A Guide To Revolutionary Agitation In The Present Era

The 1978 article On the Role of Agitation and Propaganda says that “Agitation, whether spoken or written, generally focuses on one event, and one contradiction, and seeks to make a single idea powerfully clear to broad numbers of people. It is like a sharp knife seeking to expose and make raw a glaring contradiction and draw blood around it.” Therefore, this task is the most urgent one for communists in the United States to take on at the present time.

It’s our most urgent task because material conditions at the moment make it the most useful thing for us to do. Not enough people, at least in the United States, would support the communist movement if it were to try to overthrow the capitalist state. And until we sufficiently build up an armed Marxist-Leninist organization, we won’t have the means to attempt this anyway. Until these material realities change, our focus will need to be on bringing people to the side of proletarian, anti-imperialist, and anti-colonial revolution.

How can a member of the movement participate in this agitation effort, even when they lack a social media presence or any other type of platform? I personally recommend you try to gain access to such a platform to help you with spreading your messages. But whether you can do this or not, following the instructions I’m going to lay out here will make you well equipped for the goal of revolutionary agitation in this time and place.

1: gather the proper sources of knowledge

To gain a basic understanding of the tasks we’re trying to accomplish and the problems we’re trying to address, it’s crucial to read these works:

Das Kapital by Karl Marx

The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels

The State and Revolution by Vladimir Lenin

The Foundations of Leninism by Joseph Stalin

Settlers by J. Sakai

The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon

For a far more thorough education on class struggle, one can also commit to reading through all the works listed by the Marxist study guide that I’ve linked to here. And to be able to adequately teach others the nature of communist and anti-imperialist revolution, you’ll need to defend the past and existing socialist experiments from bourgeois propaganda. This will require reading and promoting these sources on the common lies and misconceptions about Marxist-Leninist, anti-imperialist, and anti-colonial leaders:

Lies Concerning the History of the Soviet Union by Mario Sousa

The Essential Stalin by Bruce Franklin

Another view of Stalin by Ludo Martens

Did Mao Really Kill Millions in the Great Leap Forward? by Joseph Ball

Socialism and Democracy in the DPRK from Write to Rebel

Tales of North Korean Abuses: No Facts, All Fiction by Tony Cartalucci

Defending Socialism: Deconstructing the “Communism Killed 100 Million” Lie by Revolutionary Left Radio

Bipartisan hardliners use coronavirus to escalate Cold War with China by the Global Times

Time for Global Communists to Unite under Xi and the Communist Party of China by Saikat Bhattacharya

There’s also the task of countering all the regime change propaganda that the imperialists constantly use to demonize anti-imperialist countries. This is harder, because the line of rhetorical attack from our opponents is always shifting in ways that best manipulate people into believing lies about the target nations. The best way to fight this perpetual onslaught of lies is to follow anti-imperialist outlets like AntiWar.com and MintPressNews, and use their repudiations of imperialist narratives to turn others against these narratives.

2: introduce these sources and knowledge to others when certain contradictions become pertinent

For our actions to be agitation and not merely a general propaganda effort, each attempt to bring our knowledge to the people will preferably be focused on one given issue that exposes a certain contradiction. When a protester wrote a Marx quote on a Target store during the recent anti-police brutality uprising in Minneapolis, they were engaging in such an act; they drew attention to the murder of George Floyd, which represents the contradiction of racialized state violence under capitalism, and used it as an implied argument for why the capitalist class should be overthrown.

We can do the same by taking whatever equivalent opportunities appear for exposing contradictions, and using those opportunities to spread awareness of the need for dismantling capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism. Spray painting a building is maybe the most drastic (but still very much doable) way that one could try to go about with this task. If you want to take a less risky approach, you can spread flyers in your community, promote messages on social media, or use the spoken word, as On the Role of Agitation and Propaganda says can be done.

The advice I’m giving you will only be useful if I specify which messages I’m asking you to promote. So here’s a guide to the ideas that are best to spread around as they correspond to the most discussed political issues of the present time:

-When addressing/discussing climate change, use at least one of the messaging routes I listed above to promote the idea that socialist revolution can save humanity from an apocalyptic warming scenario. The same solution should be promoted when addressing or discussing economic inequality, poverty, corporate power, or racism.

-When addressing/discussing issues that relate to white supremacy in particular, the idea of decolonization should be promoted as the solution. Returning indigenous land to the First Nations, reparations for colonized peoples, and abolition of colonial police and prisons should be mentioned.

-The subject of China should be addressed with clarifications about the lies that Westerners are told about the country. The “Uyghur concentration camp” and “Chinese imperialism” narratives should especially be pushed back against. The same task of debunking imperialist propaganda should also be undertaken in regards to Syria, Venezuela, Russia, Cuba, Iran, Nicaragua, and the DPRK. In the hyperlinks from the previous sentence, I’ve provided resources about each of these countries to study and to use in arguments.

3: when you’ve won someone over, get them into an organizing space

Once you’ve familiarized someone with the material I’ve provided throughout this essay to the point where they’re willing to help with our cause, you should judge their merit and trustworthiness before deciding to bring them into a party. In the mission to build a vanguard-which is an organization that can effectively lead the proletariat to overthrowing and replacing the capitalist state-new members should be carefully vetted. We’re going to need people in charge who can be trusted, and who know the revolutionary theory that’s required to make the right decisions.

To recognize the ideas that make someone less qualified to participate in the vanguard, you can read these sources:

Combat Liberalism by Mao Zedong

“Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder by Vladimir Lenin

Decolonization is not a metaphor by Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang

The Miseducation of the US Left: Bernie Sanders, Social Democracy, and Left Chauvinism by Joshua Briond

Movement Disagreements on Social Media Openly Serve the Police by Ahjamu Umi

These articles respectively teach against the pitfalls of liberalism, idealism, incorrect characterizations of anti-colonialism, social chauvinism, and (for our modern context) counterproductive social media behavior.

Study all of the materials I’ve compiled in this essay, and you’ll be in a better position to lead and participate in the communist movement. This knowledge will make you better able to engage in agitation, which is right now the essential step towards a direct attempt at overthrowing the capitalist state.

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The Wrong And Harmful Claim That China Has “Betrayed” Socialism

Last week, the Trump White House formally announced the onset of a cold war with China. In a document titled “United States Strategic Approach to the People’s Republic of China,” it promised that China’s “transactional approach” would be met with “credible threats” from Washington, and that China will be countered in order to “protect the American people, the homeland, and the American way of life.” This means increased economic warfare against China, along with an escalation of the nuclear arms race with China and further U.S. war provocations around Chinese territory. It also means increased censorship against anti-imperialists, Sinophobic propaganda campaigns, and McCarthyist targeting of communists.

The geopolitical tensions between the U.S. and China are rapidly escalating, and this means a continued rise of militarism and fascism within the imperial core. Yet the left is responding to this with an unwillingness to challenge anti-Chinese propaganda, and therefore an unwillingness to challenge the narratives which are sending us in these dystopian directions.

This complicity is particularly present in social democratic, anarchist, Trotskyist, and Maoist circles, because these are the groups that have tended to reject China’s claim of being a socialist state. The reasons behind their position go deeper than the CIA propaganda against China, though this is a factor that often influences their perceptions. Fundamentally, they dislike the Communist Party of China because it’s supposedly incorporated too much private business into China’s economy.

The premise behind their claim that China is fraudulently socialist (or “revisionist,” as Marxists call the distortion of communism) is that Deng Xiaoping turned China into a capitalist oligarchy with his market reforms. Whenever someone in the communist community expresses this view about China, I wonder if they hold the same hardline stance when it comes to Cuba, the DPRK, Vietnam, or Laos. The communist governing parties of these four countries have also worked private business into their economies; Cuba allows strictly regulated businesses, Vietnam has utilized private enterprise to grow its economy, Laos is open for business on its own terms, and the DPRK has enacted China-style reforms to expand working opportunities for its people.

Pure socialism has never existed in these socialist countries, nor in the past ones; they’ve always had to advance towards communism while surviving within a capitalist-dominated world. In 1949, Mao himself said that “To counter imperialist oppression and to raise her backward economy to a higher level, China must utilize all the factors of urban and rural capitalism that are beneficial and not harmful to the national economy and the people’s livelihood.” Communists continue to have to make the same kinds of compromises, which is what motivates China to structure its economy in the way that it does.

The CPC’s critics might argue that China’s incorporation of business goes too far compared to those of the other socialist states. But under this reasoning, at exactly what point can a communist compromise with material conditions be called “revisionist?” Journalist Travis Jeppesen said in 2018 about what the DPRK has become like after its market reforms: “one of the fascinating things about visiting North Korea many times over the last five years is to see the extent to which you know there are more and more obvious displays of wealth on the streets of Pyongyang. You know, Hermes handbags, Gucci sunglasses.” What separates this from the “revisionist” market reforms of the PRC, where capitalist products and a business class have also been normalized?

The fact that China has billionaires, China’s relationship to the company Foxconn (which is infamous for putting up suicide prevention nets), and China’s stock market have often been named as justifications for viewing the CPC as anti-socialist. But this is only because the anti-Chinese left chooses to view these kinds of things as damning sins, rather than aspects of a complex and nuanced reality. China’s billionaires can’t control their country’s political process like American billionaires can, and this has resulted in numerous Chinese billionaires being imprisoned or executed. China’s critics don’t mention that Foxconn is a Taiwanese manufacturer, not a Chinese one-nor that the sucide rate among Foxconn workers in China is below the national average. And China may have a stock market, but it exists within a country where public ownership still dominates, and where the state is in charge of the economy.

All of these details are a result of the essence of why China is socialist: it retains a workers’ state. China’s working class people, who have been lifted out of poverty by the hundreds of millions since the Deng reforms, hold far more leverage over politics than the bosses and billionaires do. Despite efforts to portray China as a dictatorship, all Chinese citizens over 18 citizens have suffrage, and they can routinely vote in elections-ones where the candidates aren’t predetermined by wealthy oligarchs like is the case in the U.S. political system.

This reality about China’s political system proves that China fulfills the criteria for a dictatorship of the proletariat-a crucial element of a socialist state. The presence of a partially capitalistic economy doesn’t make a dictatorship of the proletariat any less real, and no Marxist-Leninists who understood material conditions have ever argued as such. The only self-described socialists who claim that a country can’t be socialist if it doesn’t have a purely socialist economy are the social democrats, the anarchists, and the left-communists, whose goals don’t even align with the agenda of proletarian revolution.

Given these facts, the Maoists who oppose the modern CPC have one argument to stand on: that Deng’s reforms undid China’s dictatorship of the proletariat. But what Deng did after Mao’s death was not an equivalent to what Khrushchev did after Stalin’s death. In addition to opening the USSR up to capitalist interests when the material conditions arguably didn’t call for this, Khrushchev carried out a change of Russia’s political system that he explicitly referred to as an end to the dictatorship of the proletariat. But Deng said that “We will not do to Chairman Mao what Khrushchev did to Stalin,” a promise he fulfilled by not doing away with the proletariat dictatorship or otherwise carrying out a de-Maoification campaign.

Don’t fall for the attempts from ultra-leftist factions to turn the world’s communist movement against China. The arguments from this faction discourage a materialist analysis in favor of an idealist one, and this only helps the forces of imperialism and capitalist reaction. It’s no wonder why the imperialist media has tried to pit Maoists against the PRC, or to claim that Mao would have supported the fascist and colonial chauvinist protests in Hong Kong; they want to keep us divided, and without a full picture of what it means to build socialism.

The nature of this anti-materialist view of China is apparent from Lenin’s assessment of how Marxist-Leninists should view idealism:

Philosophical idealism is only nonsense from the standpoint of crude, simple, metaphysical materialism. From the standpoint of dialectical materialism, on the other hand, philosophical idealism is a one-sided, exaggerated, development (inflation, distension) of one of the features, aspects, facets of knowledge, into an absolute, divorced from matter, from nature, apotheosised.

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If you appreciate my work, I hope you become a one-time or regular donor to my Patreon account. Like most of us, I’m feeling the economic pinch during late-stage capitalism, and I need money to keep fighting for a new system that works for all of us. Go to my Patreon here:

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What The Implosion Of Imperialism Means For The Future Of The American Capitalist Class

In 2014, the CIA-tied media outlet the Washington Post published an article titled “In the long run, wars make us safer and richer.” Its author Ian Morris reasoned that wars have been necessary to carry out what it called the “civilizing process,” wherein the European empires have grown through conquest and the United States has been created through the seizing of indigenous lands. Its argument was racist and biased in favor of Western capitalist interests, and this was the point. It acknowledged that the wars which brought the U.S. empire to power, and which the U.S. empire continues to wage, are good for “us”-the people in the imperial core who benefit from imperialist wars.

When it’s apparent that this is the “us” which Morris referred to, it at least makes sense why he made this statement. For Western capitalists and the intelligentsia class that shares their interests, imperialist wars historically haven’t negatively impacted the standard of living. As Fareed Zakaria, another member of the bourgeois punditocracy, wrote in his 2008 book The Post-American World: “In the two decades since the end of the Cold War, we have lived through a paradox, one we experience every morning when reading the newspapers. The world’s politics seems deeply troubled, with daily reportings of bombings, terror plots, rogue states, and civil strife. And yet the global economy forges ahead, not without significant interruptions and crises, but still vigorously upward on the whole. The front page of the newspaper seems unconnected to the business section.”

He was describing the normal state of globalized capitalism throughout the last century. Markets have routine ups and downs, wars and coups are carried out when the corporatocracy decides they’re necessary, and those in the benefitting class grow richer. Crises are the norm under this model due to the inherent contradictions of capitalism, but the crises don’t threaten the stability of the social order. Wars, both in terms of military conflicts and in terms of the class war, make the aristocracy richer and safer.

That is until the U.S. empire collapses, and capitalism is subsequently forced to eat itself. This is what’s happening now with the various global crises created by Covid-19. And it’s what the neoliberal war economy that figures like Morris and Zakaria defend has long been leading up towards.

The events that today define the front page of the newspaper-the U.S. geopolitical conflict with China, the global environmental crisis, the dysfunctionality and negligence of the Trump government in the face of the pandemic-are very much connected to the events that define the business section. Trump’s escalating economic war with China is resulting in a trend towards isolation from China by the U.S. business community, and it’s threatening to drive up price inflation for American goods while weakeningthe position of the dollar. The warming of the climate and the destruction of the biosphere have madeoutbreaks like this one possible. The capitalist state’s unwillingness to impose long-term movement restrictions like China has, along with neoliberalism’s destruction of the healthcare system, have made the U.S. and other neoliberal countries especially vulnerable to Covid-19.

This crisis isn’t like the more manageable past crises that the system has produced. It’s triggered an economic crash greater than the Great Depression, leading to intensified class struggles around the world; from the food worker strikes in Brazil to the rent strike in the U.S., the working class is pushing back. The crisis has also shrunk American power while giving China an opening to expand its global influence, with NATO and the EU growing increasingly ineffectual while China’s global medical aid projects improve its relationship with countries like Serbia. These things were not part of the plan when Washington and its allies chose to procrastinate on responding to the virus earlier this year. Their continued prioritization of business interests over public health is backfiring.

The system has been doing its best to take advantage of the crisis; the Trump White House has been exploiting the pandemic to carry out more economic, military, and information warfare, and the world’s 25 richest billionaires have gained $255 billion in the last two months while big tech companies have worked to consolidate the job market in their favor. But these kinds of developments ultimately serve to destabilize the system by taking away the balancing factors which have kept it from imploding.

While unemployment has always been necessary in order for the capitalist class to have an excess labor pool at their disposal, the recent loss of tens of millions of jobs has thrown the flow of capital into disarray. 500,000 members of the U.S. capitalist class lost their millionaire status during the first month or so of the pandemic, meaning that wealth is now particularly being consolidated into the top 0.01%. This miniscule circle of wealthy elites is leaving behind all the workers and small business owners who’ve lost their livelihoods, with the poor getting $1200 stimulus checks while the rich have been enabled to save millions on tax loopholes. Combined with the austerity, household debt explosions, and banking system meltdowns that we’re sure to see in the coming years, this inequity will have the consequence of creating a depression that lasts for at least a decade.

The potential for civil unrest that this situation has created will be furthered by the collapse of U.S. imperialism. The problems for the American economy that will appear if Chinese exports to the U.S. are cut off, combined with the worldwide abandonment of the dollar in international trade, will create a vast American economic contraction. This contraction could force a global withdrawal of U.S. troops and lose the U.S. the economic allyship of numerous additional countries.

It’s no wonder why just in this last month, Washington’s biggest neo-colony Brazil came to accept the Chinese Yuan for iron ore while making this transaction occur over China’s blockchain technology; countries like Brazil know the dedollarization of the globe is well on its way. China, which Washington considers to be its #1 adversary, is the benefactor.

The imperialist order has propped itself up by letting the proletariat within the core imperialist countries share in the benefits of imperialism, preventing revolutions in the First World. Now the contradictions of imperialism are adding up, and the reactions to this from the capitalist class are accelerating the loss of stability. Leaders like Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, and Jair Bolsonaro have been described as “accelerationist” for a reason.

What can the system do in response to these developments? Build up its surveillance, policing, and warfare tools by turning to AI technologies and remote controlled weapons. The national security state and its partnered tech companies are advancing plans to create an AI-driven mass surveillance system. The military has been replacing its troop mobilizations with drone strikes in the last decade or so, a trend that will continue as U.S. troops are forced to retreat. U.S. leaders have been pursuing advancements in American artificial intelligence technology for the purpose of helping Washington in its nuclear arms race with Beijing.

The new cold war between the great powers, which was triggered by Washington’s reactions to imperial decline throughout the last decade, is the main narrative tool used to justify these measures. Washington’s network of think tanks are saying the U.S. needs to step up its AI technology to compete with China, and the political and media establishment is using demagoguery against Russia and China to justify arms buildup. Last year, Fareed Zakaria called for Trump to escalate tensions with Russia over its efforts to protect Venezuela from U.S. invasion, showing just how desperate Zakaria has become for the world to return to its comfortable state of American hegemony.

Despite all these efforts to return things to the way it was, the world will continue to change. The front page section and the business section will keep being unavoidably interconnected, and the wars the imperialists have waged will keep coming back to haunt them.

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If you appreciate my work, I hope you become a one-time or regular donor to my Patreon account. Like most of us, I’m feeling the economic pinch during late-stage capitalism, and I need money to keep fighting for a new system that works for all of us. Go to my Patreon here:

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The Profoundly Ominous Nature Of America’s Anti-China Hysteria

There’s something foreboding and eerie about this anti-Chinese frenzy that’s broken out within the U.S. and its vassal countries. It’s like when Germany reacted to its loss of World War I and the Great Depression by blaming Jews and ramping up militarism; an imperialist country, faced with its decline on the world stage and the collapse of its economy, is shifting its reactionary fury onto a manufactured threat.

It’s unsurprising that the government and the media are carrying out this campaign. The imperialists have always justified their war efforts by inventing external threats. What strikes me the most is the eagerness with which Americans, Brits, Australians, and the people within the other core imperialist countries have embraced the atmosphere of fear and hatred. This impulse to believe the lies about China, and in many cases to directly target Asians, comes from a deep-seated paranoia. This is the paranoia of the colonizer, of the settler, of the benefactor of the global imperialist order. The fear which is coming out among these types right now, and which has long pervaded their subconscious, is that the people they’ve stood above will take away their place in the hierarchy.

This is apparent in the central claim of the anti-China propaganda campaign, which is that China will take America’s position as the global hegemon and rise to oppress the world. Even though Chinese officials have stated that their goal is not to dominate the world, and China’s unaggressive and non-exploitative foreign policy has demonstratedthis, visions of a “China threat” and a coming global Chinese tyranny are widespread in American discourse.

Aside from the surface-level propaganda that paints China as an oppressive force (such as the claims that it’s interning “millions” of Uyghurs or that it has an “Orwellian” social credit system), the perception that China represents a threat to freedom is ingrained through the innate American fears of communist “tyranny.” As Michael Parenti wrote in his 1970 book The Anti-Communist Impulse, “Our fear that Communism might someday take over most of the world blinds us to the fact that anti-communism already has.” And now that China is moving to overtake the U.S. while Marxist ideas spread throughout the capitalist world, the fear has escalated again. “Great power competition,” as the U.S. military describes America’s current conflict with China and its allies, is the primary focus of Washington’s propaganda machine, and a resurgent attempt to demonize communism has come along with it.

This campaign is being led by a network of far-right propagandists, imperialist pundits, and White House messaging coordinators. The most prominent purveyors of the “China virus” narrative, aside from Fox News and the president himself, have been the creators of the newspaper the Epoch Times. Their headlines and YouTube ads about Chinese bioweapons, communist Covid-19 coverrup plots, and Chinese organ harvesting have been facilitated by the Epoch Times’ partnered religious group Falun Gong. Since Falun Gong’s members believe that God sent Donald Trump to destroy the Communist Party of China, and that all communists will soon go to Hell when the end times come, whatever version of the truth they put out will conform to the framework they’ve constructed.

The masses of Americans participating in the hysteria around China may not exactly share Falun Gong’s beliefs, but their fear-both of China and of communism-comes from the belief that God is on their side. The Bible itself strongly encourages them to share Falun Gong’s punitive attitude towards perceived enemies and sinners. “Disobedience to God’s commands carries unforgiving consequences,” Parenti writes in his book God and His Demons. “God delivers plague and death upon the Israelites themselves when they stray. The ‘wicked’-a term used tirelessly in the Bible-are those who violate the Judaic law by engaging in activities on the Sabbath, by eating pork or shellfish, by wearing garments of mixed weave (linen and wool together), or by not lighting the right candles at the right time. But when people heed God’s commandments and observe his ritual laws, he assures them: ‘I will put none of these diseases upon yee, which I have brought among the Egyptians.’”

The power of this rhetoric about plague and disease being punishments for the “wicked” is especially apparent now. Trump’s efforts to stir up a Covid-19 culture war have the goal of convincing his evangelical base-the “righteous”-that they’ll be saved from the pandemic, as opposed to the “sinners.” Trump tells his supporters that they’re right to protest for the lifting of Covid-19 movement restrictions, because those who support these measures are all liberals and communists who want to take away the freedoms of patriots like them. The implicit message is that they’ll be safe from the virus due to their faith in Trump, Christianity, and America.

The “wicked” individuals who won’t be saved are thus implied to be the poor people and racial minorities who’ve been disproportionately dying from the pandemic, the Palestiniams and Yemenis who’ve been made vulnerable to the pandemic due to U.S. policy, the Iranians and Venezuelans who’ve been suffering under tightened U.S. sanctions during the pandemic, the refugees who’ve been infected while in detention centers, and the Chinese people and communists who supposedly created the pandemic. They’re the enemies of the righteous, so the world must be cleansed of them.

At least this is what the most hardline ideologues in Falun Gong believe. The genocidal message of the Biblical end times prophecy, wherein only the righteous ascend to Heaven during the apocalypse, is becoming more present in the American consciousness as America declines. Since the United States has always been a force for good that’s supported by God, the current failures in the American experiment-the collapse of U.S. global hegemony, the sharp drop in U.S. living standards amid this year’s economic crash, the unsurpassed explosion of U.S. Coronavirus cases-must be the fault of demonic forces. All who stand against the United States, or who stand against the societal hierarchy that capitalism and colonialism created, are implicated in a plot to destroy the good in the world.

“America represents more than just an economic system,” Parenti writes in his book Dirty Truths. “It is an entire cultural and social order, a plutocracy, a system of rule that is mostly by and for the rich. Most universities and colleges, publishing houses, mass circulation magazines, newspapers, television and radio stations, professional sports teams, foundations, churches, private museums, charity organizations, and hospitals are organized as corporations, ruled by boards of trustees (or directors or regents) composed overwhelmingly of affluent business people. These boards exercise final judgement over all institutional matters.” It’s no coincidence that the divine order which the believers in Americanism task themselves with defending is the order that enforces this aristocracy.

Communists aim to end the imperial core’s internal plutocracy, and China aims to unseat U.S. imperial dominance while reversing the process of global colonialism. So these forces must be countered with a fanatical dedication.

The United States and its loyalists will continue with their holy crusade, but reality will continue to encroach upon the constructed narrative. However much the neoconservative intelligentsia predicts that China will fall, China will keep gaining allies while improving militarily, economically, and technologically. However much the Washington imperialists declare that Venezuela’s Chavista government will soon be ousted, the Venezuela regime change plots will in all likelihood keep failing. However much the White House claims the economy will soon improve, the slow-motion collapse of neoliberalism will keep making the economy scream.

“Sometimes the orthodox view becomes so entrenched that evidence becomes irrelevant,” Parenti writes in his book The Culture Struggle, “but there are also times when the officialdom and the corporate media have difficulty finessing reality. In 2003 official propaganda promised us a quick and easy ‘liberation’ of Iraq, but reality brought undeniably different results that challenged the official line. White House propaganda told us that U.S. troops were ‘gratefully received by the Iraqi people,’ but the course of events produced a costly and protracted war of resistance. Propaganda told us a ‘fanatical handful of terrorists and Baathist holdouts’ were causing most of the trouble, but how could a handful pin down two Marine divisions and the 82nd Airborne, and inflict thousands of casualties?”

The “China created Covid-19” narrative is the 2020 version of the “Iraq has WMDs” narrative, and it’s come with parallel claims about U.S. victory being assured; Trump wants us to believe that America will win his escalating economic war with China, and we’re meant to think that the U.S. military operations in the Southeast will prevail over China. Yet Trump’s plans to default on U.S. debt to China, and to cut off Chinese exports to the U.S., will inevitably hit American consumers, drive up inflation, and further weaken the global position of the dollar. And China, which has already arguably edged out U.S. military power in the Indo-Pacific, would undoubtedly win against the U.S. if it were to partner with Russia in a world war. The miscalculations of the imperial strategy during the Iraq invasion are now happening on a scale of global economics and great power competition.

This means that the more the sphere of U.S. control shrinks, the more the empire’s loyalists will struggle against the encroaching reality. The ideologues will keep claiming to win victories against Washington’s adversaries, however much the conflicts are pushed into the American hemisphere and towards the borders of the U.S. itself. Finally, the war will become concentrated within the core of the fallen empire, with the nationalists trying to fight off an uprising from the underclass.

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If you appreciate my work, I hope you become a one-time or regular donor to my Patreon account. Like most of us, I’m feeling the economic pinch during late-stage capitalism, and I need money to keep fighting for a new system that works for all of us. Go to my Patreon here:

https://www.patreon.com/user?u=11988744