The crypto-fascist group that’s infiltrating the online communist community

Marxist Anti Imperialist Collective, a crypto-Strasserite group, has advocated for Socialism with Richard Spencer Characteristics by endorsing the idea of a white state. Big surprise, why should we care so much? Well, this group is using certain tactics to spread its ideas widely.

MAC runs several “communist” subreddits that are easy to mistake for being trustworthy, namely European Socialists, Americas Socialists, and Africas Socialists. They lure normies in, then use their favored members who’ve been trained in their rhetoric to push their ideas. What are these ideas? They’re cloaked in communist language, but they consistently serve to nudge people towards the position of supporting white nationalism. The starting point in this ideological pipeline is that any pluri-national socialist countries are chauvinist.

This idea that no nations can even voluntarily share in a singular state alliance, no matter how much autonomy the nations in this alliance have, is used by them to vilify the USSR and the PRC. They claim the DPRK is the only real current socialist country for this reason. If this all-encompassing view of what “chauvinism” means sounds like it’s pro-balkanization, that’s because this is exactly what they promote as an absolute for the conditions of any region. Even I no longer want to balkanize America, and instead desire a post-colonial federation.

This obsession with promoting balkanization naturally feeds into an imperialism-compatible view of Yugoslavia and the balkan region’s current hostilities, which I’ve also seen promoted by ultras. But these people are worse than ultras. Racism is at their ideology’s core. When you accept their idea about nationalism being necessarily front and center to communism, you can come to other imperialism-compatible conclusions, like that Ukraine’s regime isn’t actually fascist but merely concerned with “the nation.” They argue this, by the way. 

The logical conclusion of their ideas is that whites need to form their own state in America for the sake of combating U.S. imperialism, and that white nationalism can’t be fascist because it supposedly stands in utter opposition to the imperialist state (i.e. ZOG rebranded). In reality, white nationalism has only two potential roles, neither of which are anti-imperialist. One is to serve as a rival imperialist force to the current settler state, seeking to break from the U.S. so that whites can occupy Native lands with less restrictions on their ability to carry out racial terror. The other is to serve as a proxy for the existing settler imperialist state, carrying out terrorism against Blacks, Natives, Brown people, and communists. As in the people who the state seeks to continue repressing.

The way the mods of the MAC subreddits are trying to create a substantial platform is by roping in communists, then diligently picking arguments with posters from outside their community. They meticulously pick apart people’s statements, extrapolating points that aren’t intended so they can sow doubt. They don’t need to change the minds of the people they’re arguing with, just create threads in which they appear to be the smarter and more theoretically informed ones to onlookers. Their “so you’re saying...” arguing tactic reveals how vacuous their points actually are.

Indigenous erasure is ironically part of their agenda as well, despite them claiming to care so much about national self-determination. Their idea that whites need to form a state on this continent implies the settler-colonial occupation should continue. It also deliberately ignores the nature and reality of colonization, acting as if whites were an equivalent social category to Blacks under our current conditions. Under settler-colonialism, whites are the colonizers, and don’t require “self-determination” because they already have disproportionate power as is. Communists must unequivocally reject white nationalism, and not enable those who seek to normalize it within communist spaces.