ProleWiki

Logo of ProleWiki.

ProleWiki is a RedLib wiki and digital library founded in 2020. It describes itself as a collaborative Marxist-Leninist and anti-imperialist encyclopedia covering communist history, theory, political organisations, countries and contemporary events. It also maintains a large library of Marxist and socialist literature.

ProleWiki gradually developed a strict ideological membership policy. Although accounts were originally open to Marxists of different tendencies, the project later restricted membership to people its existing editors consider Marxist-Leninists. This policy contributed to a major dispute with supporters of Infrared, Patriotic Socialism and later MAGA Communism during 2022. ProleWiki removed editors associated with those tendencies, and members of the Infrared community subsequently established InfraWiki.

The dispute has continued well beyond the original split. ProleWiki portrays Infrared as a nationalist and reactionary distortion of Marxism-Leninism, while InfraWiki argues that ProleWiki applies an overly narrow interpretation of Marxism to political conditions in the contemporary United States. Much of the disagreement concerns American patriotism, the national question, the political meaning of MAGA, the composition of the working class and the role of communist organisation outside the traditional Western left.

Despite the feud, ProleWiki contains a considerable amount of useful historical and theoretical material. In October 2024 the project reported more than 30 active editors, almost 4,000 pages and approximately 1,000 works in its library.

History

ProleWiki was established in late 2020. According to one of its editors, the project initially had no single dominant ideological tendency and its founder deliberately invited non-Marxist-Leninists to participate. Arguments over questions such as the class character of China, the Sino-Soviet split and different communist traditions soon became common, and most non-Marxist-Leninist editors eventually left.

The remaining administration increasingly recruited from Marxist-Leninist online communities. ProleWiki later introduced an application process in which prospective editors answer political questions and established editors vote on whether they should receive an account. The project does not describe this merely as protection against vandalism; ideological agreement with its principles is explicitly part of the admission process.

The site continued to expand during the following years. A library, essays section and several language editions were established. In 2024 ProleWiki redesigned its main page and stated that it had grown to more than 30 active editors, almost 4,000 pages and around 1,000 works of literature.

Political line

ProleWiki identifies Marxism-Leninism as its theoretical basis and generally takes favourable positions towards the Soviet Union and contemporary socialist states including the People's Republic of China, Cuba, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, Vietnam and Laos. Its library contains works by Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Xi Jinping, Kim Il Sung, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro and many other communist writers.

The project takes a considerably stricter position towards tendencies which also call themselves Marxist-Leninist but depart from its own political line. A 2024 ProleWiki essay openly states that only Marxist-Leninists are accepted as editors and describes ideological vetting as necessary to preserve the direction of the project. ProleWiki has published essays against patriotic socialism and has treated Infrared, MAGA Communism and related tendencies as incompatible with Marxism-Leninism.

This difference in editorial philosophy is central to the dispute with InfraWiki. ProleWiki attempts to maintain a defined ideological boundary around the project. InfraWiki gives more room to competing interpretations within communist and anti-imperialist politics and was partly created because its founders rejected ProleWiki's approach to ideological gatekeeping.

2022 split

ProleWiki's own account states that one of its three administrators between 2020 and 2022 was associated with patriotic socialism. According to ProleWiki, this administrator attempted to recruit other patriotic socialists to the wiki without revealing their political intentions, with the aim of changing the project's ideological direction. The administrator was subsequently removed along with their access to the site's infrastructure.

ProleWiki openly calls this episode a purge. It later introduced measures intended to prevent patriotic socialists from joining the project. Its article on Infrared similarly states that InfraWiki was created by the Infrared community in October 2022 following ProleWiki's "purge of patsocs".

The dispute occurred during a wider split among online communists who had been grouped together under the label "patriotic socialist". Infrared itself rejected much of that milieu during 2022. In On the 'Patsoc' Split, Haz argued that the label had brought together political tendencies with substantial differences over class, organisation and strategy and declared a definitive break with several other figures who had previously been placed in the same tendency.

Infrared later distanced itself from the label "patriotic socialism" more generally. In its formulation of MAGA Communism, the term was criticised for suggesting loyalty to the existing state rather than partisan opposition to the prevailing political order.

Dispute with Infrared

ProleWiki's article on Infrared is openly hostile. It lists Infrared's ideology as including "bourgeois nationalism", "chauvinism", "anti-intellectualism", "cryptofascism", "Duginism" and "settler colonialism", while describing its Marxism-Leninism as merely nominal.

These terms represent ProleWiki's interpretation of Infrared rather than Infrared's own description of its politics. Several more specific claims made in the article can be compared directly with Infrared's writings and broadcasts.

Revolutionary strategy

ProleWiki has characterised Haz as a reformist, citing a debate with Jason Unruhe about revolutionary violence. The disagreement arose after Haz criticised the idea that publicly brandishing a weapon and calling for armed struggle was sufficient to constitute revolutionary politics.

Haz's argument in the cited exchange was that a proletarian political organisation first required logistics, organisation and enough mass support to establish political hegemony. He did not rule out violence, stating that it "may very well be necessary", but argued that violence itself was not the defining principle of revolutionary politics.

The dispute is therefore more accurately described as one over revolutionary strategy and organisation than as evidence that Infrared considers bourgeois legality permanent or rejects revolutionary change in principle.

CPUSA 2036

ProleWiki's Infrared article claims that CPUSA 2036 refers to an attempt to take control of the Communist Party USA and win the United States presidential election in 2036. Its citation for the electoral claim is a Fandom post rather than a statement by Infrared.

Infrared's own explanation states something different. In On the 'Patsoc' Split, Haz describes the immediate objective of CPUSA 2036 as "not the achievement of socialism, not the achievement of revolution" but gaining political hegemony within the Communist Party USA and rebuilding it as a major party of the American working class.

The initiative was therefore tied to work within the existing CPUSA and to the goal of rebuilding a mass communist party. The primary source cited by Infrared does not describe winning the 2036 presidential election as the meaning of the slogan.

MAGA Communism

MAGA Communism is one of the largest points of disagreement between the two projects. ProleWiki describes it as a "tailist internet slogan" calling for political and ideological unification with the Trump movement.

InfraWiki and Infrared define the concept differently. InfraWiki describes MAGA Communism as a deliberately contradictory meme intended to show Infrared's position outside the conventional left-right political spectrum. The apparent contradiction between the normally right-wing association of MAGA and the left-wing association of communism is part of the point: Infrared argues that real political antagonism does not necessarily correspond to the conventional spectrum, but develops through the formation of opposing partisan forces.

Infrared's 2022 essay The Rise of MAGA Communism develops this argument at much greater length. It describes MAGA not as an already communist movement but as the specifically American form of counter-hegemonic partisan politics which emerged around the revolt against the established political order after 2016.

The essay explicitly acknowledges that anti-communism is widespread among existing MAGA supporters. Haz writes that its "overt consciousness" contains many anti-communist ideas inherited from the Cold War, McCarthyism and the John Birch Society. The argument for MAGA Communism is therefore not that existing MAGA ideology should simply be adopted by communists.

Instead, Infrared argues that communists should enter into political contact with the people involved in the movement and struggle over its eventual direction. The essay describes its aim as the unity of Marxism with the workers' movement and argues that existing right-wing ideologies are ultimately incapable of giving the MAGA movement a successful political programme.

Infrared also argues that MAGA should eventually break with the Republican Party. While expressing tactical sympathy for some Republican candidates opposed to the political establishment, the essay describes most of the Republican Party as controlled by the same ruling class and calls for an independent working-class political party.

ProleWiki rejects this entire approach. It regards MAGA as fundamentally reactionary and sees communist engagement with it as capitulation to nationalism and right-wing politics. The disagreement is therefore deeper than whether Donald Trump should personally be supported. The two tendencies disagree over what MAGA represents socially, whether its political character is already fixed, and whether communists can contest its working-class supporters.

National question

The national question in the United States is another major source of disagreement. ProleWiki has accused Infrared of settler colonialism and chauvinism, in part because Haz rejects the view that the contemporary United States as a whole should be treated as occupied Indigenous territory.

Infrared separates the historical dispossession of Native peoples from the political question of whether the present American working class constitutes a settler population incapable of revolutionary politics. Haz has acknowledged and condemned the conquest and violence suffered by Native Americans while rejecting theories which make settler status the central political category for understanding the contemporary American working class.

The dispute is closely related to Infrared's criticism of J. Sakai and of forms of Third Worldism which it regards as denying the possibility of revolutionary politics among workers in the imperial core. ProleWiki's interpretation places much greater emphasis on settler colonialism and national oppression in analysing the United States.

ProleWiki on InfraWiki

ProleWiki has also maintained an article attacking InfraWiki directly. The article describes InfraWiki as "neo-fascist" and "MAGA Communist", characterises its founders as patriotic socialists who attempted to infiltrate ProleWiki, and accuses the site of racism, misogyny, anti-LGBT politics, police apologia and systematically unreliable sourcing.

The article cites genuine examples of poor material from early InfraWiki revisions. Some older pages contained weak sourcing, jokes presented in article format and claims which had little or no documentary support. One version of the old InfraWiki article on National Socialism, for example, contained deliberately absurd statements about Adolf Hitler which were not serious historical scholarship. Early InfraWiki pages also made frequent use of Twitter posts, YouTube videos and other informal online material.

Those examples provide evidence that early InfraWiki's editorial quality was uneven. They do not by themselves establish ProleWiki's broader description of the project as neo-fascist. InfraWiki does not describe itself in those terms; its main page describes it as a volunteer-run encyclopedia concerned with Infrared and "the study of Marxism-Leninism in the Age of Multipolarity and the post-COVID World".

InfraWiki's article on Infrared likewise presents the collective as Marxist-Leninist and places its theoretical emphasis on adapting the historical experience of Marxism-Leninism to conditions in the contemporary West, multipolarity and the failure of earlier attempts to reproduce communist politics mechanically in Western societies.

The classification of InfraWiki as fascist or neo-fascist is therefore part of the political dispute between the projects rather than a politically neutral description of the site's stated programme.

Sourcing

ProleWiki has criticised InfraWiki for citing social-media posts, Telegram channels, Quora, YouTube videos and politically partisan websites. The criticism has some basis in older InfraWiki material, where sources were often used without enough attention to whether they actually supported the claims attached to them.

The two projects also differ in their broader conception of sources. InfraWiki does not treat the reputation of a publication as sufficient on its own to determine whether a source can be used. A social-media post may be poor evidence for an independent historical assertion while still being the best primary source for establishing what a particular person publicly said. Similarly, a politically hostile publication may contain useful documents, interviews or factual information.

This approach requires individual citations to be checked closely. A source being politically sympathetic does not make a claim true, and a hostile or mainstream source being politically objectionable does not automatically make every fact it contains false. InfraWiki's own maintenance pages include material from a wide range of political sources and even identify ProleWiki pages for possible integration where their content is useful.

The difference is therefore partly one of editorial method. ProleWiki places greater emphasis on maintaining an ideologically coherent collection of sources and interpretations. InfraWiki is more willing to extract information from sources across hostile political camps, although this makes careful verification especially important.

Library

ProleWiki's digital library is one of the strongest parts of the project. It contains works by Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Xi Jinping, Kim Il Sung, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, Rosa Luxemburg, Frantz Fanon, Michael Parenti and many other communist and socialist writers.

By October 2024, ProleWiki reported approximately 1,000 works in the library. Whatever the disagreements between the two projects, the library remains a useful repository of communist literature and primary documents.

InfraWiki has itself considered importing useful material from ProleWiki. Its maintenance page for sources to integrate specifically lists ProleWiki material among resources which editors may adapt elsewhere on the site.

Relationship with InfraWiki

ProleWiki and InfraWiki emerged from overlapping online Marxist-Leninist circles but developed different answers to the problem of communist politics in the contemporary West. The disagreement is most visible in their treatment of MAGA, patriotism, the American national question and the boundaries of acceptable Marxist politics.

ProleWiki responds to ideological disagreement by maintaining a relatively narrow definition of Marxism-Leninism and restricting editing privileges accordingly. Its editors openly defend this model as necessary for a coherent political encyclopedia. InfraWiki was created partly in opposition to that model and gives more space to theories and political currents which ProleWiki excludes.

The feud has at times produced weak arguments on both sides. Older InfraWiki material often answered ProleWiki with insults rather than examining its claims, while ProleWiki has sometimes reduced complicated Infrared positions to labels which do not accurately convey the arguments found in Infrared's own primary texts. Its description of CPUSA 2036 as a presidential-election project is one example; its description of MAGA Communism as simple political unification with Trumpism similarly leaves out Infrared's explicit criticism of Republican politics and its acknowledgement of widespread anti-communism within MAGA.

The two projects nevertheless retain substantial common ground on many historical subjects. Both identify with Marxism-Leninism, publish favourable material on the Soviet revolutionary tradition and defend several existing socialist states. Their sharpest differences concern what Marxist politics should look like under present conditions in the United States.

See also

• InfraWiki
• Infrared
• Marxism-Leninism
• MAGA Communism
• Patriotic Socialism
• CPUSA 2036
• Communist Party USA
• RedLib

External links

• ProleWiki
• ProleWiki Library
• ProleWiki article on Infrared