“Well hello. What’s your dogma?”

No activist has ever said that to me as a pick-up line. Then again, no apolitical charmer has ever asked me what my sign is either. Should that situation ever happen to any left militant, a scientific love profile based on ideology* would come in handy to determine whether or not your dogma is compatible with his/hers’ dogma.

So I made one.

The Communist

Why we love them: As Vanguards of the proletariat and champions for a classless society, Communists are all about uniting and rolling with their motley crew, the workers of the world. It’s cool; they have nothing to lose but their chains.

Make them want you: Drop the books every so often and change the world. You can always interpret it in the process.

Big Shots: Karl Marx, Che Guevara, Pablo Neruda.

The Socialist

Why we love them: Who doesn’t love them? The ultimate social butterflies, Socialists are the life of any party, organizing cooperatives while crushing capitalist structures.

Make them want you: Remember, sharing is caring. Dismantle consumer private property and push for socialized health care, childcare, education and the means of production. Society will increase its productivity and wealth, allowing the masses plenty of time for more intimate and frisky social affairs.

Big Shots: Vladimir Lenin, Albert Einstein, Rosa Luxemburg, the editors of the Monthly Review.

The Feminist

Why we love them: Independent, assertive, sassy and sexy! Aside from being fearless, trailblazing spitfires, Feminists are revolutionary strategists, aware of themselves as works-in-progress, thus taking the super-sisterhood high road along the clumsy highway to emancipation.

Make them want you: Stay in the kitchen.  Be honest, to her and to yourself especially if you’re vacillating between patriarchal cowardice and struggling to be the liberated man (liberated from patriarchal cowardice that is). This isn’t just about attracting the Feminist—it’s about doing a tremendous favour to the world, to women and to yourself.

Big Shots: Alexandra Kollontai, Ninotchka Rosca, Simone de Beauvoir.

The Organic Intellectual

Why we love them: Astute in the praxis towards a more conscious society, Organic Intellectuals can easily translate Marx’s Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of the Right, but they have enough humility—and humanity—to sleep on flattened cardboard boxes with striking workers and admit they don’t know everything or anything really.

Make them want you: Eschew elitist cliques, fraternities, sororities and refuse to be a YES person for the status quo. Seek knowledge outside the cushy ivory towers of academia and learn amongst the lower rank of the class divide. Organic Intellectuals know that lower organs (socially and physically) are more exciting than upper organs.

Big Shots: Antonio Gramsci, Carlos Bulosan, Frederick Engels.

The Liberation Theologian

Why we love them: They may not be able to split the Red Sea or raise the dead, but they will die for your sins and for the people.

Make them want you: Love thy neighbour. Ditch mass and Sunday school and actually be with the masses either in the cocoa fields of Brazil or at a battered women’s shelter. Stand up against the Man as David did against Goliath and say your prayers every night (you’re excused from attending church, but God can still see you).

Big Shots: Gustavo Gutierrez, Paulo Freire, Jesus.

The Anarchist

Why we love them: As the extreme sports-nuts of left movements, Anarchists are unpredictable, adrenalized empiricists always ready for a showdown either through direct action or civil disobedience.

Make them want you: Keep up, but keep away. Enjoy the perks that come with political flings (spontaneity and individualism) but lower your red love standards. Anarchists detest systems, government, states and ideologies of any kind and believe that no person truly belongs to anyone.

Big Shots: Pierre Joseph Proudhon, Mikhail Bakunin, Emma Goldman.

*I haven’t covered all progressive doctrines, just some of the biggies.