So I went with some friends to the Hegelian e-girls’ VIP “symposium” last Saturday, August 3. It was held in the backdoor patio space of a Persian restaurant in Crown Heights, where they sometimes hold DSA meetings. The event attracted a strange mix of people. Everyone from Dimes Square bohemians to bookish members of the Platypus Affiliated Society, too-online theorycels to actual grad students excited that somebody was throwing an event on Hegel. Various online commenters and podcast hosts like Jamie Peck and Joshua Citarella were also in attendance. By far the most important organizational connection to the event, however, was that of the newfound American Communist Party (ACP), the so-called “MAGA communist” splinter from the old Stalinist US Communist Party (CP-USA). Later, I’ll briefly go over some of the major figures from that group. There were about 150 people total.

My friend Alex Gendler and I went on The Antifada pod to give a rundown of the event. What follows are some of my remarks from the episode, which I’ve transcribed and reworked in light of new material that’s become available. Before I proceed, though, I do want to defend the idea of being able to go to an event for the lulz or whatever. Or even just to look at it anthropologically, to see what kind of people would show up. You don’t have to “go native” like that dude Crumps has with the Dimes Square scene. (He was there, too, for anyone keeping count.) And I’m sure there were some who were genuinely curious to hear what the e-girls had to say for themselves and were interested in what sort of crowd would be there, though anyone who saw the way this event was advertised could have probably guessed. I don’t think the mere fact of showing up to something implies political agreement.

Serious criticisms can certainly be made of many of the groups and individuals who went to this symposium, as well as the e-girls themselves, and that’s precisely what I’m hoping to do. I get that some people might object: “Why are you giving this thing oxygen? It’s pure spectacle.” And I’d agree with them — but we live in a spectacular society, so here we are. I’m going to start by talking about the conciliar organization of the e-girls, and some of the drama that swirled around the event(s) they planned. Then I’m going to address what I took to be the philosophical content of their statements and try to locate their outlook within the history of Hegelianism more broadly. Finally, I’ll examine the politics behind the Hegelian e-girl council and speculate about what their concrete goals might be.

Council and controversy

.
When I was first thinking about how to dissect this event, I thought one could maybe break it into two parts. They call themselves “Hegelian e-girls,” after all. So we could ask what it means to be an Hegelian, and what it means to be an e-girl. But thinking about it more, I realized there’s a third term. They’re not just “Hegelian e-girls”; they’re an “Hegelian e-girl council.” What does it mean that they’re in a “council”? Just how organized is this? I really thought we wouldn’t have to address this aspect of it, because the whole thing is just a silly internet phenomenon that these two e-girls — Nikki and Anna — were trying to parlay into a real-life meetup. A couple of them had met up in the preceding weeks and taken a selfie together, which they then posted with the caption “the Hegelian e-girl Enlightenment has arrived.” But it’s hard to know how seriously to take that.

Even a day after the event, though, there was a bunch of drama specifically surrounding the “council” part. It turns out there had been a third Hegelian e-girl. One of the former e-girls, Sanje Horah, who’d been in that photo announcing the arrival of the e-girl Enlightenment, publicly tweeted her misgivings about the direction of the project. She said she’d resigned from the Hegelian e-girl council a week or so before the party. This confused me, because to say that you resigned from something suggests that it had some sort of formal structure or sense of official membership. Does it just mean she left the groupchat? A groupchat had been mentioned by a number of Twitter users, especially after someone approvingly shared an image of Red Scare cohost Dasha Nekrasova aiming a gun at a racist effigy of an Islamic terrorist. Either way, it was hard for me to tell if everyone in the groupchat actually belonged to the council. The e-girls apparently have a Patreon, run by Nikki, so there’s that. However you cut it, a “council” with only two people is pretty small. Unless they plan on expanding.

Regardless, Sanje Horah voiced a few objections people on the outside had been making. In particular she felt like Anna, whom she’d been closest with, was being dishonest about what they hoped to achieve with this whole project. Sanje further alleged that Anna’s good standing largely stemmed from her incomprehensibility, because people don’t have a clue what this is actually all about. Possibly Anna doesn’t, either. There’s probably something to that. Fundamentally, though, Sanje thinks there is something deceptive about the way the e-girls have gone about this and the various milieux they’re trying to appeal to. Sanje self-identifies as a centrist, and was uncomfortable with how it seemed like the e-girls directed most of their ire against the left while remaining more or less silent about the right. Beyond her political concerns, she had philosophical worries as well. She thinks they have “a very vulgar understanding of dialectics” and that the project is “literally sub-Hegelian.” Looking back, Sanje said she regrets ever having been involved.

Haela Hunt-Hendrix, the singer from the black metal band Litvrgy, was one of the principal organizers of this “symposium.” She also had a public falling-out with Anna the day after the event, though she later stated (in a since-deleted Tweet) that the two of them have “hammered out” their differences. I’m not as familiar with Litvrgy or HHH as an individual, though I do know she’s an heiress to Dallas oil billions. (According to Andy, her grandfather was not just any tycoon; he was an extreme rightwing figure.) Besides making music, she seems to be interested in esoteric religious themes, numerology, and Orthodox iconography. In any case, Hunt-Hendrix claimed that Anna was stealing her ideas and twisting them in a “cryptofascist” manner. Generally, she objected to the way Sanje had been treated and didn’t like how Anna had been trolling academics. Both HHH and Sanje did say that they think Anna is a good person and that some of the mistakes she’s made have been honest. Who can tell, though? Motives are difficult to discern.

Finally, there was this guy Matthew Donovan who was also listed as one of the event hosts. He tweeted about how he had fun at the party, which got widely reshared, but also went on to write a pretty balanced longer post the next day sharing his thoughts. It’s worth checking out to get a better sense of the different groups and individuals at the symposium. Matthew organizes leftist events around NYC; last year he hosted a talk by Chris Smalls about efforts to unionize Amazon. Apparently, the e-girls approached him at a Norm Finkelstein talk and asked him to help host the event. Upon reflection, Matthew felt like the whole thing “reeked of an interpersonal psyop.” I didn’t know he was going to come on, but midway through the Antifada podcast he joined along with a girl named Morgan, who’d been randomly added to the e-girl chat a week before the event. She said it was really chaotic, with over a hundred people at one point and new users getting added all the time, but five or six dominated the conversation. Eventually Morgan was denounced as a “woke leftoid” and left the chat of her own accord.

There was also controversy in the leadup to the event, because originally it was supposed to be this bigger public thing that had 700 people responding to the Partiful invite. A day or so before this was scheduled to happen, they said that threats of violence had been made to the venue where they’d planned to have it, and so they had to hold a smaller VIP event instead. (One Twitter user, Inflammate Omnia, raised doubts about whether they’d ever secured a location that could handle those kinds of numbers to begin with. Doubts which I think are pretty well-founded, given how last-minute a lot of this seemed. He said he got in touch with St. Joseph’s, where the original event was supposed to take place, and they had never even scheduled anything. The Hegelian e-girls have not responded to his post.) Anna insisted to me that this bigger event is still going to happen in a couple weeks, but I have no idea whether it actually will. It may be up in the air now considering how much heat they’ve already drawn from this smaller gathering.

A common thread running through the above accounts — Sanje’s, Haela’s, Matthew’s, and Morgan’s — is that each of them feels burnt by the association. I’m sure the Hegelian e-girls have a different story about how this all went down, but since I don’t really know what went on behind the scenes I’ll refrain from weighing in. Nikki and Anna seem to be responding to the hubbub in separate ways; Nikki’s handling press inquiries while Anna’s tweets since the event have been more sullen and circumspect in character. The “symposium” was a pretty lowkey affair. Initially there were a couple bouncers, two dudes from the ACP in polo shirts who went on to deliver statements. But this didn’t last long, and after a while they stopped checking if anyone was on the VIP list. There was a PA system set up for the speeches and some DJs played music in between. Despite the free alcohol no one was dancing; very little philosophizing appeared to be happening, either. It was just a hangout.

What kind of Hegelian are you?

.
Anyway, now that we’ve gotten the “council” aspect out of the way, and talked about some of the attendant controversies and the event, we can look at the two remaining parts of the equation: “Hegelian e-girls.” First, they’re self-professed Hegelians. Second, they’re self-described e-girls. I’m going to focus on the first part, and try to situate the various remarks they made at the event and Tweets within the history of Hegelianism. I’ll leave it to others to theorize the situation of e-girls, tracing out their life cycle and the kinds of online followings they cater to. Leaving that bit aside, to call oneself an “Hegelian” is still fairly indeterminate. Sure, it indicates that you’re a devotee of a long-dead German philosopher, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. But beyond that, it isn’t saying very much. Hegelianism has encompassed a whole range of opposed stances and dispositions over time.

Even just in the 1830s and early 1840s, you had Right Hegelians like Daub, Hinrichs, and Henning defending the Prussian monarchy and Lutheran theology. There were centrist Hegelians like Hegel’s first biographer, Karl Rosenkranz, as well as the proto-sociologist Lorenz von Stein, whom Moses Hess referred to as an “Hegelian of the middle.” And then there were the Left Hegelians, probably the best remembered of the bunch, who could be quite radical. The names associated with Left Hegelianism in Germany include Marx’s old professor Eduard Gans, Ludwig Feuerbach, the Bauer brothers, and Max Stirner. Beyond Germany, in France you had one of the founders of anarchism with Proudhon steeped in Hegelian verbiage (even if he only had a superficial grasp, he knew how to turn a phrase). A number of early Russian revolutionaries were also inspired by Hegel — Aleksandr Herzen famously called dialectics “the algebra of revolution,” while the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin translated Hegel’s lectures early in his career.

This is to say nothing of subsequent Hegelian revivals. Classical Hegelianism more or less collapsed around 1848, but Hegel’s thought has been rediscovered several times. To give a sense of all the ways neo-Hegelianism could be translated into twentieth-century political ideologies, you could look at Italy from the 1890s through the 1940s. On the far left, you had a really exceptional Hegelian Marxist in Antonio Labriola, much admired by Lenin and Trotsky. Benedetto Croce started out as a Marxist, having been one of Labriola’s students, but eventually drifted toward liberalism. After the Second World War, he was asked to serve as Italy’s interim president but turned it down. Then on the far right, you had an erstwhile friend and mentor of Croce, Giovanni Gentile, who became Mussolini’s court philosopher. He was the official ideologist of Italian fascism. Richard Rorty, the postmodern pragmatist, once quipped that the left- and right-Hegelians “eventually sorted out their differences at a six-month seminar called the Battle of Stalingrad.”

All this is to say that to call oneself an Hegelian can mean any number of things. It’s been tough for me to piece together an accurate picture of their specific brand of Hegelianism. Twitter or X or whatever it’s called is not really conducive to philosophical thought, even if you pay for the blue check and can write long-form posts. There are some who valiantly try to overcome the limitations of the medium, like Reid Kane with politics and Jensen Suther with philosophy. My distaste for him notwithstanding, Haz attempts this as well (more on him later). But ultimately I don’t think it’s possible. Twitter is even worse than Facebook was back in the day, and that was already far worse than message boards like RevLeft that it replaced. Give me an article so I can see you lay out your claims and marshal reasoning and evidence. I saw Anna tweeted that she’d be writing something for the Platypus Review soon, so maybe there’ll be more to chew on after that’s published. I don’t want to be unfair to them but there’s not a lot to go by.

I guess I can try to parse Anna’s and Nikki’s statements from the event itself, and then the “Hegelian e-girl mini-manifesto” the former posted. At the symposium it was hard to hear what anyone was saying, so for the Antifada episode I was going mostly from memory and whatever I could see on their Twitter timelines. Thankfully, Matthew shared the Googledoc the e-girls had sent him with their prepared remarks. My commentary over the next several paragraphs will only make sense if you read over them (they’re mercifully short), so I’d urge everyone to open up the hyperlink and give it a quick look.

Let’s actually start with Anna’s “mini-manifesto,” in the interest of charity, since it’s better than the speech she gave. She starts off by sketching some basic observations about our present moment. There are some obviously correct points Anna makes here, ones I think anyone with a brain would assent to, but I’m not sure she really needs Hegel to make them. Some examples: she talks about how we live in a polarized time. Everyone with eyes to see should recognize this. The Geisteswissenschaften are dominated economically by capital and politically by bourgeois democracy. Fascism is incipient within industrial capitalism, as the “objective unconscious” of liberalism. Anna rejects culture war “loyalty-testing” and dutifully denounces the Schmittian claim that the friend/enemy distinction is the essence of the political. (I would positively counter that the Leninist кто/кого distinction is more apposite when it comes to politics.) But these are all generic Marxist points, not specific Hegelian ones.

After a while I feel it descends into gobbledygook, precisely whenever she tries to bring in explicitly Hegelian concepts. I have no idea what the “social mediation” Anna seeks might look like. Nikki has said that centrism ought to be smashed, so presumably they’re not just looking for a happy medium between the extremes. I know what a “concrete universal” is in Hegel’s Logic, but it’s unclear to me why she would want professionals (??) to actualize the concrete universal. I’m not at all sure what she means when she says we need a “new piety for the Absolute.” And I don’t know what she thinks it would take to achieve a “speculative” universalism. Maybe that it contains within itself the determinate negation of that which it opposes, the cult of immediacy, as a result? The most dialectical formulation she sets forth is about being at once timely and untimely, and that’s probably the best bit. Otherwise, she would need to flesh these arguments out in a longer article, because as things stand it just sounds like she inserted Hegelian buzzwords in order to rev up her readership. I get that it’s a mini-manifesto, and that it’s supposed to be stirring, but still.

The prepared remarks Anna read at the symposium were of a much lower quality. Virtually everything she said there came in a sort of mock Freudian register, in what Freud himself would have probably called Laienanalyse (if not out-and-out psychobabble). She tries to psychoanalyze the city of New York, identifying the different layers of its unconscious: the metropolitan ego, superego, and id. In her view, the New York literary scene suffers from an obscure repetition compulsion. I’ll be the first to admit that there’s plenty that’s pathological about NYC, but I don’t think it is specific to the city. Rather, it’s symptomatic of culture under capitalism as a whole. Toward the end of the first paragraph, though, Anna gets lost in her own prolix prose:

By what means may we combat this spiral [down an abyss of nihilistic degeneracy, in accordance with the cult of sensuous immediacy mandated by the currently reigning neoliberal ideology]? By the means of concrete philosophizing. Concrete philosophizing means applying insight to the alchemical transformation of everyday life. Philosophy must be raised above the insularity of an academic exercise — we must make use of abstraction by suspending its methodological isolation, we must discover the intricate dialectical connections that the constitution of speculative thought as an interpersonal practice bears objectively.

I wish I could say it got better from there. After this baffling interlude, Anna tries to confront some of the accusations of “fascism” leveled against the Hegelian e-girls. “The fasces are a symbol of power,” she says, following it up with a psychoanalytic non sequitur. “In a sense, they are a desexualized phallus.” Incidentally, I don’t think that it’s accurate to charge them with having fascist sympathies. This is not to say there’s no reactionary subtext here, simply that it’s of a flavor other than fascism. But I’ll save that for the last section, which spells out the politics undergirding the Hegelian e-girl project.

Nikki’s speech is by contrast refreshingly direct, even if it is longer. She starts out by discussing “the immense memetic power of the Hegelian e-girls.” Hegel has without doubt been extensively memeified over the last few years. Whether this is a good a bad thing I’ll leave to the reader to decide. Personally, I enjoy a good Hegel meme as much as the next guy. At any rate, though, lot of time is spent in Nikki’s speech deploring the way that Hegel’s philosophy has been confined the ivory tower. Fair enough — she is right to take aim at the “vulgar empiricism” in which the Anglo tradition has long wallowed, though I do wonder what she would make of the Pittsburgh school of Hegelianism with Brandom and Sellars. Regardless, there’s one quibble I had with her speech, though it may seem pedantic. She distinguishes between a “false dualism,” which is static, and a “true dualism,” which is dynamic. Hegel’s philosophy is resolutely monistic; there are no dualisms, just manifold oppositions which dissolve before their own finitude. The point she’s trying to make, namely that the political alternatives offered by both major American parties constitutes a false opposition, is true enough, however. Yet again, though, everyone ought to know that.

Yes, I do think they’ve read Hegel. On top of that, they’ve also read some commentaries, as I’m sure we all have. There are too many commentaries out there, frankly, and it’s hard to keep track of the immense body of Hegel scholarship in the academy. I can’t be bothered to read all the crap churned out by academic presses on the topic. But it’s perfectly natural to lean on secondary literature in approaching a philosopher as daunting as Hegel. So it’s just a question of which interpretations they’ve drawn upon in order to articulate their own position. As far as I can tell, just going by these speeches and trawling through their Twitter output, Nikki and Anna approach Hegel via Lacan, very much à la Žižek. They don’t have his sweaty charm or funny accent, of course. But you can tell from their repeated references to jouissance that Žižek was formative for them.

Whatever else one might say about Žižek, he’s a major public intellectual who has sold tons of books and has been very influential. Jameson and Eagleton and countless others were blurbed on all his old Verso titles. I disagree with many of his specific positions, and am opposed to Lacanian readings of Hegel in general. Most French Hegelianism after the war, even Marxist variants (excepting those of Henri Lefebvre and Guy Debord), was vectored through Alexandre Kojève’s lectures on Hegel. Kojève was deeply influenced by Heidegger, and focused too much on the dialectic of recognition in the “self-consciousness” chapter of the Phenomenology, which is quickly overcome in the transition to Reason. Lacan was deeply impacted by Kojève in his essay on the mirror stage and his reception of Hegel in general, assimilating it to his structuralist Freudianism. Žižek inherited a lot of these faults from Kojève by way of Lacan. (Robert Pippin’s review of Less Than Nothing is tackles some of these problems.) Still, Žižek has occasionally made some serious arguments that are worth grappling with. I’m not sure if this is the case with the Hegelian e-girls; it’s hard to tell whether there’s a there there.

Nikki was recently rereading The Sublime Object of Ideology, Žižek’s first book, and that has come through in her pronouncements. Her Twitter handle, furthermore, is “returntohegel.” That echoes what Žižek proposed years ago, in his last serious treatise, Less than Nothing, where he argued that we need to go “back to Hegel” rather than “back to Marx.” Just a week or so ago she wrote that she supported “Žižek’s thesis that communists need to return from Marx back to Hegel (to understand Marx).” It should be mentioned that Žižek is not the first to make this claim. People often say you need to read Hegel to understand Marx. Lenin famously remarked that you couldn’t truly comprehend Capital unless you’ve read (and understood!) all of The Science of Logic. He was probably right, there; at the very least, it enriches your understanding and helps you appreciate the conceptual moves Marx was making and how his overall argument unfolds. Marx never got around to writing his promised article on dialectics, where he was going to lay bare the methodology used in Capital and other works, so reading Hegel can be really valuable in that respect. But even more than reading Hegel in order to understand Marx, I think you need to read Marx in order to understand Hegel.

Let me explain what I mean. Marx believed that Hegel’s system marked the culmination of more than two millennia of philosophical development. Hegel had effectively brought all of philosophy to a close. Not long after his death, however, bourgeois society — the truth of which Hegel had grasped in thought — was thrown into crisis by industrial capitalism. All the categories he’d spun out in his writings were seemingly inverted, and his radical followers (the Left Hegelians) tried to update his philosophy in order to come to terms with the new reality. In so doing, however, Marx and Engels felt that the Young Hegelians had each in turn fallen short of Hegel. They didn’t think they were smarter than Hegel, they just didn’t think Hegel lived long enough to see industrialization transform society. For them, the existence of an immiserated industrial proletariat gave body to the negativity of capitalist conditions, as the concrete universal class within bourgeois society. “As philosophy finds its material weapon in the proletariat, so the proletariat finds its spiritual weapon in philosophy,” Marx wrote in the introduction to his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy.

Anna is a bit harder to pin down. She is clearly inspired by Žižek but has some criticisms. For example, she is right that Žižek’s Hegel is too Schellingian, but anyone who read his stuff from the nineties (Tarrying with the Negative, The Indivisible Remainder) would know this is the case. He tries to read Schelling’s philosophy of the middle period — after Hegel ended their friendship with the infamous “night in which all cows are black” remark — into the Lacanian logic of the “lack” or “the void of being” plaguing the “split subject.” Especially the 1809 lectures on the origin of evil and freedom, and the Weltalter books. By contrast, and in keeping with her own Lacanianism, she is convinced that Lacan remained closer to Hegel with his logicism instead of the mythopoeisis of Schelling. I don’t know Lacan well enough to say. Besides Žižek, she has expressed admiration for the late Gillian Rose, author of the classic Hegel Contra Sociology (her old lectures on the Frankfurt School also just came out), as well as the Japanese theorist Kōjin Karatani and Julia Kristeva. With Anna, I feel like she sometimes just reaches into the grab-bag of Theory, a byproduct of forty years of theoretical overproduction.

Moreover, Anna has said that she now disagrees with Žižek’s atheism, and has become a follower of Eastern Orthodoxy. She calls herself an “Orthodox Christian social communist.” Nikki is Catholic. For an Hegelian this strikes me as very odd. Hegel always stressed the importance of Luther and the Reformation in the development of inwardness and modern subjectivity, and was openly contemptuous of Roman Catholicism (and especially converts like the Schlegel brothers). Presumably he held the Eastern Church in even lower esteem. Nikki has told me she’s a Catholic, so I’m not sure how she squares this with her Hegelianism. Now obviously Hegel wasn’t an avowed atheist either, but many Hegelians — I’m thinking of Bauer and Feuerbach here — argued that his philosophy had atheistic implications, that theology was just alienated anthropology, etc.

Just to lay all my cards on the table, I basically follow Lenin, Lukács, and Adorno when it comes to my interpretation of Hegel. The Hegelian e-girls would probably think of me as a “Frankfurt soyboy.” Loren Goldner is an important reference for me here as well. Personally, I regard Herbert Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution as the best intro to Hegel’s thought, though Adorno’s lectures on dialectics are also good. Lenin’s notebooks on Hegel are really intriguing, but don’t work well as a point of departure. In terms of recent scholars, Robert Pippin is usually reliable. And my old teacher Brady Bowman translated an outstanding text by Eckart Förster called The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy, covering the arc of philosophical development from 1781 to 1806. Highly recommended.

Admittedly, I’m not a Hegel scholar and wouldn’t call myself an “expert” by any means; I’ve not read all of his works. I’ve read the First System-Program and the Differenzschrift, two of his earlier works. Bowman also translated Hegel’s Heidelberg writings, including his great essay “Who Thinks Abstractly?”, so I also read that. Then of course I’ve read the Phenomenology, The Science of Logic, and the Encyclopedia Logic. I’ve never read the other two encyclopedic entries, his Philosophy of Nature and Philosophy of Mind, or any of his lectures on the history of philosophy or religion. Because I’m interested in art and architecture, I’ve read parts of the Aesthetics, his lectures on fine art. And of course I’ve read the intro to his philosophy of history, if not all of the history lectures that follow. Lately, I have been spending a lot of time with his Elements of the Philosophy of Right to get a better handle on Hegel’s account of the family, civil society, and the state.

MAGA communism

.
So, are the Hegelian e-girls fascists? In short: no. They’re — and I don’t think Nikki, at least, would even object to this appellation — Stalinists. Politically, Nikki seems to align herself with the Infrared/Haz faction of MAGA communism. She’s called herself “Haz’s strongest soldier” (maybe a joke, who knows?) and has posted photos of herself with him and various others from the ACP, saying that MAGA communists were the most attractive representatives of any political dissident grouping she’s encountered. There was a strong ACP presence at the event, incidentally. The two bouncers were both affiliated with Infrared. One of them told me that he used to read this blog, and tried to explain his reasons for joining the ACP at length. It was a real IRL “Notice me, senpai” moment. But obviously he wasn’t reading my blog closely enough if that’s where he ended up politically.

Again, Anna’s a bit more complicated, as she’s tweeted in the past about the failure of Stalinism and has speculated that “Marxo-fascists” like Dugin rep Stalin for his great Russian chauvinism. She described herself as a Bogdanovite, an odd choice for an Hegelian. Bogdanov after all was a Machist, a species of neo-Kantianism philosophically far removed from Hegel’s system and method. In recent months it appears that Anna has gone back to read Lenin’s Materialism and Empiriocriticism, and has since connected the dots between Bogdanov and French theorists like Deleuze, Lyotard, and Laruelle. Someone more familiar with these thinkers will have to tell me whether she’s onto anything here. Nevertheless, Anna said a couple days ago that she’s closer to MAGA communism than other tendencies. Maybe MAGA communists are “post-fascist” Stalinists, in the sense theorized by Gáspár Miklós Tamás, but not fascists proper.

You don’t need to be a fascist to have retrograde views about gender, sexuality, and the family, or even entertain antisemitic prejudices. Stalinism has a rich history when it comes to all of this stuff, and even of cutting deals with fascists. (“Thermidor in the family,” the doctors’ plot, Molotov-Ribbentrop, etc. The list goes on.) But to talk about the ACP, one has to perhaps nuance this a bit. There’s a range of different Stalinisms out there, a truth particularly evinced by the fact that the ACP is a breakaway from the old Stalinist party, the CP-USA. For a long time, the MAGA communists who eventually formed the ACP had tried to take over the CP-USA from within, trying to capitalize on the rupture signaled by the 2016 election. But the CP-USA’s policy for roughly seventy years was to pressure the Democrats, so realignment didn’t pan out and the MAGA communists pulled up stakes. Despite their disavowals, lambasting both Democrats and Republicans, I feel it’s quite likely that they’ll just end up adjuncts of the GOP.

MAGA communism has had a lot of buzz lately, so I probably don’t need to examine it at length. But I will highlight some of the major figures associated with the movement, as well as the fledgling ACP, which launched last month. The “big three” behind MAGA communism are Haz al-Din (InfraHaz), Jackson Hinkle, and Carlos Garrido (MidwesternMarx). Hinkle is little more than a hype man, a glorified used car salesman, but he’s had enough media savvy to get “retruthed” by Trump on TruthSocial. (Andy referred to Hinckle as a “scumbag antisemite,” and I tend to trust his judgment.) Back in 2017, he was fêted in TeenVogue as one of the “8 Young Environmentalists Working to Save the Earth,” but has since denounced ecologism as an “antihuman ideology.” He’s become an outspoken supporter of Putin in Russia, Kim Jong-Un in North Korea, and al-Khamenei in Iran. Though his YouTube channel has since been banned, it garnered widespread attention with slickly-produced videos. The ACP in general has pretty good production values; they’ve generated a lot of chatter with well-edited clips featuring their bizarre semiotic mash.

I don’t know enough about Carlos Garrido to comment, though he appeared on a Platypus panel with Sean. Haz is the real brains behind the operation, though, so a few words might be said about him. Haz is actually decently intelligent, and has produced dozens of lengthy Twitter posts explaining his philosophical outlook. A number of people, myself included, believe that he used to go by “Rafiq” on RevLeft forums, more than ten years ago. There he adopted a Bordigist viewpoint. (My suspicions were more or less confirmed by his recent admission in a Platypus interview: “[Before my conversion to Marxism-Leninism,] I adopted Bordiga’s view one-for-one, which was that the phenomenon of Stalin was a romantic bourgeois revolution because it had its basis in the peasants and petit[e] bourgeoisie. I saw it as an evolution of Jacobinism.”) Since reemerging online a few years ago — he “went dark” for half a decade trying to figure things out after 2016 — he’s cobbled together a unique political philosophy, though I’m curious how this gels with the Hegelian e-girls.

Despite his avowed Marxism-Leninism, Haz engages extensively with the Russian hypernationalist philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, and believes the Nazi fundamental ontologist Martin Heidegger furnished a new foundation for communism. Specifically, it’s in Heidegger’s conception of authentic rootedness that Haz finds fertile soil for a renewed workers’ movement. He has gone so far as to claim that “Marxist theory in the West is meaningless without the aid of Dugin and Heidegger’s thinking.” Moreover, he is intensely distrustful of the Enlightenment and its program of radical skepticism, which obliterates the sense of community and tradition in favor of a sort of cosmopolitan rootlessness. He’s a big fan of the art theorist Boris Groys, whose work I love. On top of that, Haz has embraced a kind of accelerationism, not the social-democratic reformist sort of Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams in Inventing the Future or Aaron Bastani in Fully Automated Luxury Communism, but rather “accelerating productive forces” according to the Chinese pattern. Anna has criticized Haz in passim for his reliance on “Deleuzian cybernetics”; I take this to be connected to his accelerationist sympathies.

One member of the Infrared faction, Grayson, gave a speech at the Hegelian e-girl symposium that I might briefly analyze. (I’m informed that there were actually three official ACP representatives there: Grayson, Christopher Helali, and Mirek.) Grayson’s statement is probably the best written of the four, and presents a decent narrative. But there are still some criticisms I would like to make. First, Grayson unfairly characterizes Kant as a “warden.” While he did try to place the Ding an sich beyond the limits of cognition, his efforts to ascertain “conditions of possibility” were absolutely essential for Hegel and Marx; hence Hegel’s appreciation of Kant’s transcendental unity of apperception. Second, Marx did not “identify” the proletariat with the Absolute. Rather, as I pointed out above, he recognized it as the concrete universal class, a concrete or specific part of society that nevertheless contained within itself all the contradictions of that society, and could thus express the universal interests of that society. The Absolute for Marx is the same as that for Hegel: it is freedom, a rationally-ordered society. Only the proletariat can bring it about, by consciously affirming that which is historically necessary according to the dictates of Reason.

This perhaps gets to the most crucial baseline question for the Hegelian e-girl phenomenon. What is the significance of the current moment for the Hegelian e-girls? Why is there such historical urgency now? Nikki, after all, ended her statement with “You cannot stop history itself.” It seems that, in agreement with the MAGA communists, they think the time is ripe for the workers to practically seize upon Hegel’s theories and complete the system of German Idealism. Haz and others insist that they don’t actually endorse Trump or the GOP, but simply see MAGA as an opportunity to disrupt the present state of affairs, a popular index of discontent with the status quo. But today the labor movement lies in ruins. When Marx and Engels began settling their accounts with Hegelian philosophy in the 1840s, there was a vital and internationally militant proletarian movement into which they could intervene. Heinrich Heine, the great German poet and Marx’s close friend during his stay in Paris, wrote of the need for “armed Fichteans” to realize the worldly kingdom of ends.

Nothing of the sort exists today. Philosophy lives on, as Adorno put it, precisely because the moment to realize it (1917) was missed. The significance of philosophy — read here Hegel — for Marxism can only be understood by working through the history of Marxism’s own failure, as Karl Korsch sought to do in his landmark Marxism and Philosophy essay. This is the task of philosophy at present: to reflect the fact that it should no longer exist, and seek the positive conditions of its own anachronism.

(All the memes posted here, most of which are five years old, were taken from the Instagram of the one true Hegelian e-girl: Annski.)