 1917, Smolny, the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets. The Mensheviks and the Right SRs get up to walk out in protest, and Trotsky tells them from the platform that they are bankrupts, that their part is finished, and that they should go where they belong, into the dustbin of history.

It is the greatest live line in the history of the left, and nothing has touched it since. A man watched his enemies leave a room and handed them a destination on the way out.

In March 1921, the Tenth Party Congress banned factions inside the party, and Kronstadt was put down the same month. Trotsky was expelled in 1927, deported in 1929, and killed in Coyoacán in 1940 by an agent of the state he had built.

The man who invented the dustbin went into it, and the reason has nothing to do with irony. The polemical culture that produced Trotsky required one very specific condition in order to exist: an opposition that couldn’t be arrested. Every book named so far was written into a live argument with people who had their own press, their own money, their own delegates, and the ability to answer at the next congress. Marx could call Vogt a Bonapartist stooge because Vogt could sue him, and did. Lenin could call Kautsky a renegade because Kautsky had a journal and used it. Rosa could compare the party leadership to a wife-beater because she was going to be standing in the same hall as them the following autumn.

Take that condition away and the polemic stops being polemic. What’s left is an announcement from a body that can’t be contradicted, and there’s already a word for that: propaganda. Rosa saw it coming in 1918, in the manuscript published after her death as The Russian Revolution, where she wrote that freedom is always the freedom of the one who thinks differently. She meant it as a warning to people she was otherwise defending, and it is the sentence I resent needing most.

10. When the joke had a treasury

Spokane, Washington, 1909. The city passed an ordinance against street speaking, aimed squarely at the Industrial Workers of the World, who recruited from soapboxes outside the employment agencies robbing migrant workers with placement fees for jobs that lasted a week. The IWW put out a call. Members came in from all over the West, and one after another they got up on the box, said one sentence, and got arrested. Then the next one got up. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was arrested while pregnant. The jails filled past capacity, the city’s costs went vertical, and the ordinance broke.

That is a prank, but it is also a strategy, and what separates the two is that hundreds of people had agreed in advance to go to jail in a specific order.

Then there’s Joe Hill, who in 1911 wrote “The Preacher and the Slave” to the tune of the hymn “In the Sweet By-and-By,” which is where English gets the phrase “pie in the sky.” The Wobblies would stand next to the Salvation Army band on the same corner and sing the same melody with different words, loudly, so the crowd couldn’t hear the sermon. They printed it in a songbook subtitled To Fan the Flames of Discontent. They called the Salvation Army the Starvation Army and then sang it at them in harmony.

Set that beside a good quote-post. The formal content is identical. Somebody said a thing, you took their own structure and filled it with your meaning, and the audience laughed at them instead of with them. What is different is that behind the Wobbly on the corner there was a union with a defense fund, a legal apparatus, an agreed order for who gets bailed out first, and a specific list of the employment sharks the entire performance was actually about. The joke was the recruiting arm of something. Remove the something and it is karaoke.

11. Détournement, and the day the Stock Exchange bought glass

The Situationists understood the joke as a method and gave it a name. In 1966, a handful of pro-Situ students won the student union elections at Strasbourg and spent the union’s money printing On the Poverty of Student Life, an attack on student life, financed by students and handed out at the university’s own ceremony. The courts got involved and the union went into administration. Note the title, lifted from Marx, who lifted it from Proudhon. The tradition trolls itself down the generations like an inheritance.

In August 1967, Abbie Hoffman and a small group went up to the visitors’ gallery of the New York Stock Exchange and threw money onto the trading floor, and traders scrambled for it in front of cameras. No speech could have done that. The scene made the argument, and it made it in about eleven seconds, and afterward the exchange enclosed the gallery in glass, which is the most honest review any action has ever received. The ruling class doesn’t answer a joke with a rebuttal. It answers with architecture.

Then, because history has a sense of humor and it is at our expense, the right studied all of this and got better at it than we are. From roughly 2014 onward, everything above got picked up by people who understood the mechanics perfectly and stripped out the one part that made it dangerous to the person doing it. The whole innovation of the modern reactionary troll is the escape hatch. He can’t be answered because, the second a point lands, he was kidding, and the second he is pinned, he was never serious. There is no name on the account anyway.

That is the opposite of everything described so far. Marx put his name on two hundred pages about Karl Vogt and stayed in London where Vogt’s lawyers could reach him. Rosa said it at the congress with the men in the room. Joe Hill sang it on the corner and the state of Utah shot him in 1915. This isn’t a tradition of getting away with it. It is a tradition of not getting away with it, on purpose, in public, with your legal name attached to the invoice.

12. The four conditions

So the rule has four parts.

It is signed. Your name and an account people can find. Anonymity is fine for the girls who would actually be killed, and I mean that literally, and I am not talking to them here. I am talking to the men in the reading group with the frog avatar and the theory degree.

It has an address. A named person, a named position, a named organization, and a specific thing that was actually done on a specific day. The discourse isn’t an address, and neither is a vibe you are subposting so that four different women think it is about them and one of them cries.

It can lose. What you said has to be checkable, which means it has to be capable of being wrong, and you have to be willing to eat it when it is. This is the same bar Marx set for theory in that unpublished notebook in 1845 and then actually met in 1860: an idea that never risks the outcome isn’t praxis. It’s just opinion with a bibliography. He spent a year on Vogt and was vindicated in 1870. He could just as easily have spent that year and been wrong, and there are plenty of other fights where he was.

You stay in the room. You take the reply. You don’t post and mute. You don’t swing and then announce you are stepping back for your mental health while your friends handle the aftermath. If you can’t survive the answer, you were never in an argument. You were performing one for people who already agreed with you.

Underneath all four is the requirement that it goes up, or sideways at cowardice, and never down. This is the condition Marx failed. He aimed at Vogt, who was on a foreign government’s payroll, and he aimed at Lassalle and at his own son-in-law with the identical equipment. There was nothing in his method to stop him because he never built the stop.

We have to build it. Squeamishness isn’t the reason, and neither is a sudden taste for respectability politics. The difference is between contempt as a political instrument and contempt as a personality.

13. The exchange rate

All of that is a defense of the sharp reply, and I am extremely aware of who gets to make one.

A white man in a reading group can call another man a renegade and it reads as erudition. He gets a laugh, and somebody screenshots it admiringly and puts it on a graphic with a red background. When I do the same thing at half the temperature, there is a document. There is a group chat where three people who have never met me establish that I am a danger. There are DMs going out to organizers explaining that I am difficult, and difficult travels faster than any essay I have ever written. By the time it arrives in a room I have never stood in, it has become unsafe, and there is no reply to unsafe because unsafe is built to be unanswerable. That is the entire appeal of the word.

I have watched money leave over one sentence. Bookings evaporate over one sentence. I have had people describe my tone as an injury while sitting on housing and an income I have never had, and while never once in their lives having been in the smallest physical danger from me, which is the only kind of danger I am actually capable of putting anybody in and the only kind nobody ever bothers to accuse me of.

So the rule about direction isn’t an abstraction where I live. When a Black transsexual woman is sharp, the bill is charged immediately and it is charged in rent. When a white cis man is sharp, he gets called based. The tools are identical. The invoice isn’t, and the difference has nothing to do with any quality in the sentence. It is about who can be made to pay and who has a room full of people ready to absorb it on his behalf.

Since I am running an audit on everybody else, I have gotten this wrong myself. I mocked a woman from a large platform once, for free, because it was easy and because a certain audience wanted it, and she blocked me, and I didn’t care at the time. Years later, after my own turn in the machine, I went back and read her properly and found out she had been right. That wasn’t polemic. There was no claim in it capable of losing, there was no address, and there was nothing underneath it. It was entertainment for people who were never going to lift a finger for either of us, and I was the labor.

14. What I actually want from you

Be a hater. I mean it. The anger is doing real work, and the movement’s habit of laundering it into gentle language has produced twenty years of people who can describe an injustice for ninety minutes and can’t embarrass a single person responsible for it. Contempt is load-bearing. Amerika runs on the confidence that nobody serious will ever be publicly humiliated for what they do to us, and the small available correction to that is somebody with a name and an audience saying out loud the exact thing everybody in the room already knew.

Aim it up at the executive director, at the man with the fellowship, and at whoever’s comfort is being paid for out of somebody else’s silence. Aim it sideways at cowardice, which is the one lateral target I will always allow, because cowardice is how the arrangement gets maintained and it is the only sin in our circles that never once gets punished.

Put your name on it and stay for the answer.

Have something underneath it, because this is the part that isn’t a joke. Marx bought his year back in 1870, in the form of proof, a decade late, and that is the going rate. Pay it if you want. Spokane worked because there was a union, and the Wobbly on the corner was recruiting into a thing that existed, with a bail fund and a plan for the morning after the arrest.

The joke is a recruiting arm. That’s the war of position and the war of maneuver actually holding together instead of one standing in for the other. Position without maneuver is decoration. Maneuver without position is a fight nobody watching even knows is happening. If there is nothing for the joke to recruit into, you aren’t agitating. You are producing free content for a platform that will sell ads against your worst week and ban you the following year.

Build the thing, and then be as mean as you want about it.

Works cited

Marx, Karl. Theses on Feuerbach (written 1845, first published 1888 as an appendix to Engels’s Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy). Used for the eleventh thesis’s formulation of praxis, applied throughout as the standard that separates a tested claim from mere commentary.

Gramsci, Antonio. Prison Notebooks (Quaderni del carcere, written 1929 to 1935, first published in Italian 1948 to 1951). Used for the concepts of hegemony and the war of position versus the war of maneuver, applied to the naming and titling material in sections 2 and 4 and to the closing argument that a joke needs an organization behind it.

Marx, Karl. Herr Vogt (1860). Used for the central case of polemic as a year-long expenditure, and for the 1870 Tuileries revelation of Vogt’s payment from Louis Bonaparte, which supplies the claim about vindication arriving too late to be worth its price.

Marx, Karl. The Poverty of Philosophy (1847). Used for the title inversion of Proudhon’s The System of Economic Contradictions, or The Philosophy of Poverty (1846), cited as the earliest instance of the tradition putting the joke on the cover.

Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism (1845). Used for the technique of repeating an opponent’s self-description back until it discredits itself.

Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. The German Ideology (1845 to 1846). Used for the “Saint Max” section against Stirner’s The Ego and Its Own (1844), supporting the claim that the first full statement of the materialist conception of history was produced by the effort of attacking somebody, and for Marx’s remark in the 1859 preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy about abandoning the manuscript to the mice.

Engels, Friedrich. Anti-Dühring (serialized 1877 to 1878, published as a book 1878) and Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880). Used for the argument that the most widely read introduction to Marxism in the nineteenth century was a reply to a minor opponent, and that Dühring survives in memory largely as its target.

Marx, Karl, Friedrich Engels, and Paul Lafargue. Report on the Alliance of Socialist Democracy and the International Working Men’s Association (1873), together with the proceedings of the Hague Congress (September 1872). Used for the expulsion of Bakunin and Guillaume, the Nechayev material, and the removal of the General Council to New York, which supports the section on winning a factional fight by destroying the organization.

Records of the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (1903). Used for the sequence in which Lenin lost the vote on the membership clause to Martov and then claimed the name bolshinstvo after the Bundist and Economist delegations withdrew. Supports the claim that naming performs organizing work independent of argument.

Lenin, V. I. Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1909), The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky (1918), “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder (1920), and Judas Trotsky’s Blush of Shame (written 1911, unpublished in his lifetime). Used as evidence that Lenin’s insults were addressed, dated, and answerable, which is the distinction the four conditions are built on.

Luxemburg, Rosa. Speech at the Stuttgart party congress (October 1898) and Social Reform or Revolution (1899). Used for the wife-beating comparison against Heine’s compensation policy, and for her argument that credit, cartels, and the world market concentrate rather than resolve capitalism’s contradictions, which is why abandoning the conquest of political power converts a party into a machine for its own survival.

Luxemburg, Rosa. The Russian Revolution (written 1918, published 1922). Used for the claim that freedom is always the freedom of the one who thinks differently, which supplies the condition that polemic requires an opposition capable of answering back.

Lafargue, Paul. The Right to Be Lazy (1880). Used for its argument that the demand for the right to work imports the employer’s morality into socialism, cited as an instance of a joke pamphlet outperforming the serious literature, and for the biographical contrast with Marx’s private racial abuse of him.

Trotsky, Leon. Speech at the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets (October 1917). Used for the dustbin of history line, set against the Tenth Party Congress ban on factions in March 1921 and his own expulsion and assassination, to argue that polemical culture depends on an opposition that can’t be arrested.

Records of the Spokane free speech fight (1909) and Joe Hill, “The Preacher and the Slave” (1911), published in the IWW’s Little Red Songbook. Used for the distinction between a prank and a strategy, which is the presence of an organization, a defense fund, and an agreed order of arrest.

Situationist International and the Strasbourg students. On the Poverty of Student Life (1966). Used for détournement as method and for the fact that the pamphlet was financed by the institution it attacked. The title’s descent from Marx and Proudhon supports the point about the tradition inheriting its own jokes.

Hoffman, Abbie, and the New York Stock Exchange action (August 1967).

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