The Anti-Unruhe Reader

What's wrong with Jason Unruhe aka Maoist Rebel News?

Ignorance of Marxist Theory and History

Unruhe refers to himself as a "Maoist" when it is obvious his views have little to do with actual Mao Zedong Thought. Maoism, as an ideological categorization, is an innovation of the Shining Path in Peru. Does Unruhe hold to the Shining Path's theoretical line? Does he best represent the Shining Path's Maoist beliefs? How does he reconcile, say, North Korea's autocratic Confucianism with Red China's decentralized, grass-roots cultural revolution? What of the campaigns launched by the Communist Party mobilizing the Red Guards to eradicate "The Four Olds" and all remnants of feudalism? Or the campaigns against Confucianism in China, during which Confucius and his philosophy were decried as "evil"?

The DPRK never underwent such a mass upheaval as China did during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Rather, in stark contrast, the DPRK's leadership regarded the Cultural Revolution as being a negative, chaotic phenomenon, and feared that it might influence North Korea's young people to wreak havoc on the deeply held Confucian, traditionalist Korean values held by the majority of the DPRK's inhabitants. Essentially, the DPRK felt that the cultural revolution was "ultra-left." Tensions between the North Koreans and the red guards grew, and eventually culminated in bloody conflicts between North Koreans and Chinese:

"Relations with China collapsed when that country became engulfed in the Cultural Revolution. North Korea refused to condemn the campaign, stating that it was Beijing's internal affair. However, when visiting Moscow in 1966, Kim expressed to the new Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev his bewilderment at the Cultural Revolution in China. The Red Guards then denounced Kim as a "millionaire, a revisionist, and a capitalist" who lived in splendor and luxury while American imperialists made war on Vietnam (all the while ignoring Pyongyang's secret assistance to the DRV). In the end, North Korea could not condemn a neighbor that was easily capable of putting a million troops on its border poised to invade, and had no choice but to lie low until the Cultural Revolution ended. There were isolated clashes with Chinese troops along the border in 1968 as Chinese and North Korean troops exchanged small arms fire with each other. As a result, the Red Guards erected loudspeakers on the border facing North Korea where they denounced Kim Il-sung and read quotations from Mao's Little Red Book. North Korean troops responded by erecting their own loudspeakers towards the Chinese border and airing quotations from their leader's writings. But by 1970, most of the storm clouds of the Cultural Revolution had blown away and relations with China quickly returned to normal. Chinese premier Zhou Enlai visited Pyongyang that year and apologized for the attacks made on Kim by the Red Guards."

Red China, like socialist Albania, waged war against what they deemed to be "Soviet and Yugoslav revisionism." On the other hand, the DPRK took no side during the Sino-Soviet split (likely for strategic reasons rather than ideological ones, but nevertheless) and made no initiative whatsoever against Soviet bloc, Yugoslav, Romanian, etc. revisionism, instead embracing Honecker of East Germany, Tito of Yugoslavia, and Ceausescu of Romania with open arms.

Maoism grew out of the Sino-Soviet split, specifically China's isolation from the Soviet bloc and the subsequent antagonisms that followed. Bloody border conflicts between the USSR and the PRC near Soviet Kazakhstan, Soviet Mongolia, and Russia itself. Nuclear war between the Soviet Union and China nearly broke out several times, with the Chinese anticipating a Soviet missile launch against the Chinese mainland in October of 1969, leading to Mao's meeting with Richard Nixon and subsequent US-PRC negotiations. The Americans threatened to nuke the Soviets, should the Soviets nuke China, effectively shielding China from harm. Lin Biao, who was murdered along with his family by Mao during his failed 1971 defection to Soviet Mongolia, when his plane was shot down by Chinese forces upon Mao's orders, sought to mend relations between the Soviets and the Chinese, maintaining that the Soviet Union remained to be a union of Proletarian states, despite its revisionism. The DPRK remained silent during these conflicts, and officially joined the Yugoslav led Non-Aligned Movement in 1976. Maoists often reject the DPRK on the grounds that it's antagonistic to Maoism. Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il both described the country's political line as consisting of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and the Juche idea, never mentioning or commending Mao and his contributions to Marxism-Leninism.

Other communists object to Unruhe and his channel not because he is privy to controversial viewpoints, such as defending the DPRK and Kim Jong Il or Joseph Stalin and the purges of the Soviet secret police, but rather because his grasp on Marxist theory is clearly sub-par and his analyses ill-conceived. He would do well to dedicate the time and energy he expends on his third-rate videos to rigorous study, improving his understanding of Marxism, thereby enhancing the quality of his content. They object to his status as "The #1 Marxist on YouTube" because he represents communism, specifically Maoism, badly. Maoists prioritize a dialectical method, and yet his understanding of the Marxist dialectic is at best bare bones. He seldom speaks of the statuses of the New People's Army in the Philippines, the Naxal insurgency in India, or the Shining Path in Peru, instead devoting yourself to defending North Korea's public imagine tooth and nail.

The vast majority of Maoists are anti-revisionist, and range from being nuanced in their assessments of North Korea to outright condemning the North Koreans for their Confucianism and Marxian revisionism, whereas Unruhe embraces Juche whole-heartedly. What do you think Marx or Mao would say, if they could see the unspoken dynastic bloodline succession that has taken hold since the death of Kim Il Sung? Or do you deny that such a thing even exists? Third Kim's the charm?

The Juche idea isn't exclusive to Korea: A North Korean propaganda poster from the 1980s depicts a European, an African, an Asian, and a Latin-American upholding Juche. Romanian communist leader Nicolae Ceausescu was markedly influenced by the Korean model of socialism, as he tried to mimic and implement a "Romanian Juche," and the then leader of the former German Democratic Republic, Erich Honecker, also tried exporting Juche to East Germany. Ceausescu and Honecker also took note of the hold of Kim Il Sung's cult of personality on the Korean people, making cults of personality for themselves in turn.

Several black leaders, revolutionaries, and black organizations including the former Black Panther Party, which Unruhe falsely characterizes as being broadly Maoist, attempted to apply Juche to the black diaspora. For example, Eldridge Cleaver, Minister of Defense of the Black Panther Party, was an avid and outspoken "Juche-ist", whereas Huey Newton, Minister of Information, was an adherent of Marxism-Leninism Mao Zedong thought (The Black Panther Party never claimed Maoism, instead describing their organization as being Marxist-Leninist and non-aligned with regards to the Sino-Soviet split - that is to say, they weren't allied with the Soviet Union against China, nor China against the Soviet Union).

Juche was also embraced by segments of the Irish Republican movement in Northern Ireland, during their socialist national-liberation struggle against the British.

The Juche idea suggests a kind of nationalist communism, by which oppressed third-world/colonized peoples may gain independence from imperialism/neo-colonialism and establish socialism and self-reliance. This compliments Unruhe's Third World oriented Marxism perfectly. Under the pretensions of Juche, culture is taken to be a metaphysical constant inextricably connected with race and nation, whereas, under Maoism, culture is put under scrutiny as being an artificial construction of class society – that, rather than stemming from some biologic or genetic basis, culture merely embodies the sum of interrelations. Whether one opts for Maoism or one opts for Juche, they can't have it both ways. If one opts for Maoism in the end, they should continue to defend North Korea from imperialism, but their theoretical assessment of its internal dynamics should be nuanced and more critical: that North Korea exists as an anti-Imperialist force in the world, like Iran or Zimbabwe, let's say, but not necessarily an anti-revisionist Marxist-Leninist or Maoist one. Should one opt for Juche, they should realize that Juche is as internationally applicable as Maoism, and they aren't anywhere near being one and the same.

Unruhe's understanding of Marxism reveals itself in his lack of coherent theory. Seldom does he discuss the theoretical contributions of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Mao, Guevara, Sankara, or even noted theorists to come out of the Marxist tradition. In one case, Unruhe brought up the case of Enver Hoxha's criticisms of Mao. Without going into detail as to what Hoxha's actual criticisms contained, Unruhe merely poo-poo'd Hoxha - not to mention modern-day "Hoxhaists" - as racists and Eurocentricists. Had Unruhe bothered to dig into what he was criticizing, he would have seen that Hoxha's criticisms of Mao were mostly aimed at the ways Mao conducted New Democracy - the period in China where the Chinese national bourgeoisie was able to rule, albeit under the eye of the communists - and that Mao's China and Hoxha's Albania were, for the most part, friendly with one another up to Mao's death.

Unruhe does not understand Marx's theory of alienation. For Unruhe, one who is "alienated" is merely the archetypal emo kid who is depressed and withdrawn from the world. Young Marx, taking his idea from Feuerbach, saw alienation as a state in which the worker's labor is mechanized, in which he or she is denied the fruits of his or her labor, to which the laborer longs for a more fulfilling and authentic working experience whereby he or she has control. Such a theory was heavily employed by those in the Marxist humanist camp, such as Georg Lukács and his disciples, and later by more bourgeois Marxist theorists, namely Erich Fromm in his book Marx's Concept of Man. Fromm's Frankfurt School colleague, Herbert Marcuse, stated in his popular treatise One-Dimensional Man that alienation within modern capitalism was no longer limited to individuals, as the modern individual doesn't even think about his or her relation to the means of production, but as something which the entire modern society embraced.

The theory of alienation came under heavy fire by none the less than Western Maoists, the most notable being Louis Althusser, who decried "alienation" as nothing more than an old truism left over from the Young Hegelians. For Althusser, Marx had broken with the concept before he had written Capital, and instead took on an anti-humanist understanding. The individual was not "alienated" from his or her labor or society at large, but was the product of "interpellation", i.e. molded into his or her existing self through ideology given off by existing institutions (state apparatuses). It should be noted that Althusser heavily modeled his dialectical method off of Mao's: in the last instance, the institutions that shape the dominant culture and ideology are shaped by the dominant relations of production, but the last instance never comes, because it is embedded within the existing society's ideological apparatuses. Contradiction is thus layered, as it is in Mao. Why doesn't Unruhe scrap his talk of alienation and move towards Althusser's understanding of culture and hegemony that's far more consistent with his "Maoist" line?

Unruhe barely touches upon what "Maoist Theory" even is, for all his use of Mao-era imagery and terminology. Spewing out phrases like "combat liberalism" at any and all adversaries is one thing, digging deep into the theoretical basis of Mao's works and those who were influenced by him is another. Would Unruhe be able to explain how precisely Mao's dialectics differ from those of Marx or Lenin? Would he be able to explain the agonies and ecstasies of the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath? Unruhe name-drops Lin Biao every so often but this seems to only be for the purpose of gaining credibility for his Third Worldism. He doesn't even mention the influence of Mao's thought on 60s student groups in the United States and Europe, namely the Red Army Faction or the Weather Underground (both of them precursors to the Third Worldism he propagates). Nor does he mention the French Maoists of the same time, many of whom, to his dismay, sold out and became revisionists later on (these were the "New Philosophers").

Unruhe loves to claim his adversaries are "living in the past" due to their reluctance to take up the more "advanced" theory of Third Worldism and instead keep with the old Marxist-Leninist orthodoxies. Unbeknownst to Unruhe, the same Marxists whom he relentlessly puts down and shoves aside turn to the traditions of Marxism's past not because they are "fanboys" but because those works have relevance for today. What Is To Be Done? has relevance for today. Reform or Revolution? has relevance for today. History and Class Consciousness has relevance for today. The histories of communist revolutions - both the successes and the failures - have relevance for today. This doesn't entail that comrades who follow those works are clinging to a dinosaur version of Marxism, but are, rather, seeking to find answers in the past that can be applied to a modern context.

Narcissism

Unruhe displays many tell-tale signs of what psychologists label as shattered-ego narcissism. The ways in which he “responds” (if it can even be called as such) to legitimate criticisms against the arguments he presents in his vlogs and blogs seems heavily, heavily akin to narcissistic rage, as if he’s suffered such a huge blow to his enormously inflated ego that he can’t work out a sound argument against his opponents. For example, if he's told his Third Worldist hypotheses are bullocks, Unruhe will resound with terse little lines of rhetoric which usually involve buzzwords or ad hominem insults, or will poo-poo them entirely by insisting that his adversaries are "literally not making an argument".

His tactics are also textbook cases of narcissism:

1. Emotional blackmail: Unruhe frequently employs this dramatic appeal to emotion to make his case for Third Worldism. "First World 'oppression' is nothing compared to Third World oppression, therefore First Worlders have NO RIGHT to complain." This tends to be a common tactic of Third Worldists and is also a common aspect of narcissistic abuse. Unruhe, in particular, uses fear, obligation and guilt in order to silence and put down his opponents, specifically when he claims struggles in the First World only further the oppression of the Third World. How would a $15/hr minimum wage increase in the US hurt Mexicans? If Israeli workers go on strike to demand higher wages how does that hurt Palestinians? If British workers reverse austerity, how is that hurting Indians/Pakistanis? In reality, Third World workers latch on to struggles in the First World because they see both struggles as coming from a common source and are relieved that workers from the oppressor nation are disturbing things. This was the case when the Naxals offered solidarity with Occupy Wall Street and again when the PFLP came out in support of the Ferguson uprising. Unfortunately, Unruhe doesn't see this. He and others in the Third Worldist camp guilt-trip others into accepting their bogus "theory" through the means that were just highlighted. "You have no right to complain because others have it worse." "Your problems don't matter because you are First World." Etc.

2. Political gaslighting: Unruhe frequently deflects criticisms of his theories by putting the burden on the people who question them. If someone points out an inconsistency or weakness in Unruhe's theory, he insists that the critic is not smart enough, not moral enough, or is making a strawman. It's the political equivalent to the narcissistic abuser's phrase of, "No, you're just crazy." The same thing is true whenever a critic of Unruhe's brings up the oppression and exploitation going on in the First World: Unruhe assumes they're exaggerating or making up stories so they can get away with exploiting the Third World or "social imperialism".

3. Bait and Switch: One only has to look towards the extreme poverty that exists in Detroit, Appalachia, or the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in order to see how exploitation continues in the richest countries on earth. To this, Unruhe will say: "Yes, they are exploited, but they can't carry the revolution." He blatantly changes the subject from whether or not a certain group is exploited to whether or not a certain group can carry the revolution in order to save himself the effort for a lengthy response.

4. The need to be intellectually/morally superior: The narcissist disapproves of anything that isn't of credit to them. Likewise, Unruhe doesn't engage with people. He responds to his critics with insults reminiscent of 4chan shitposting, which is also sign of narcissistic injury. Unruhe does not take accountability for where his theories are wrong. Unruhe also resorts to ad hominem attacks, as he has done in several responses to his critics. "Everyone is an idiot but me." He would denounce a Marxist-Leninist political science PhD who has done extensive research on Third World exploitation but who thoroughly disagrees with the Maoist-Third Worldist position in the same way. He do not care about facts, only your perceived intellectual superiority. Other Marxists who understand the need for struggle on an intellectual basis will concede when their theories are proven to show serious theoretical flaws, especially by those who are more educated or experienced with a particular field/subject. Unruhe, however, folds or dodges things outright (again, a sign of narcissistic injury).

5. Trolling and humiliation: In nearly all of Unruhe's responses to his critics he proceeds to engage in soft-scale humiliation tactics. It would be enough to refute his opponents with evidence but instead he feels the need to name-call, insult, use humiliating images or bring up past instances with that opponent. This attitude of his resembles sadism. He feels empowered when he's humiliated and "exposed" the person who has demonstrated flaws in his reasoning or understandings.

6. DPRK is a fantasy world: Clinical narcissists have fantasies of themselves achieving high amounts of success, money, fame, power and privileges. They must be perfect in their minds or else they will lose their self-worth. Many times they'll project their desires unto their children. Unruhe does the exact same thing with the DPRK, envisioning it as a mystical rainbow unicorn land. This is arguably why he seems to take any negative information about North Korea or its leadership as a narcissistic injury. In reality, the DPRK has contradictions, both internal and external, like any other state in the world today. He also did the same with Gaddafi and seem to be going the same route with Putin and Assad.

7. Violence: Shattered-ego narcissists are considered by psychologists to be the most dangerous narcissists because they are the most prone to violent impulses. They will fly into violent rage whenever they feel that their spotless image has been sullied – if this isn’t an accurate description of Unruhe I don’t know what is. In 2013, when Unruhe was called out for using oppressive language in public online forums, he refused to apologize, which caused a large number of online Marxists to (rightfully) abandon him. In response, Unruhe proceeded to personally attack the "bigger" names, specifically those in Kasama Project, even going so far as to making online death threats. More recently, Unruhe was caught in a situation where he posted a picture of a fellow Marxist with his wife in a collage about Third World sex tourism with the implication that the comrade in question was a sex tourist and his wife an underaged prostitute. Once Unruhe's image was exposed, Unruhe quickly made an apology and claimed his discovery of the image in question had been completely accidental, and no malice towards the comrade or his wife was intentioned. However, Unruhe quickly changed his story to say he found the collage in its entirety. In no time, a communist-oriented troll page obtained Unruhe's doxx, which lead to the harassment of Unruhe's mother and sister by online trolls. Unruhe made a video explaining the situation, where he claimed his mother and sister were facing death threats by the online trolls and that they were calling the police in order to deal with them. However, Unruhe also retreated back to his original explanation: that he had found the mere image of the Marxist and his wife as he was making the collage. Others noted how Unruhe may have very well held a conflict with the comrade and undoubtedly used his image in order to get back at him (most likely for insulting Unruhe's ego).

8. Grandiose idea of self: Unruhe's ego has been shown to be over-inflated. He declares himself the "No. 1 Marxist on Youtube" despite the fact most of his videos have under 2,000 views each. But this is hardly scratching the surface. Despite numerous responses to his Third Worldism by an array of online communists, Unruhe insists that he remains "undefeated" in his efforts to prove his theories correct. Unruhe has also made unsubstantiated claims about his ethnic background, calling himself an "indigenous person" for allegedly being of Sami ancestry (people whom he claims were once "red-skinned like the Native Americans, setting aside the obvious racist connotations about "reds***s") - and thereby demanding that others see and relate to him as they would an individual of First Nations/Aboriginal descent - even though he has never shown how he holds a connection to that culture or people. One can easily deduct Unruhe's exploitation of the struggles of indigenous peoples for his own social gain.


Conclusion:

Unruhe's internet personality is a combination of ignorance and arrogance. He is the fool who is too foolish to realize his foolishness. A much better source for Marxist resources would be Marxists.org where an array of literature can be found.