Confidence in a Material-Ideological Apparatus

In his Ethics, Spinoza clarifies four different affects – as in physical and/or mental states that changes the power to act of a particular entity.

1. Hope is an inconstant joy arising from the idea of something in the future or past whose outcome we are uncertain about.
2. Fear is an inconstant sadness arising from the idea of an uncertain outcome.
3. Despair arises when the cause of doubt about an anticipated outcome has been removed in the direction of believing that the hoped-for outcome will not occur.
4. Confidence arises when the cause of doubt about an anticipated outcome has been removed.

There is a dialectical relationship between these concepts. There can be no hope, without fear that we will lose hope, nor fear without hope that we will no longer fear. Despair rises out of the absence of hope, and Confidence fades when hope is lost.

As a communist, we regard the news with a sad passion for following events we have no control or agency over, ie doubt in the purest form. The uprisings in France and Albania in the autumn of 2026 play out on our phone screens, but we in the anglosphere can only act as cheerleaders for struggles we have no role in. As anti-imperialists we are inundated with despair watching the genocide of Palestine unfold, and our hearts are in our mouths as we watch Ansar Allah attempt to fight for and defend Yemen’s national sovereignty.

We want to create conditions where we no longer have need for hope. Rather than praying that the next uprising will be the spark that lights the prarie fire, we must become active participants in history. As Che taught us, the apple does not fall on it’s own, you have to make it drop. The most famous Spinozist-Marxist was Althusser, who understood that ideology builds up individuals as subjects. People see themselves as social beings with certain expectations for the future. We act as the good citizen and expect reward for being law-abiding, as the successful worker and expect a raise, as the responsible parent and expect grateful children , as the obedient student and expect good grades and good jobs. When material conditions change, we feel a sense of dissonance. To be Gen Z is to feel the rug pull of history. All that we were promised was obliterated in front of our eyes over the past decade, and we are now left sleepwalking into adulthood to deal with the threats of AI fueled neo-fascism, ecological disintegration, potential pandemics, and the ever escalating slip into a permanent state of brutal proxy wars that sacrifice entire nations and peoples on the altar of imperialism.

We must become people who remove doubt from situations we find ourselves in. The communist party, from a Spinozist perspective is a doubt-removal machine that generates confidence in the masses. As Althusser explained to us.

“ideas are … material actions inserted into material practices governed by material rituals which are themselves defined by the material ideological apparatus from which derive the ideas of that subject.

The communist party is a material ideological apparatus that not only provides an incubator for proletarian revolutionary ideology and politics, but is a structure that can organise the masses and develop a strategy with them to fight and win socialism. In situations where we are condemned to exist without a communist party, it is easy to fall into the traps of fear, of despair, and most dangerously, of hope. Right now, we all hope that things might change, that revolutionary leadership might fall from the sky (or be imported from India or the Philippines) but to be good Marxist-Leninist-Maoists, it is up to us to build the material ideological apparatuses needed to wage class war.

Now is the time to put our heads down and do the long and arduous task of building the material ideological institutions necessary to fight for socialism in our countries. We are subjects of communism, who can remove doubt by clarifying proletarian revolutionary strategy for ourselves and our comrades. This is what it means to start to have confidence in our ability to act as true communists.