On Theory

Communist Praxis and the Recuperation of Dissent Under Capitalism

Morning Comrades.

A little later than usual, as we had the official opening of our restaurant over the weekend and the lead up to it, as well as the work after essentially fried my brain and exhausted whatever energy I had left to a point where I was trying to brush up on some reading on Sunday and struggled to put two and two together. I wanted to focus a little more, for my own personal enjoyment, on the theoretical side and obviously, because of the week that just was the synapses weren’t firing and I became frustrated at the writings in front of me, questioning my own need to study theory when my brain told me that I already knew what to do - which is exhaustion rearing its ugly head to convince me I had done enough, when the opposite is true. With that, a few thoughts on the necessity and purpose of theory, coming from an old, tired worker.

The purpose of communist theory has never been the cultivation of moral prestige, nor the production of a subcultural identity through which educated classes can symbolically distance themselves from the brutality of capitalism whilst continuing to materially benefit from it. Communist theory emerged historically as the intellectual weapon of classes forced into struggle against dispossession, starvation, colonialism and industrial exploitation. It was not written to decorate seminar rooms or provide existential meaning to alienated professionals seeking redemption through aesthetic radicalism. It was developed in order to answer a brutally practical question: how can the oppressed survive capitalism long enough to overthrow it?

This distinction matters because contemporary left politics across much of the West increasingly suffers from a profound inversion of means and ends. Theory, which should function as an instrument of political clarity and collective organisation, has instead frequently become an end in itself. Radical language operates as cultural capital and political affiliation becomes a marker of taste and social identity. Entire milieus of self-described radicals speak endlessly of liberation whilst remaining structurally incapable of confronting power beyond rhetorical performance. The consequence is not merely political weakness but the gradual transformation of communism into precisely what Marx spent his life opposing: an abstract philosophy detached from material struggle.

Marx himself was explicit that communist thought was not a contemplative exercise. In the “Theses on Feuerbach”, he wrote that “the philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” The sentence is quoted endlessly because its meaning remains perpetually inconvenient. Marx was not rejecting theory; he was rejecting theory severed from praxis. He understood that ideas become revolutionary only when embedded within collective social force. Detached from organised struggle, theory degenerates into scholasticism and detached from material reality, critique becomes performance.

Often, the contemporary academic left often embodies precisely this degeneration. Within universities, radical discourse can become entirely compatible with institutional reproduction because it poses no organisational threat to capital. One may write endlessly about decolonisation whilst working within institutions financially intertwined with imperial extraction. One may denounce exploitation whilst inhabiting professional strata whose existence depends upon global labour arbitrage. One may perform revolutionary identity whilst remaining materially integrated into bourgeois social relations. Under these conditions, radicalism ceases to function as a weapon against capitalism and instead becomes a moral language through which privileged classes negotiate their own guilt.

This is not an accidental development but a structural consequence of capitalism’s extraordinary capacity to commodify dissent. Late capitalism absorbs opposition by transforming it into culture, lifestyle and spectacle and even anti-capitalism itself becomes marketable identity. Radical aesthetics circulate through publishing industries, universities, social media economies and cultural institutions that depend upon the very system ostensibly being criticised. The result is a peculiar form of depoliticisation wherein the appearance of radicalism proliferates precisely as the actual capacity to challenge capital collapses.

The revolutionary traditions of the Global South have repeatedly warned against this process because they emerged under conditions where political failure carried immediate material consequences. Anti-colonial Marxists did not possess the luxury of treating communism as symbolic identity because colonial domination imposed direct confrontation with hunger, military violence and national destruction. Theory had to function operationally and it had to organise peasants, workers and the dispossessed into coherent historical force.

Amílcar Cabral insisted that revolutionary struggle required a “return to the source”, meaning not romantic nationalism but reconnection with the material life of the masses themselves. He warned repeatedly against the emergence of a detached revolutionary class more concerned with ideological self-image than collective transformation. His famous injunction to “tell no lies, claim no easy victories” was fundamentally a warning against the narcissism of performative politics. For Cabral, theory derived legitimacy only insofar as it clarified and advanced real struggle.

Similarly, Frantz Fanon argued that colonised intellectuals frequently remained trapped within abstraction because their social position insulated them from the practical realities confronting the masses. In “The Wretched of the Earth”, Fanon described the tendency of colonial elites to substitute rhetoric for revolutionary transformation, mistaking verbal radicalism for political action. He understood that genuine revolutionary consciousness emerges not through symbolic identification with the oppressed but through participation in collective struggle itself. For Fanon, liberation was not a moral posture but a material process requiring organisation, discipline and confrontation with power.

What these traditions recognised with far greater clarity than much contemporary Western leftism is that capitalism is not primarily an ethical problem but a system of material domination. One does not defeat it through moral purity, one defeats it through organised power. The worker evicted from housing, the migrant subjected to border violence, the indebted labourer surviving precarious employment and the populations of the Global South crushed beneath imperial extraction do not require aesthetic radicalism from intellectual classes, but they require structures capable of materially defending life.

This is why communist praxis historically involved unions, tenant organisations, mutual aid structures, anti-colonial movements, political education programmes, underground networks and disciplined parties. These formations emerged because survival under capitalism requires collective infrastructure. Capital atomises. Communist organisation attempts to reverse atomisation by constructing forms of solidarity through which people can resist being crushed individually.

The reduction of communism into identity politics therefore represents not merely theoretical confusion but practical surrender. If politics becomes primarily about self-expression, then organisation collapses into individual performance. The question ceases to be how to build collective capacity and instead becomes how to display personal virtue. Under such conditions, the “left” fragments endlessly because identity-centred politics encourages competitive moral positioning rather than strategic unity. Political communities become scenes of perpetual purification in which individuals demonstrate ideological correctness through denunciation rituals whilst material power remains entirely untouched.

This phenomenon has been especially pronounced within professional-managerial strata whose relationship to capitalism is contradictory. Many educated radicals experience genuine alienation under capitalism, yet their social position often grants them relative insulation from its most violent consequences. This contradiction produces guilt, but guilt alone cannot generate revolutionary politics. Indeed, guilt frequently paralyses political action because it centres the emotional experience of privileged subjects rather than the material needs of the oppressed. Communist theory then becomes therapeutic rather than revolutionary. Its function shifts from organising struggle to managing psychological discomfort.

Walter Rodney sharply criticised this tendency among intellectuals detached from popular movements. Rodney argued that revolutionary knowledge must emerge through reciprocal engagement with working people rather than academic isolation. His work consistently rejected the notion of intellectuals as moral saviours standing above the masses. Instead, he emphasised that theory gains transformative capacity only when embedded within collective political practice. Intellectual labour detached from struggle merely reproduces elitism under radical language.

Importantly, the central issue here is not anti-intellectualism. Communist movements require rigorous theoretical work because capitalism itself is immensely complex. Marxism without analysis degenerates into empty sloganism. However, there is a categorical difference between theory functioning as a weapon and theory functioning as identity ornamentation. The former sharpens strategic understanding and the latter signals cultural belonging.

One can observe this distinction historically by examining revolutionary movements that actually threatened capitalist power. The Bolsheviks, the Chinese communists, anti-colonial liberation movements across Africa and Latin America, and socialist movements throughout the twentieth century all treated theory instrumentally. Study existed in service of organisation and political education existed to develop cadres capable of advancing struggle under concrete conditions. Theory was expected to produce operational consequences.

By contrast, much contemporary left discourse remains trapped at the level of symbolic consumption. Radical texts are consumed much like commodities themselves: as markers of identity and sophistication. One reads theory not necessarily to intervene politically but to inhabit a particular social persona. Under these conditions, communism risks becoming another lifestyle niche within capitalism rather than a force seeking its abolition.

Thomas Sankara warned repeatedly against revolutionary rhetoric divorced from material transformation. He argued that political commitment required sacrifice and structural change rather than verbal militancy alone. “You cannot carry out fundamental change without a certain amount of madness,” he declared, referring not to irrationality but to the willingness to break with the normalised logic of exploitation and dependency. Sankara understood that anti-capitalism without confrontation with existing power structures rapidly degenerates into theatre.

The contemporary obsession with ideological self-fashioning reflects broader capitalist social relations. Neoliberalism trains individuals to understand themselves primarily through personal branding and competitive self-presentation. This logic infiltrates political culture itself and thus “activism” becomes performance, identity becomes curated spectacle. Even suffering risks commodification as individuals compete for moral legitimacy within symbolic economies of oppression and recognition.

Such dynamics fundamentally undermine communist politics because communism requires precisely the opposite orientation: collective discipline, strategic thinking and material solidarity. It requires individuals to subordinate ego to organisation. It demands engagement with imperfect masses rather than retreat into morally purified subcultures. Most importantly, it requires confronting the reality that capitalism cannot be overcome through discourse alone.

This is why revolutionary traditions from the Global South remain indispensable today. They emerged under conditions where politics retained existential clarity. Imperialism was not theoretical metaphor but military occupation, economic dependency and mass death. Consequently, Marxism developed less as academic interpretation and more as practical methodology for national and class survival.

José Carlos Mariátegui insisted that socialism in Latin America could not emerge through mechanical imitation of European formulas but had to develop from concrete material conditions. His famous declaration that socialism must be a “heroic creation” rather than a “copy or imitation” reflected precisely this insistence on praxis over abstraction. Theory mattered because it enabled effective struggle under specific historical circumstances, not because it granted intellectual distinction.

Likewise, Samir Amin spent decades analysing how global capitalism systematically underdevelops peripheral nations through unequal exchange and imperial dependency. Amin’s work was never merely descriptive but it sought to identify strategic possibilities for delinking from imperial domination. His Marxism remained grounded in the practical problem of how oppressed populations might survive and resist within a violently unequal world system.

The tragedy of much Western leftism is that it often treats these revolutionary traditions as intellectual resources to be consumed rather than political lessons to be operationalised. Quotations circulate detached from organisational practice. Anti-colonial thinkers become aesthetic references within academic discourse while the structures they fought against continue largely intact.

Communist theory must therefore recover its original orientation toward survival and struggle. Under capitalism, millions already inhabit conditions of permanent insecurity. Housing crises, ecological collapse, privatised healthcare, debt peonage, precarious labour and militarised borders are not future possibilities but present realities. In large parts of the world, capitalism no longer even promises stable incorporation but it governs through violence, abandonment, disposability and managed precarity.

Under such conditions, communist praxis begins from the recognition that survival itself has become collective political question. How do communities defend themselves against eviction? How do workers resist casualisation? How do populations preserve access to food, healthcare and shelter under systems organised around profit extraction? How do societies confront ecological catastrophe produced by endless accumulation? These are not academic questions. They are material problems demanding organised responses.

The communist project therefore cannot be reduced to ethical critique alone. Moral condemnation of capitalism changes nothing unless translated into structures capable of exercising counter-power. This requires rebuilding traditions of organisation that neoliberalism systematically destroyed: unions, tenants’ movements, cooperative infrastructures, political education networks and disciplined mass organisations. It requires abandoning the fantasy that social media visibility constitutes political strength. It requires recognising that power yields only under organised pressure.

Most importantly, it requires rejecting the narcissistic conception of politics as personal identity. Being communist is not an aesthetic category. It is not subcultural affiliation. It is not moral certification. It is participation in historical struggle against systems that immiserate billions for the enrichment of ruling classes.

The task of communist theory, then, is profoundly practical. It must clarify the mechanisms of capitalist domination so that people can resist them collectively. It must expose the ideological myths through which exploitation legitimises itself. It must provide strategic orientation under conditions designed to produce confusion, atomisation and despair. Above all, it must help construct forms of solidarity through which human beings can survive capitalism and ultimately abolish it.

Anything less risks transforming communism into one more consumer identity circulating harmlessly within the machinery of capital itself. The ruling class has little reason to fear radicals whose politics begin and end with symbolic performance. What capital fears are organised populations capable of disrupting profit, challenging property relations and constructing alternative forms of collective life.

That remains the essential distinction. Communist theory is either a hammer forged within struggle, sharpened through praxis and wielded collectively against systems of domination, or it becomes an academic accessory through which privileged classes manage their contradictions whilst history burns around them.

Yours, warmly,

V.