 Lenin at the Communards Wall (1966-7) Rafail Andreevich Didenko. Discourse online is saturated with everyone calling everyone else a LARPer. The meme of the three Spider-Man’s pointing at each other nicely registers the structure of LARP accusations online.  LARP! LARP! LARP! LARP, for those not versed in this online lingo, is short for live-action role-playing. When you accuse someone of LARPing, you are suggesting that they are inauthentic, that they are pretending (role-playing) something they are not. It is clear why such an accusation becomes so popular in leftists spaces in the West. Since there is no strong independent left-wing, anyone who attempts to build one is seen as LARPing: “those guys aren’t actually revolutionaries, they’re just LARPers.” There is of course a kernel of truth in this. There are many for whom communism is a lifestyle, a counterculture identity they take on, not for the sake of struggling to change the world, but to look hip, edgy, and dissident within the current form of life. In my book, The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism, I call these subjects ‘identity socialists.” For them the label of “communist” is grounded in a self-imposed identity (putting the hammer and sickle on one’s bio), not in a classification one earns through work, that is, through joining an organization that makes you “earn your stripes” as a communist organizer. Nonetheless, what those who accuse others of being LARPers presuppose is the possibility of activity that is not LARP, of acts that are radically new, acts for which there is no pre-established roles one could have possibly role-played. Who are the non-LARPers of leftist history? Of course, the classics: Lenin, Mao, Fidel, etc. All those who waged revolutionary struggles, won, and opened up a new dimension of revolutionary activity, which is to say (when translated to the domain of theory), advanced the revolutionary framework Marxism beyond that which they inherited. The problem faced by those who sustain this simple binary of inauthentic LARPer versus true revolutionary is that all of the true revolutionaries saw themselves, in various ways, as reenacting a moment of the past, as going back to the original tradition, and it was precisely in this act of pretending to go back that the new was born. Slavoj Žižek makes an interesting observation in this domain, anticipating by a decade this hysteria around LARP accusations: “the invention of some new content can only occur in the illusory form of returning to the past original truth.” What the LARP-police officers are not aware of is that all of their favorite revolutionaries saw their task as returning to the basics of the tradition they were a part of, and it was precisely in doing this that a new content was arrived at: “their ‘return to’ constitutes the very object to which it returns… in the very act of returning to tradition, they are inventing it.” Martin Luther LARP’s as an original, pre-Catholic Christian, in doing so, he creates a radical rupture, something qualitatively new. A return to origins gives birth to novelty: Protestantism. The Bolsheviks LARP as communards (perhaps even as Jacobins), and through the LARP they go beyond LARP and develop something new. They sought to go back to real Marxism after it had been corrupted by the Second International. But precisely in this attempt to recapture lost origins something new is born (the ‘new’ here, of course, should be understood dialectically, as in building up and sublating the old): Marxism-Leninism. The Chinese Communists LARP as Bolsheviks, and in doing so, genuinely develop upon Marxism and our historically shared index of wisdom on the struggle for building socialism. Who could’ve imagined a socialist revolution led (and not just supported by, as in Russia) the peasants? It was by trying to reenact the revolutionary spirit of 1917 in a Chinese context that the newness of the 1949 revolution emerges. The 26 of July Movement LARPS a return to the unfinished business of the 1953 assault on the Moncada barracks, but in doing so goes beyond anything that could have been foreseen in 1953. By LARPing they develop a new synthesis of Cuban Marxism-Leninism and socialism with Cuban characteristics. In each case, the structure is the same: artful LARPing is often the form through which something radically new is born. Even those traditions which seek to define themselves through a complete break with all of the traditions of old, nonetheless do so by reenacting all those who have purported to take up the same task in the past. Marx already knew this well, as the famous first paragraphs of the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte show: The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language. Thus Luther put on the mask of the Apostle Paul, the Revolution of 1789-1814 draped itself alternately in the guise of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody, now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793-95. In like manner, the beginner who has learned a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he assimilates the spirit of the new language and expresses himself freely in it only when he moves in it without recalling the old and when he forgets his native tongue. One can say there is a certain naivety to these revolutionary breaks (I think this is central to what Marx is highlighting), they are forced to “conjure up the spirits of the past to their service” even when the service (the revolution process) is producing something often times unimaginable to those old ghosts. We shouldn’t simply see this as a contingent mistake, it is the necessary (at least from what we can see historically) form revolutionary struggles take. It is as if correctly developing something new requires this constitutive delusion that one is simply reenacting the old, returning to the origins. And so the real question is not, to reformulate the Shakespearean “to be or not to be,” “to LARP or not to LARP?” But: “how can we LARP in a revolutionary manner, that is, how can we go through LARP to new revolutionary activity?” How can we dialectically turn LARPing, the enactment of the old, into its opposite, into new revolutionary activity? Originally published on Carlos' blog Philosophy in Crisis Author Dr. Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American Professor of Philosophy who received his M.A. and Ph.D. from Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He serves as the Secretary of Education for the American Communist Partyand as a Director of the Midwestern Marx Institute, the largest Marxist-Leninist think-tank in the United States. Dr. Garrido has authored a few books, including Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Why We Need American Marxism (2024), and the two forthcoming texts, Domenico Losurdo and the Marxist-Leninist Critique of Western Marxism (2026) and Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (2026-7). Dr. Garrido has published over a dozen scholarly articles and over a hundred articles in popular settings across the U.S., Mexico, Cuba, Iran, China, Brazil, Venezuela, Greece, Peru, Canada, etc. His writings have been translated into over a dozen languages. He also writes short form articles for his Substack, @philosophyincrisis, and does regular YouTube programs for the Midwestern Marx Institute channel. He is on Instagram @carlos.l.garrido Archives July 2026
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