Our most ambitious goal is to be useful to communism, that international proletarian force which seeks the annihilation of capitalism and class society and, importantly, which conceives of itself as such. To do this, we offer a meagre experiment called Heatwave: a magazine and aspiring multi-media project that aims to be a shared theoretical and social surface for communists, including anarchists and communists-to-be. By providing what we see lacking today, both in terms of form and content, we hope to recognize each other, coordinate, and cultivate mutual growth toward a common, actionable horizon. To be effective toward this end, it is important to demarcate which sort of content to publish and what form it should take. More specifically, this means developing a heuristic for deciding which ideas to platform and what standards to hold them to. Our present moment is nebulous. While interest in communism seems to be growing, it remains marginal, and we cannot yet speak of a coherent communist movement adequate to the tasks that lay before us. The sobering maelstroms of today require that our heuristic be capable of processing inputs from across the partisan world and intelligently parsing the tensions and disagreements between them.

Though there is no consensus about adopting this as a formal watchword, being “ecumenical” has become one framework some of us in Heatwave have adopted as a way to think through these problems of receptivity and selectivity. A dictionary definition of ecumenical might say: interdenominational cooperation and dialogue between churches—or within “the church,” in the historical sense of the Catholic ecumenical councils, depending on the nuance. Our ecumenicism is similar, albeit more like an inter-tendency cooperation and dialogue among communists within the movement of communists—or within “the party” of communism, in the “historical party”² sense, depending on the nuance—something not too far from the purposes of The International Workingmen’s Association, commonly called the First International. The term’s etymology is curiously prescient for our concerns as well. While ecumenical’s etymon arose from the Greek word oikos or “habitation,” the term’s significant development follows an arc of “inhabitation” as a mode of dwelling, in which the activity and its world are viewed in necessary unity. The “ecumenical” evolved more still to appeal to matters “from the whole world.” Its enduring usage, the derivation drawn from the Catholic ecumenical councils and the one we reference today, appeals to a common, “general, universal” trajectory shared by a socio-political body across historical time. It is in this manner that ecumenical communism presupposes a long, unified, diverse ecology of revolutionary-oriented praxes.

Well after the Christian and Imperial Roman uses, ecumene and the ecumenical have since been deployed by the likes of anarchist speculative fiction author Ursula K. LeGuin, neo-Heideggerian philosophers like Peter Sloterdijk, and Lewis Mumford, a historian, sociologist, and technicist. For clarity, in the editorial for Issue Two, we outlined our version of being ecumenical as: “refusing the false dividing lines inherited from the long dissolution of the last global communist movement.” We as Heatwave commit to rigorous analysis that “invokes the real complexity of revolutionary theory and history, actively seeks evidence for its claims, and engages in good faith with opposing positions.” We maintain that the partisan project is inherently international and incendiary, “requiring confrontation with the rulers of the world, rather than gradualist compromise or secessionist retreat.”³ Communists depend on—in fact need—ecumenical experimentation.

In short, “ecumenism” properly grasped cannot abide an arbitrary mixture of ideas and methods. It aims to intervene where partisans, becoming increasingly ignorant of the lived realities of the working classes, select for strict ideological conformity that devolve into sectarian factions⁴ of circular firing squads on the one hand, or “happy patchworks of radical ideas”⁵ on the other. Self-conscious proletarian movements around the world live under the weight of both pressures now. We choose neither, beyond either. 

No doubt, as an international and internationalist project, we must seek out and embrace a diverse array of perspectives rooted in real struggles and should account for similar diversity in its international readership. Although we live under the shared, historically specific conditions of capital’s domination, this planetary domination is uneven. It is a historically necessary feature of capitalist development that communists would develop comparably adequate accounts of what is happening—even if varied based on context—with disparate ideas of what is to be done. Ecumenicism is the form in which this contradiction is both expressed and resolved. Being ecumenical can mean hosting pieces in dissensus to facilitate and value stringent arguments among partisans that better our understanding of the potential born from current and historical situations. It also means valuing these arguments beyond the limited conception of debate. Heatwave is not simply an agora⁶ for the marketplace of ideas. We attend to ecumenical practice not only because it is generative, but because difference is inevitable. Within fragmentation we must develop the capacity for cohesive communication and action.

The value of argument comes as an already-partisan practice rooted in stringent material analysis and in existing struggle, in furtherance of our gestational, communist project. This approach helps protect against two impasses. The first is the deterioration into language games or silly polemics directed at some impotent political faction or ideological rival. The second results from assuredly painting too bleak or too bright a picture of the prospect of revolution. Many of us have wandered away from different anarchist and socialist tendencies precisely because of this over-certainty, often an indicator of an underlying impotence in its own right. Our heads should not be stuck in either sands or clouds. A clear-eyed look at the world today is indeed sobering, but it is in recognizing our slim chances that we believe searching for practical paths forward is all the more crucial. Getting it wrong costs us dearly, every time.

Beyond dissatisfaction with the “too sure too soon” impulse there is another line we find essential to draw. Unfortunately there are many parties and partisans today whose political lives have devolved into preoccupations with unreliable and decrepit approaches to communist revolution. We may have started from the foot of the same mountain hoping to reach the same communist summit, but some have become hopelessly lost in the alpine woods with no plan to reevaluate their course, sealing their fate. We have no convergent objectives with these communists and happily exclude them from our pages. This dismissal is not because we want to build our own “one true church of communism” that denounces all others as false. Rather, our “one true church” is the total revolutionary overthrow of class civilization—even if we do not see this revolutionary overthrow as imminent. Of course, the reason for this decay of formal communist parties into partners and managers of capitalist society is itself not reducible to betrayal by power-hungry cynics, nor is it simply the product of bad people with bad ideas. Here, an ecumenical approach anchored by our commitment to the abolition of class society enables us to grapple with the nuanced reality of this history without either oversimplifying our own genealogy or ceding ground to those who may share our name but not our aims.

Being ecumenical is not about suturing back together the grand churches after their historic splits—or in our case suturing back together the parties or tendencies of communism—nor is it about excommunicating them. Being ecumenical means seeing already-unfolding instances of proletarian resistance, substantive communist inquiry, and effective partisan organization as part of our ecosystem. For a magazine this means publishing pieces that make useful interventions or accurately and succinctly portray things that are of importance, even if they are written by people who veer over some ideological lines, on a case by case basis. As we’ve said, a broad heuristic for this might be, “is it useful to communism?” Our mosaic of pieces might then reveal the small or large fires of struggle and pair them with exacting analysis laying bare our present conditions. Ideally, we do this in a way that is legible to those outside our current ecosystem who would like to join, because communism, like capitalism, must grow or die.

This practice of highlighting emerging communism and juxtaposing it with a more hard-nosed critique of political economy is akin to what the philosopher and communist Ernst Bloch described as the “warm” and “cold” streams of Marxism. For Bloch, the “cold” streams include acts of rigorous analysis of how exploitation, accumulation, crisis, and class power must be understood. It invokes theoretical sobriety that discerns limits, constraints, enemy capacities, and the real power of capitalism’s institutional forces. According to Bloch, the “cold” stream resists mistaking wishes for realities, i.e., it resists mistaking the “ought to be” for the “what is,” and tracks determinate conditions—an approach that, if taken on its own, might lead communists to fatalism.

Conversely, Bloch’s “warm” streams consist of acts of on-the-ground speculation in the midst of the still yet indiscernible possibilities and the “not-yet-conscious” formations of the rebel proletariat. The “warm” reaches out to grasp. It maps real tendencies and traces practical possibilities immanent to a situation and capable of being organized, carving out potentials to be realized against the actual operations of class antagonism. The “warm” also grapples with why people would risk, endure, and build without assurances—because of this, the approach risks slipping into moralism and escapist consolation. In a dialectic with each other, the twin streams form a sort of “speculative materialism” or revolutionary realism where “neither the path in itself, nor the goal in itself, are held apart from one another undialectically.”⁷Approaching something like the Operational Arts,⁸ this is the kind of generative dialectics we aim to cultivate between and within the pieces in this magazine.

Our hope with this issue is to offer examples of what we have in mind ranging across the macro, meso, and micro-level of analysis. Where “Black Box of Production” takes a macro-level approach to communist interventions in the capitalist organization of industrial production, “Nuclear Power Revanchism” works similarly at the meso-level with an analysis of nuclear power production on the indigenous territories of the Diné and Tewa in the southwest United States. Similarly, macro-level analyses of partisan organizing detailed in “What May Come” and “A Theory of Ecological Partisanship” have meso-level counterparts in “Dispatches from Mae Sot” and “‘Now the Actual Work Starts’: Reflections from Nepal, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka.” At the micro-level, we have a personal reflection on, and translation of, Siavash Kasrai’s poem, I am with you, rafēgh (comrade), as well as book reviews of Idris Robinson’s The Revolt Eclipses Whatever the World Has to Offer and Madeline Lane-Mckinley’s Solidarity with Children, and a review of Robyn’s new single, “Dopamine.” We also include an excerpt from Bruno George’s speculative novel Dead Revolting, which approaches the communist problematic from another micro register: individual memory, death, and the afterlife, as refracted through a possible trajectory of capitalist development and the small-scale resistances it engenders. In this way, the micro is not only reflective, but also speculative; capable of tracing how historical tendencies are lived, remembered, and imagined from within. As we traverse these levels of analysis to understand our surrounding world, we invite readers to not lose sight of themselves, as our experiences inevitably shape the contours of our own ecumenical tastes. However, the interests of this project go beyond relations between individual communists and strains of communism, i.e., the plane on which the ecumenical operates.

The “movement of communists,” to which we’ve referred, let alone the even smaller “we” of Heatwavers, are likely not what produces the revolutionary conditions sufficient for a decisively communist insurgency. In reality, those who are acting upon ruptures and rifts in ways that advance communist potentials are radicalized through coming into conflict with capital and the state more so than by encountering discursive interventions. To quote from “Rift between the blazes,” another piece in this issue, “Theory, as a ruthless critique of what exists, is in no way a guide for the proletariat—who will find their own way—but still is capable of shedding light on the forms of our activity in the tumultuous reality of class struggles.” Similarly, “‘Now the Actual Work Starts’: Reflections from Nepal, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka” shows “revolutions without revolutionaries” delivering a situation where a plurality still believes in reform or defaults to it because alternatives lack cohesive force, and in which violent upheaval gives way to a return to everyday capitalism despite a clear hunger for alternatives. Given the impasses and potentials of these recurring revolts, as well as the potential for becoming-communist and the potential for the spreading of class consciousness in the networked publics of our time, named communist positions and explicitly communist ethics seem to have some use.

If Heatwave is to be useful to communism or, more humbly, to the movement of communists, it will not do so by pretending to resolve the questions we face well in advance or by acting as an arbiter above the fray. It will be by cultivating a point of encounter where communists and proto-communists can sharpen their diagnosis, test their orientations in the midst of other perspectives, and better locate the sites where coherence and coordination are possible. Careful line-drawing need not entail schismatic cloistering, and openness need not entail a frictionless uncritical eclecticism. We invite our readers to take the magazine in that spirit: as a tool for developing our understanding of our predicament, of enemy or partisan capacities, and as a site of both formation and contestation.

Footnotes

1. Ikkyū Sōjun, Having Once Paused: Poems of Zen Master Ikkyū (1394–1481), trans. Sarah Messer and Kidder Smith (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015). ↩

2. The “historical party” here does not refer to an electoral party, a league, or a formal association with a membership list, but rather, to quote Marx in a letter to the poet Ferdinand Freiligrath, it is “a party that is everywhere springing up naturally out of the soil of modern society.” He continued this is a “party in the broad historical sense.” It is something like the implicit proletarian movement and communist tendency at large which could include particular sects or organizations, but is not limited to any one of them. ↩

3. “Comrades Known and Elsewhere,” Heatwave, Issue 2, December, 2025, https://heatwavemag.info/magazine/issue02/issue2_editorial_090925/ ↩

4. Harumasa Abe, “Fragmentation, Centralization, and Civil War in the Japanese Ultra-Left,” Ill Will, June 17, 2025, https://illwill.com/uchigeba

   We cite this piece here because, even if “sectarianism” can appear comparatively nebulous in places like the U.S. today, the term carries a far more concrete and catastrophic historical weight in contexts like the Japanese archipelago, where the logic of the “circular firing squad” became brutally literal. As Harumasa Abe shows, uchigeba was not simply the result of excessive rigor, but of an inability to tolerate divergence within the communist groups: a conviction that fragmentation signaled betrayal, that separation had to be reversed or annihilated, and that fidelity to revolution required enforcing ideological unity at all costs. In that sense, the confusion lies not between rigor and laxity, but between rigor and a dogmatic process of pruning one’s own camp to fit an a priori standard. As elaborated in the cited piece, they also mistook their “sect” of revolutionaries for the revolutionary movement itself. To quote Marx in a letter to Schweitzer in Berlin, “The sect sees the justification for its existence and its ‘point of honour’—not in what it has in common with the class movement but in the particular shibboleth which distinguishes it from it.” Despite the popular resonance of these groups’ grievances and goals, their self-destructive behavior made proto-revolutionary politics synonymous with death spirals and cult-like violence. On the other hand, in the absence of non-reformist communist groups, communism became associated with dusty, if not reasonable, parliamentary reformism and electoral careerism of the Japanese Communist Party.

   ↩

5. Phil A. Neel, “Theory of the Party,” Ill Will, September 6, 2025, https://illwill.com/theory-of-the-party ↩

6. Agora (ἀγορά): the central public space of the ancient Greek polis, used for assembly, commerce, religious activity, and political discussion. In Athens in particular, agora functioned as a civic and commercial center closely tied to public life, though participation in that public was structured by exclusion, especially of women, slaves, and noncitizens. By agora, we mean a purportedly neutral public forum in which antagonism is recoded as debate and partisanship is subordinated to a false universality of exchange which obscures infrastructure, class, and power. ↩

7. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vol. 1, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 209. ↩

8. Developed by commanders in the Red Army, the Operational Arts deal with the coherence of tactics (means and ways) and strategy (goals and ends) given difficulties of scope and complexity. ↩