Democratic Socialism and the “Politics” of Exhibitionism
Tailing socially reactionary sentiment would lead international democratic socialism to a dead end. So would continuation of its accommodation of exhibitionism practiced under the guise of democratic socialist agitation.
Not only does exhibitionism carried out on Twitter, city streets, TikTok, organizational meetings and conventions, and all spaces in between under the name of democratic socialist organizational effort repel or frighten the vast majority of those that are exploited and oppressed by Capital, the vast majority of those who would make up the ranks of the Socialist Revolution, but it is in itself demonstration of a lack of commitment to a serious revolutionary politics and program, a lack of commitment to a politics and program of development of an international class conscious proletarian consensus, seizure of state power, expropriation of Capital, and realization of a global cooperative commonwealth. It amounts to display of the mindset that Marxism and democratic socialist agitation is simply a pretext for lashing out and being “bad”, “edgy”, or generally unlike so-called “normies”, for ribaldly signaling that one is “different”, for throwing temper tantrums of raw, indiscriminate iconoclastic rage.
If a movement is one of trumpeting that its faithful are “different” from and somehow better than the “normies”, of shocking and offending simply to shock and offend, of being a boisterous “Catboy”, “commie witch” or “commie Satanist”, “Tankie”-themed BDSM practitioner, or clotheshorse of styles and articles meant only to be grotesque, it is not one of serious politics of radical social transformation and is, by definition, a movement which is anti-popular. The objective of the democratic socialist project, as laid out by Marx and Engels, is developing the class consciousness of all proletarians to a mature level, freeing humankind from the scourge of capitalism, and building a classless world of human solidarity and democratic production for use economy. It is about emphasizing what the exploited have in common and emancipating the “normie” and the “eccentric” or “queer” oppressed alike. The idea that the eccentric or the exhibitionist libertine is superior to the “normie” is anti-majoritarian, counter-proletarian solidaristic, anti-socialist, bourgeois hyper-individualist nonsense. International democratic socialism must be intolerant of these attitudes, just as it is intolerant of racial, ethnic, gender, or sexual orientation bigotry. How can we continue to allow space for thinking so oppositional to genuine Marxist thought in our institutions of political education and organization?
Intolerance of the practice of exhibitionism in the name of Marxist revolutionary politics does not in any sense amount to intolerance of deviation from aesthetic or sexual norms. It amounts to enforcement of a serious commitment to revolutionary politics and protection of our movement from tendencies opposed to serious constructive mentality and programs, to protection of international democratic socialism from tendencies that would derail the movement. Institutions of international democratic socialism must not accommodate elements which deem the objective of the democratic socialist project to be the advertisement of sexual or aesthetic preferences in a manner designed to offend the “everyman and everywoman”, establishment and broadcasting a “subcultural” identity, simple castigation of the “masses” or bragging about how “bad” or “edgy” we democratic socialists are.
No, we cannot write off proletarians practicing this rubbish as “irredeemables” or individuals incapable of becoming revolutionary actors, just as we cannot write off those proletarians under the sway of socially reactionary ideology or “radical” essentialism and identity reductionism as such, but we cannot pretend that they are as of yet serious, genuine Marxists.
