On Comparing Marjorie Taylor Greene to Black Hundreds and claiming Communists should support her:

This article is not a polemic. The below statements are presented as contextual artifacts to examine as a basis for this article. None of the individuals or their specific claims are necessary to the overall point.

I’ll come back to the tiny difference “her solutions to these woes are wrong” in a small capacity later. To start, lets focus on the notion of using the Black Hundred comparison with Conservatives. I’ve seen these two opinions conjoined as if they have any business informing one another. Each is partially correct in a very charitable way on their own.

When joined, they look something like “Lenin convinced the Black Hundred members to join the Bolsheviks, so we should defend and support conservative petty-bourgeois congresspeople who identify working-class woes but provide incorrect solutions”. This assumes the Black Hundred danger can be compared quantitatively in something like “severity” to the apparent “severity” of these congresspeople and blanket-excuse any abstract argument for support.

The Black Hundreds

The Black Hundreds were police, secret police, Orthodox priests, bureaucrats, private landowners, and the rich peasants directing class traitors and misled, backward workers among their ranks. They were ultra-nationalist and stood for the dying order of Romanov autocracy. This was not only an ideology but an action plan. On multiple occasions, they raided the revolutionaries and commonly, despicably, ethnic cleansing against Jews.

“Left-Wing Communism” is the most common basis for equivocating arguments like our central thesis, so let’s start there. The idea goes, Leftists (or even Communists) are obsessed with purity to a dogmatic degree. If you stop being obsessed with the purity of support, we can win a real revolution. I think we have to be careful with arguments like this. The temptation is to see infantile Leftism and push recklessly in the opposite direction. This inevitably leads to “swingy” opinions that boom and bust just like the social market. Instead, an approach that carefully examines the relationships and history is necessary. I won’t focus much rigor on the relationships because frankly, it’s not my argument! That burden is on those who feel so inclined to think this way. So then what is the history?

Lenin said:
Under tsardom we had no “legal possibilities” [to get into the reactionary trade unions] whatever until 1905; but when Zubatov, a secret police agent, organized Black Hundred workers’ assemblies and workingmen’s societies for the purpose of trapping revolutionaries and combating them, we sent members of our Party to these assemblies and into these societies (…). They established contact with the masses, managed to carry on their agitation, and succeeded in wresting workers from the influence of Zubatov’s agents.†

V.I. Lenin

So until 1905, the Communists were unable to enter reactionary trade unions to influence workers against the reactionaries and move them to Communism. Lenin uses this point to criticize “Left” revolutionaries for wanting to “fence themselves off”† from backward elements instead of “convince [them]” and “work among them”. Here, he is not saying the Bolsheviks should work side-by-side with the Black Hundreds, but in fact go into their assemblies and societies to undo the damage they were causing “at all costs”! To translate that into our situation, Marjorie Taylor Greene and any other reactionary congressperson you like is cherry-picking her articulation of Proletarian contradictions. On the one hand, she gives truths to (some of) US imperialism and the worsening situation of the Proletariat. On the other, she blames Communists for atrocity. These are not incoherent. One supports the other. This is out-flanking from the Right. A common right-wing tactic is acknowledge the class struggle and faults of our government but then claim they have the only solution, which is inherently against Communism. This is close enough to a Black Hundred tactic for me to accept the barebones of the framework at least.

From my perspective, we should be going into conservative spaces to combat people like Marjorie Taylor Greene, not support. We must be there with the correct (Communist) solution as Lenin indicated. It’s one thing to criticize the “Left” who get their panties in a twist over being around backward elements of the working class; and it’s another thing to work downstream of MTG (and her whole clan of politicians), reacting to her moves. We should be intercepting her consumer demographic, penetrate her loop, and de-fog all of the uncertainty people have about this situation. Joining alongside or subordinate to MTG-et-al is closer to what the Cadets tried to do with the Black Hundreds than the Bolsheviks.

Lenin said:
The Mensheviks’ main argument is the Black-Hundred danger. The first and fundamental flaw in this argument is that the Black-Hundred danger cannot be combated by Cadet tactics and a Cadet policy. The essence of this policy lies in reconciliation with tsarism, that is, with the Black-Hundred danger. The first Duma sufficiently demonstrated that the Cadets do not combat the Black-Hundred danger, but make incredibly despicable speeches about the innocence and blamelessness of the monarch, the known leader of the Black Hundreds. Therefore, by helping to elect Cadets to the Duma, the Mensheviks are not only failing to combat the Black-Hundred danger, but are hoodwinking the people, are obscuring the real significance of the Black-Hundred danger. Combating the Black-Hundred danger by helping to elect the Cadets to the Duma is like combating pogroms by means of the speech delivered by the lackey Rodichev: “It is presumption to hold the monarch responsible for the pogrom.”†

V.I. Lenin

Again we see the Black Hundreds are different than the Conservative consumer demographic in action. The conservatives putz around with laws and polemics. The Black Hundreds conducted explicit ethnic cleansing. So the focus here must be on the politics. Cadet apologia for Black Hundred danger in 1906 (after Lenin’s experience with them in the reactionary masses)—and therefore Menshevik support for Cadets—is inexcusable. So should we wait until our bourgeois democracy leaders have influenced the backward masses enough against Communism so we can be like the Cadets and perform that apologia? From my perspective, it’s the duty of Communists to struggle against that development, not for it! Lenin goes on to say:

The second flaw in this stock argument is that it means that the Social-Democrats tacitly surrender hegemony in the democratic struggle to the Cadets. In the event of a split vote that secures the victory of a Black Hundred, why should we be blamed for not having voted for the Cadet, and not the Cadets for not having voted for us?†

V.I. Lenin

Bolsheviks supporting the apologist Cadets is incredibly stupid! Here, Lenin outlines how this can lead to a Black Hundred win. Think of the class traitors MTG empowers with her anti-Communism. Do we want to support the Cadets and potentially lose to our own reactionaries and class traitors? Again, the situation is not a rejection wholesale of our backward masses but to work among them. But it also cannot be to allow our (Cadet-like) opponents to outflank us in building political support for a reactionary win. All of the Ukraine truthing in the world does not advance the struggle of the working class. Lenin’s argument is actually closer to a rebuttal to our time’s Vaush demographic—the Democrats who claim the “Left” must support Hillary and Biden or they are responsible for a Trump win. The revolutionary Social-Democrats were accused, if they didn’t support the Cadets, this lets the Black Hundreds in. The Black Hundreds weren’t interested in Duma seats like Cadets, the real danger is they were interested in immense violence and reactionary ruler-ship. So we started this comparison with the implication that MTG is like the Black Hundred group but I think I’ve made it clear MTG is closer to the Cadets. Lenin categorically refused to support the Cadets politically on the grounds they were anti-revolutionary.

Today

How is it any different for today’s Bolsheviks to refuse to support MTG’s group for using our contemporary woes as fuel for her own social capital? If the relationships change, we can revisit the solution. For now, I see little reason any org should work with MTG-like groups of politicians without a very good action plan. And in the case of individuals, I see zero excuse to be supporting and defending them in public. As an individual, you do not move with the blessing of the masses, only yourself and your demographic. Attempting to use social media to convince other individuals to support or defend Cadet-like anti-communism is petty-bourgeois radicalism. Only the organized masses have the authority to make tactical alliances. It’s the petty-bourgeois radical that seek to “influence” workers into a call to action individually, without any organizational discipline. On a personal note, it’s like I’m watching the birth of soft-adventurists through revisionist apologia. And in this spectacle, it’s clear to me that adventurism and revisionism are not in opposition—they create capital between them! For me, it remains to be seen if people like MTG are capable of holding this line through thick and thin, or are venal like the Novoye Vremya newspaper, which in 1905 became an organ of the Black Hundreds. Lenin said:

Here, Lenin refers to the way the extreme Right (the party of the landowners) has to branch out of landowners for power and find risky roots with the masses. They do this by pretending they’re not for land ownership but a “good old” and “stable” rural way of life. They appeal to the most deep-rooted prejudices of the most backward and play on that ignorance. In that spirit, he says every single political party has to seek a link with the people. So when you find a link—like the articulation of working-class woes—it does not mean it’s revolutionary! This is only the form their political agenda present itself in—the shell. To get to the meat of the matter, an examination of what they do and how they interrelate within social hierarchy is necessary. Marjorie’s articulation of the troubles of land, bread, and other important questions is closer to Bishop Nikon than the Red Army. Like Nikon, she makes the same mistake: the questions are not being ignored, they do reach the hands, hearts (and pockets) of congressional “authorities”. Those “authorities” and Congress provide solutions to these questions as is possible—meaning ones that accord with the interests of power, imperialism, and the bourgeoisie. And if you read my source before continuing, the last several sentences should look like literal plagiarism; our situation is so close, I could copy Lenin and swap the names.

In short, naming the problem is not enough to finger the contradictions of capital. Capitalism can thrive from naming problems and speaking that truth to “power”. Names are just another image commodity to capital after all. By taking the initiative, MTG’s “conservative” camp can appear to speak for the people (have links with the people) while doing nothing threatening against capital. MTG and the “conservatives” in her camp simply follow the intelligentsia model exactly the same as their pretend opponents on the other side of the Purple Party.

Not for nothing, the Bolsheviks originally lost against the Black Hundreds counter-revolution in 1907 before they finally won in a brutal struggle.

Stalin said:
During these years of dark counter-revolution it was the working class that had to drain the bitterest cup. Since 1907, when the forces of the old order succeeded in temporarily crushing the revolutionary mass movement, the workers have been groaning under a double yoke. On them above all the tsarist gang took ruthless vengeance. And it is against them that the onslaught of the capitalist offensive was directed.
…
Clenching their teeth, the workers remained silent. In 1908 and 1909 the Black Hundreds’ intoxication with their triumph reached its peak and the labour movement reached its lowest ebb. But already in the summer of 1910 a revival of workers’ strikes began, and the end of 1911 brought with it the active protest of tens of thousands of workers against the retention in penal servitude of the Social-Democratic deputies of the Second Duma, who had been sentenced on false charges. †

J.V. Stalin

Let’s ground ourselves for a moment and remember the Black Hundreds were the sworn enemy of the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks didn’t exactly work arm-in-arm with them. They covertly sent in their Communists to struggle with Black Hundreds propaganda against the backward elements of the workers and peasants. Through this trade union struggle, the Bolsheviks recruited people to the Communists. They did not win over the leaders of the Black Hundred. They were not allies. From 1905, even to 1913, the Black Hundred was among the major antagonists to the Bolsheviks and working class. The Black Hundred was unofficially sanctioned by the Tsarist government to carry out their violent raids.

In 1926 USSR, Boris Tageev wrote an essay titled “The American Black Hundred”. It was about the Ku Klux Klan. With that in mind, our power with the “American Black Hundred” is the power to turn misled backward workers from racist secret societies, racist organizations and racist unions—i.e. Lenin’s trade union strategy. But the lesson is not that we can take from the top or middle-management of the KKK directly into the Bolsheviks! As a reminder, their links with the people only begrudgingly exist. The ruling class would rather operate entirely within their own class. That is why the backward elements in these reactionary groups can be turned away. So to be specific, they didn’t even recruit “from the Black Hundred” generally but from specific lower sections, as part of a larger struggle with a specific goal. That’s not what I see in individual, online communism-supporters.

There are 3 primary differences between the Black Hundreds of the historical period and today’s imperialist intelligentsia strategy (which is why I mentioned the KKK):

1. The Black Hundreds represented a peasant landowning reality; today’s world has all but eliminated the landowning class into Proletarianization, occasionally the petty bourgeois, and very rarely into the bourgeoisie.
2. The Black Hundreds actively conducted counter-revolutionary and racist, reactionary ethnic cleansing (pogroms), hunted and trapped revolutionaries; today’s intelligentsia gather and disseminate intel against the people for the alphabet soup that does the same violence, though at a more “hidden” level to those with their eyes shut.
3. Lenin existed during an imminently revolutionary period and operated—key of all the words I said so far—WITHIN A COMMUNIST PARTY; Individuals on the internet making Black Hundreds references are doing so without the wisdom of the masses, without their links or authority, without the rich history of a revolutionary party.

The mass-led and revolutionary practice of Lenin and the reactionary christian fascist practice of the Black Hundreds are completely contradictory to one another, and still different than our individual communism-supporters and our intelligentsia strategists. The practice of the “communist” individuals is to squawk on media like grackles. The practice of the intelligentsia model is to squawk on media like grackles. The two are a perfect pair! Just remember: