The LARPer’s New Clothes, OR The Borrowed Language of Leninism
Conrad Hamilton
1 January 2025
In recent years, socialist Internet spaces have (you’ll be shocked to hear!) found a new object of derision: that of the LARPer. Short for “live action role player,” the term derives from the late 1970s, when fans of tabletop role-playing games sought to supplement their experience by holding them in actual physical environments—say, dressing up in a Gandalf suit to game with others in the heaths and peat bogs of Denmark’s East Jutland. In the current left discourse, however, it refers to something else: to showy and performative displays of agitprop that, by dint of this, are deemed inauthentic. A twentysomething catgirl coddling a copy of Mao’s red book on her bed in a communist cap, anti-Hegelian Marxists in balaclavas shooting the Phenomenology of Spirit with an AR-15, young podcasters reading aloud from Enver Hoxha, and pledging to abide by communist Albania’s beard and haircut restrictions. All of these can be considered ‘LARPers,’ whose enthusiasm for communist symbols—and, often, communist states—is thought to conceal a conspicuous lack of real content. Driven above all by a desire to juice their click counts, they are, in effect, online, all too online.
As an ‘elitist’ PMC academic of sorts, I must admit to sharing some of these reservations. However, while reading through A.M. Gittlitz’s book on the ‘Posadist’ Marxist UFO cult—I Want to Believe—I was struck by his very daring decision to defend the LARP. To do this, he draws on Marx’s The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Wherever revolutionary energies emerge, Marx points out, they “anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.” Thus “Luther put on the mask of the Apostle Paul, the Revolution of 1789-1814 draped itself alternately in the guise of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody, now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793-95.” Drawing the conclusion from this, Gittlitz contends that “what might be considered cringeworthy LARPing […] could actually be helpful.” Provided, that is, that it is capable of updating itself—that it can, as Marx puts it, learn this “new language” with a fluency that allows it to freely express itself, rather than having to constantly translate “it back into [its] mother tongue.”
I bring this up for a specific reason. In Žižek’s article—“Dugin, Vance, Lacan”—he has already, with great efficiency, exposed the defects of Dugin’s use of Lacan to defend Trump (and, of course, Vance, who it is intimated may even be a closeted Lacanian). But his attempt to put forth an alternative to his ‘acid Trumpist’ defense of tradition is slightly less compelling. For Dugin, the ‘delirious’ vertigo of far-right thought is the only thing that stands in the way of the crystallizing of the Democrats’ gleeful unshackling of social mores into “overt totalitarianism” (a shift he analogizes with that of the Bolsheviks, whose call for “freedom and equality” quick led to a new master in the form of autocratic party rule). “The Alt-Right on 4chan” manifested in “the figure of the meme Pepe the Frog,” “reptilian conspiracy theories,” “chaos magic,” “the delirious theories of QAnon”—these are for him the expressions of a ‘esoteric’ rightism that has exploited the forbidding of tradition by casting tradition as revolutionary. After making his objections—which I will not recapitulate here—Žižek, seemingly as an afterthought, provides an indication of his positive vision. What we need, he tells us, is a “moderately conservative communism”: one that, while willing to pursue rationalization, is nevertheless aware of “the terrible price of progress.”
One could raise certain questions about this approach. The German verb “aufheben,” which Hegel uses to describe the movement of the dialectic, means both “to conserve” and “to raise up.” Thus it is not clear that, from a Hegelian-Marxist standpoint, we can truly place tradition and progress within separate categorical registers, adopting—as psychoanalysis does—an equilibriated discourse (in which case the ideal dialectician would be someone like Mao, who discretely incorporated elements of neo-Confucianism while actively decrying it). The real issue with Žižek’s “moderately conservative communism,” however, is not that it is wrong—who could deny modernity’s discontents? Rather, it’s that it is ill-timed, being too meek to confront either ‘woke’ liberalism on one side, and, on the other, the reactionary, libidinal impulses the far right has unfettered. After all: what is “moderate conservatism” compared with “delirium”?
Let us lay down our premises. For the past ten years, Western socialists have been dominated by what could be termed the Reformist Superego. The rules it imposes are as well understood as they are rarely articulated. To shake off the stigma of socialist dictatorship, one must commit themselves to parliamentary deliberation, advocating an incremental mass politics. While stopping short of the reification of identity, they must support the sacred cows of identitarianism, accepting the spirit—if not the letter—of liberal social causes ranging from Black Lives Matter to #MeToo. They must be cautious about anti-imperialism: while critiques of the American hegemon are welcomed, you will be severely punished if you are seen as ‘symping’ for non-Western states, even putatively socialist ones. And they must unequivocally condemn the bulk of communist history. Mao, and especially Stalin—these are simply murderous despots. That they led governments that raised hundreds of millions out of poverty, or dealt heavy blows to fascism and colonialism, are not taken into account in this equation. Thus an image of the past is internalized according to which, as Althusser puts it, “communism = crime.”
The origins of these injunctions can be traced back to various anti-authoritarian socialisms, which—after the fall of the USSR—consolidated their hegemony over the left. But they acquire a particular importance in the 2010s, as a way of constituting a sanitized socialism fit for the electoral consumption then pursued by ‘left populist’ movements ranging from Syriza to Sanders. Granted, there were always grumbles, as well as dissenting voices: Greece’s Stalinist KKE, for instance, who with characteristic grimness concluded from the outset that Syriza was bound to either fail or, barring that, become an organ of bourgeois rule (and indeed, part of the tremendous appeal of Žižek in this time was his ability to appeal to everyone at once, offering qualified support to these movements while cautioning about the limits of reform). But as long as left populism continued to expand its influence, these voices remained marginal: the expression of miscreants, who could not see a good thing when it was in front of them.
As if to honour the advent of the 2020s, left populism—in December 2019—entered into a state of terminal decline. That month, Jeremy Corbyn, unable to surmount the splitting of his constituency by Brexit as well as a barrage of nonstop media attacks, stumbled to a disappointing result in the British election—then resigned as leader of the Labour Party. Five months later, the Sanders movement collapsed spectacularly, as the Democratic establishment succeeded in condensing support behind Biden before Super Tuesday in historically unprecedented fashion. Making matters worse, all of this occurred just as the pandemic was kicking off—a pandemic that the left would struggle to come to terms with, failing to find an independent position around which it could marshal support.
Since then, left populism has limped on. But like a latter day season of The Simpsons filled with contrived plotting and lazy jokes, its pitch has become less and less attractive. Now in the U.S., the flagship magazine of the Sanders movement – Jacobin—is urging democratic socialists to stick with the Democratic Party, even as it refuses to disavow Israel. Why, though? One can imagine the terms of this exchange in the format of the popular ‘trade offer’ meme, itself a parody of the trade request pop-ups in video games like NBA2K. You give: complicity with genocide. You get: … nothing.
Predictably, many have refused this offer. And it’s this refusal which seems to drive the profusion of strange expressions, including LARPy ones, we’ve seen over the past few years. Using the likes of YouTube or TikTok to market communism to the masses, the spirit of the past conjured up by them is that of Lenin, who—mortified by its support for World War I—launched a fusillade of challenges against the socialist establishment. Of course, these ideas are often severely flawed. ‘MAGA Communism,’ for instance, rests on a fatal misidentification of the MAGA Movement with the working class. In reality, it is a cross-class coalition that’s most salient feature is its consistent whiteness. Thus any communist movement worthy of the name cannot simply co-opt this constituency: it must rather build a new one, incorporating proletarian fragments of the Republican and Democratic parties as well as—quite decisively—non-voters.
Where these tendencies have been instructive, however, has been in their politicization of transgression. The Reformist Superego has long reassured us that the pathway to victory lies in tempering socialist ideas to fit with liberal sensitivities. Desperate to win over this demographic, it followed it down the pathway of barefaced electoralism, of the rejection of communist history, of political correctness and no-platforming. What the new tendencies know is that—in a time in which the liberal center does not hold—the masses either are hostile to these gestures… or simply do not care. In a world where Trump refuses to denounce the Proud Boys, there is no strategic need to denounce Stalin (or Stalinists, as the case may be). In fact, such a move may be counterproductive, since it prevents the left from exploiting the stigmatization of Stalin as the ultimate taboo in much the same way the right exploits the stigmatization of tradition (or at least its imagined stigmatization). Indeed: the most ardent unreconstructed communists today have become people ‘with interesting views,’ no more or less eccentric than the type you’d expect to see sipping cognac on The Joe Rogan Experience.
Can we imagine, then, a new, socialist delirium? One that would—like 40,000 Turinese workers assembled beneath the balcony of Siccardi Palace—drown the delegates of reform in mantric chants of “Viva Lenin,” so they can no longer speak? If what we’ve seen over the past decade is an “acid Trumpism,” one is tempted to describe its nascent left-wing counterpoint as an “acid communism” of the type envisaged by Mark Fisher: an attempt to break out of the closed circle of capitalist realism by reinvigorating radical imaginaries long trammeled up by neoliberalism. But herein we must observe a difference. Because he followed Nick Land in adopting an immanentist, Deleuzian metaphysics, Fisher—no doubt under the influence of a left populism he tragically did not outlive—was too dismissive of the time-honoured disguises of state socialism. He had one foot inside the Reformist Superego, one out: while he exposed the class character of liberal dogmas, he showed deference to the dominant ideology by portraying Lenin as an ascetic militant devoid of avant-garde aspirations. He even went so far as claiming, contra all historical evidence, that “neoliberalism’s real target” was not “the Soviet bloc” but “the experiments in democratic socialism and libertarian communism […] efflorescing at the end of the Sixties and the beginning of the Seventies” (!).
Given this, it is perhaps no surprise that the left-accelerationism he helped birth has drawn ambivalent responses from Marxists. Éric Alliez and Maurizio Lazzarato have called it productivism with a “techno beat.” Alberto Toscano has been even more biting, referring to it as an “unstable amalgam of leftovers from Landian Schwärmerei and an English nostalgia for techno-modernity.” The new tendencies have spoken of Fisher—they do not abhor him. But what they understand is that—if it is the future one wants—nothing has served it better than the dizzying artistic experiments of Proletkult, than the training of female scientists and engineers and the creation of written scripts for minorities that were previously without them, than the provision of material prosperity to untold millions now told. Parlaying these remembrances into a politics of desire, what they give us is a rewrite of Deleuze: one where intensification is dispensed with, and contradiction is restored to its proper place.
I do not, therefore, feel that “moderately conservative communism” is a prescription appropriate to the present. The task of the left in our time is, rather, to acquire a political fluency worthy of these provocations. It is as Hegel says: one undertakes the study of knowledge in much the same way one undertakes the study of a language—through the internalization of crude symbols and laws. But when they rise to the summit of real knowing, what they see is a new social world.
Conrad Hamilton is a postdoctoral research fellow at East China Normal University. His works deals with the relation between social agency and the value form in the mature writings of Karl Marx. He is co-author of Myth and Mayhem: A Leftist Critique of Jordan Peterson and author of the forthcoming Marxism contra Subjectivity.
