New 12-Step Programme AAAA Founded for those Addicted to Artisanal Anti-Revisionism

CW: Addiction, self-harm

A BASEMENT IN LOS ANGELES – A new twelve-step programme called “Artisanal Anti-Revisionism Addicts Anonymous” (AAAA) has been founded in Los Angeles (or by its full, original, Spanish name: El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili), which is targeted at anti-revisionists too disattached from the social dogma even for Gonzaloism.

You know, the sort of people who read Abstrakt and write for Worker’s Spatula and have strong opinions about the TİKB splits.

These poor souls have had their chance at a normal life ruined by a crippling addiction to reading condemnations, analysis, and declarations from various anti-revisionist groups so obscure in the mainstream discourse and so furiously angry at the various frauds who masquerade as Marxists these days that they make the RIM look like social democrats. Using the traditional twelve-step format for other addictions, they hope to come together and become normal, healthy, functioning (but critical) members of popular fronts.

The inaugural meeting began with all attendees going round the circle and introducing themselves in turn, in the form: “my name is [FIRST NAME], and I’m addicted to obscure boutique anti-revisionist publications”.

“It started with reading old Stalinist Workers Group for Afro-American National Liberation and a New Communist International polemics against anyone and everyone. I thought it was no big deal, just a fun way to arm myself theoretically against the modern revisionists,” explained one young man, who was fired from his job for spending an entire workweek doing nothing but printing up hundreds of pages of opinions on precisely what went wrong in China.

“The next thing I know, I’m casually using terms like ‘modern revisionists’, and teaching myself Tamil so I can read NDMLP propaganda from Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka. That’s like extra bad island India, with extra annoying Trots. Our comrades in the NDMLP say that…” trailed off the young man before bursting into tears, horrified at what he had become.

The young woman seated to his right patted him on the back to comfort him before taking her turn: “I started talking to some of the APL people in some leftbook group. It seemed like there couldn’t be any harm in reading Enver Hoxha. Then I found out that in Turkey, Hoxhaism is so mainstream that there are multiple kinds of Hoxhaist who disagree with each other on how to criticise Hoxha, whether to do it like Hoxha or Stalin or Freire or Che or something. I hit bottom last week when I found myself snorting the ashes from a printed-up stack of Devrimci Proletarya tweets I had smoked while listening to Kutup Yıldızı and screaming ‘FACTIONALIST! SPLITTER! NEO-BERNSTEINITE!’ at the mirror.

“My mother came in just as I had punched the mirror, shattering it to pieces. When she tried to take my wounded hands in hers, I pulled away screaming ‘NO, COMRADE MOM, I NEED TO WRITE A SELF-CRITICISM IN MY OWN BLOOD!'”

A minor spat broke out between two members over which four-person Guevarist group hiding in the Andes whose faxed pamphlets they had read in the library was more correct in their critical engagement with the Bolivarian Revolution, causing the moderator to have to intervene and remind them: “Comrades, let’s not forget that we want to be the sort of people who can hear the word ‘Venezuela’ without launching into an hour-long sectarian tirade against sectarianism.”

All members of the group, regardless of tendency or number of screeds they have wheatpasted to the walls of their college campus, could agree on their higher power to which they would appeal as they worked their way through the steps: the dialectic of history.

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