For those of you who’ve never read The State and Revolution (recommended in my reading list), one of the main things Lenin talks about in it is “opportunists” – people who will capitalize off the popularity of the struggle because there’s a buck to be made at every trend. This is what we’re essentially dealing with now. For those of you who stay outside the cesspool that is Left Twitter (congrats by the way), the tankie podcast Proles of the Round Table fell out after it was discovered one of their members was planning to embezzle Patreon money to open a craft brewery. It should be noted these folks had, at the time of their demise, damn near 400 patrons. They sat around a table, getting drunk and spewing neo-Stalinist propaganda (defending Xi Jinping, using historical revisionism about ol’ Uncle Joe, and bigging up Parenti).

I want you all to consider this situation very carefully now. These were not people who belonged (as far as I can tell) to revolutionary organizations. They were not on the ground doing the work. Look at the cesspit that is “BreadTube”. Natalie Wynn has damn near 12,000 patrons. Peter Coffin has 1,200. Philosophy Tube has about 5,100. HBomberguy has about 5,700. These are not people on the ground. These are not people donating money to imprisoned revolutionaries. These are people who realize – at some level – that there is money to be made in the struggle. Is it any coincidence at all that when Peter Coffin got caught defending a rapist, all his comrades came running to his defense? Of course not. They all realized they live the same petit bourgeois life, off the donations of the working class. Now I’m not denying that these people have obviously done good propagandizing, but this misses the point.

We sometimes forget the enemy reads our literature. And when I say “the enemy” I’m not talking about MAGA Proud Boy chuds walking the streets. I’m not talking about Christopher “Crying Nazi” Cantwell. I’m not talking about the Republican Party. I’m talking about the bourgeois state, the bourgeois & petite bourgeois intelligentsia, and everything that entails. If you think for a moment that someone as well off of Patreon money as Natalie Wynn has not read Marx, you are not paying attention (granted she clearly pushes a revisionist form of Marxism but that’s it’s own conversation). These people are petit bourgeois intelligentsia. They can get ad space from corporations. They are not threatening the status quo, if anything they are giving the masses a little psychological relief that someone out there is “fighting the good fight”. Revolution is not a transaction in the liberal marketplace of ideas, it’s concrete action.

Ask yourself, when was the last time you heard any big left person tell you to join a party? Or a union? Or to build a co-op? When was the last time you heard them talk about the organization they belong to? When was the last time you saw them doing anything but the barest minimum beyond propagandizing? I’m autistic, nervous, and a mental wreck, and I still diligently show up to my monthly IWW branch meetings, and co-chair a committee. That’s not to be holier-than-thou, that’s to point out that I have all the excuses in the world to sit on my ass & let the depression kill me. Go out there. Go organize. Go join a revolutionary organization. Blow that Patreon money on dues instead of careerists. Join a fucking picket line. And most importantly, kill the hero in your head.