The coming new wave of revolutions won’t have room for America’s imperialism-compatible “left”

There’s an incurable detachment between the reality of the global class struggle, and the illusory view of the world that America’s “left” is always going to cling to. Therefore for revolution to come to the imperial center, the class struggle here will need to be guided by something other than its current default representatives. There will need to be a reconstruction of the communist movement, which is distinct from the left in that rather than merely being the more progressive wing of the liberal order, it’s an enemy of the liberal order. At least with sufficient ideological struggle and development, the communist movement will become unified in principled opposition towards imperialism. So is not the case for “the left,” which will always be a place for pro-imperialist opportunists to build their hollow brands. “The left” is a big tent for every servant of empire who claims to identify with it, whereas communism, when successful, is inherently anti-opportunist.

It’s anti-opportunist because it’s capable of building a working class movement within the USA that functions in unison with the global working class movement. Communism has no place for the pro-imperialist left’s endorsement of State Department narratives, such as the fictitious Chinese persecution of Uyghurs or the psyop about Russia’s Ukraine intervention being unprovoked. Being a communist necessitates that one decide to think critically about what the imperialist media says, because communism’s interests lie with the anti-imperialist movement. Not with the opportunistic projects which define the left in this country.

Vijay Prashad, who spoke at the Party for Socialism and Liberation’s recent conference on the need for peace negotiations with Russia, has identified a deeper issue that shows why communists have this innate advantage in their analysis. He notes that “The modes of thought that come from North American positivism – game theory, regression analysis, multi-level models, inferential statistics – are at a loss to offer a general theory of our condition.” Our left, mired in imperialist interests, can’t grow beyond understanding the world through these kinds of frameworks, which all look at the symptoms rather than the cause. It’s Marxism that seeks to investigate the material interests driving today’s crises. So is not the case for the ideas Prashad writes about, which he observes aren’t capable of finding answers to our most important questions:

Can they explain the relationship between the endemic crisis produced by globalisation, the failure of neoliberalism to manage this crisis and the emergence of neofascism as its current consensus? Do they have the concepts – such as imperialism – that are essential to an investigation of the real world that we live in and not the illusory world dreamt up by the first principles of bourgeois social science? Can we understand why the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) wants to bomb this country or why the International Monetary Fund (IMF) wants to extract its pound of flesh from that country? Do they have an explanation for why the countries of the world spend more money on the arsenal of repression than on the production of social goods, why there are more police on our streets than social workers and artists?

Once you understand that imperialism is the primary source of systematic inequality in the modern world, and that everything our ruling institutions do is therefore foremost prioritized around aiding imperialism, you can correctly identify how to conduct yourself as a revolutionary. You can see that there’s a reason why the media says the things it does about Ukraine, about north Korea, about China, about Iran, about Syria, and so on. Upon learning Marxism, you learn to reject the misleading ideas that are put forth about these places. You also learn to think of workers liberation in the core within a global context. Socialism can’t come to this continent until neo-colonial extraction is ended, therefore combating it is paramount for a socialist in the core.

The anti-Marxist facets of the left oppose neo-colonialism only in the abstract. When it comes to the countries that have broken free from neo-colonialism, they’re selective in which ones they support, and it’s not their impulse to defend them from imperialism’s propaganda. They may stand with Cuba, while repeating the narrative about the DPRK being undemocratic, even though these two countries share all their essential qualities. They may give credit to Vietnam while repeating the atrocity propaganda about China, even though these two countries have the same political-economic system and are increasingly unified. This is not a serious way to conduct oneself as a student of class struggle, which is why the left in the core doesn’t require one to be such a student. It only requires as much as signalling one’s identification with the social justice causes of the day, without consideration for how these causes are themselves tied to the success of the anti-imperialist cause. Without the defeat of imperialism, the state within the core that perpetuates racial, gender, sexual, and other types of oppression won’t as easily become weak enough to be defeated. Which is also a goal that the imperialism-compatible left isn’t unified behind, as the social democrats don’t seek to overthrow the bourgeois state.

On the opposite end of the spectrum from the rightist-oriented social democrats are the ultra-leftists, who grasp that class struggle needs to be taken seriously while rejecting serious anti-imperialism. They don’t see how it’s a progressive development for Russia to neutralize Washington’s proxy war state in Ukraine, or for the PRC to take away Washington’s economic hegemony. Since countries like these became strong enough to geopolitically challenge imperialism, the ultras have invented a new definition of imperialism that’s designed to encompass the semi-peripheral countries, a category that Russia and China fall into. This definition considers any kind of international trade or military operations to be imperialism, disregarding the essential quality of modern imperialism: export of capital in order to let the exploiter countries economically feed off of the exploited countries. They claim this criteria is fulfilled by Washington’s challengers, but this idea is based on the same analysis of the imperialist pundits who’ve spun a mythology about a Chinese “debt trap” in Africa. It’s not scientific, it’s dogmatic.

It’s unscientific because it’s detached from an analysis about the forces that are bringing the globe closer towards a new wave of revolutions. Because it discounts the steps needed for realizing global workers liberation. Multipolarity is not the end goal for communists. It’s only a way of getting to the end goal, which is a scenario where imperialism has been weakened enough for the imperialist governments to no longer delay revolutions in the core nor the periphery. In that scenario, the United States and its imperial partners will no longer exercise the control which lets them continue to exploit the formerly colonized world. The currently exploited countries will have ended their servitude by carrying out one of the prerequisites for ending neo-colonialism, which is the rise of the peripheral countries out of their economically dependent status. This requires these countries get the opportunity to economically stand on their own feet, which places like Ethiopia are now doing with the BRI’s help.

The next step in the liberation of the global proletariat will be the new wave of revolutions, in which the workers under these capitalist states rise up to construct socialism. What China is doing is a key part of this process, as it erodes neo-colonial control and therefore lessens Washington’s means for carrying out global counterrevolutions. The Indian Marxist Saikat Bhattacharya wrote several years ago that: “The rise of China as an important trading partner of Latin American countries is of great help. It is only after China’s economic rise that Western monopsony (monopoly as a buyer) in the global oil market ended by early 2000s. It is then that anti-imperialist forces started coming to power in Venezuela, Bolivia, Uruguay and Brazil. But ignoring the USA is still largely difficult due to its proximity. This is proved by the fact that US sanctions can destroy the Venezuelan economy once global oil price started to fall in 2013. Therefore, the Latin Americans may face the Middle Income Trap for a few more years until US importance in the global economy is further eroded.” 

The longer the rise of multipolarity takes, the longer imperialism will be able to maintain its destructive influence, as decrepit as its hand is. This influence still extends far enough that Washington is capable of pressuring certain anti-imperialist countries into making concessions, setting back the struggle. Venezuela’s government, as part of its Trotskyism-influenced concept of “21st Century Socialism,” has been shifting towards compromise with imperialism in response to the two decades of warfare against the country. Which has provoked contention within the country’s anti-imperialist movement, where the communist party is seeking to create a coalition to build a more reliably anti-imperialist presence. This has provoked Maduro to reaffirm his pro-appeasement stance and decry the communists. 

This dynamic is perpetuating a series of contradictions that can’t be solved either until Venezuela becomes a workers’ state, or imperialism gets fully defeated. For us in the core, the most important things at the moment are to build solidarity with those fighting imperialism, and to fight against our own government’s global violence.

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Washington is running out of weapons to give Ukraine. Is this checkmate for U.S. imperialism?

The imperialist media’s big secret at the moment is that Washington is exhausting its arms supply for Ukraine. With a global series of occupations to maintain, and a military-industrial complex that prioritizes profits over outcome, the U.S. can no longer keep sending optimal or sufficiently numerous equipment. It’s having to tap into its lower-quality spare materials, send humvees in place of actual military trucks, and ship inadequate amounts of guns and rounds. The deindustrialization of Europe that the war has accelerated represents another obstacle in NATO’s project to keep Ukraine sufficiently armed. Operation Z isn’t just demilitarizing Ukraine, it’s demilitarizing NATO as a whole.

This is only the latest in the long list of reasons why Ukraine can’t win. Even before this decline in Washington’s capacity to send aid, the Ukrainians had lost the manpower to mathematically be able to beat Russia in the long term. Ukraine has had to expand its draft far beyond the optimal fighting demographics, mobilizing soldiers of ages up to sixty while recruiting torturers and child molesters. Russia had only used around a quarter of its population’s potential mobilization capacity prior to when it transitioned beyond the special operation phase. Now that Russia has intensified towards a real war, there’s no way Ukraine won’t be successfully demilitarized. The series of territorial gains Ukraine made during the fall were for the sake of optics, not for the sake of strategy. They actually created new liabilities for Kiev, forcing Ukraine and NATO to commit their dwindling resources in excess. Kiev’s illusion of advantage has consequently started to be broken, with Russia carrying out a series of new mobilizations that Kiev can’t adequately counter.

We know Kiev won’t be able to overcome this offensive because as the foreign policy commentator Paul Craig Roberts has observed: “It seems Russia won’t require a winter offensive to win the war.” Roberts says this not because Russia won’t continue its offensive throughout the winter, but because from an honest assessment, Ukraine has been so weakened that Russia could complete Operation Z’s demilitarization goal quite promptly. The only reason this hasn’t happened yet, says Roberts, is because Putin has been and will likely continue to hold back. Roberts sees this as a blunder on Putin’s part, one that serves to keep the conflict going longer than necessary. Nevertheless, he anticipates that Russia will win, because Kiev’s forces are so crippled that that’s the only logical outcome at this point:

The Western peoples have a totally false picture of the situation.  Russia could destroy Ukraine in a day without using nuclear weapons.  The Kremlin’s restraint–in my view a strategic blunder as it enabled the West to get involved and widen the war–in Ukraine has a number of legitimate reasons. Ukraine and the population there have been a part of Russia for centuries.  There is much intermarriage. Most Ukrainians are not favorable to the neo-Nazis who have dominated Ukraine since the US overthrew the government in 2014 and have suffered at their hands.  The Kremlin doesn’t want a poverty-stricken ruin of a country on its border, and the Kremlin doesn’t want the responsibility for rebuilding Ukraine’s infrastructure. It is inconceivable to me that “experts” and “reporters” in the West are so stupid and corrupt to have written the ridiculous accounts of the conflict that bear their names.  It is total nonsense and has encouraged the false belief that Russia can be defeated and that “Ukraine can be in Crimea by Christmas.” 

If NATO can’t win a proxy war against Russia even when Russia insists on showing mercy, U.S. imperialism has lost the geopolitical chess game in Eurasia. And by extension, it’s lost global primacy.

Washington’s destabilization attempt in Iran is a desperate ploy to fulfill the Ukraine proxy war’s goal of cutting off the Chinese trade network. The evidence that the U.S. ops in Iran have the intent of creating an equivalent of the Syrian war, with the CIA-backed actors carrying out spectacular acts of violence designed to provoke a civil conflict scenario, shows how frantic the imperialists are to sow more chaos. Their ongoing efforts to starve Syria and Afghanistan through sanctions are another facet of Washington’s operation to disrupt the reconstruction of the Silk Road. If they were to succeed at bringing civil war to Iran, as they have in Syria, they would better be able to sabotage Iran’s capacity for facilitating multipolarity’s rise. Yet even in Syria, there’s still an Assad government in place to work with China in the rebuilding effort. 

There’s no way the imperialists will succeed at bringing Iran’s government under control. And it’s not a serious possibility that Iran will be brought to Syria’s situation of being ravaged by a conflict which allows the U.S. to gain a military foothold within its borders. The U.S. propaganda outlets act like such a collapse of Iran’s social stability could come, but their analyses are warped by wishful thinking. Iran will prevail against the U.S.-backed terrorists, and the emergence of a Chinese-aided new global economic order will continue.

These facts are encouraging, but they’re not cause for anti-imperialists to rest. Because until the USSR is restored, imperialism will likely continue to find post-Soviet states that are willing to work in its favor. This year, the U.S. instigated and backed an Azerbaijani invasion of Armenia. Kazakhstan’s government is headed in a pro-imperialist direction, giving Washington new chances to expand its influence within the country. Ukraine, aside from its eastern former areas that Russia has annexed, will remain under fascism indefinitely. The other Eastern European countries have been taken over by fascists as well, their governments tearing down communist monuments and persecuting opposition to the Ukraine proxy war. 

The ongoing imperialist foothold within Kazakhstan and Ukraine is due to the problem which Roberts spoke to: that Russia’s government is not fully committed to carrying out interventions against imperialism, instead taking whatever actions it thinks will benefit its ruling class. Sometimes this self-interested mentality on Putin’s part works to imperialism’s detriment, sometimes it doesn’t. It’s an unreliable source of hope. 

This problem is a consequence of the deeper issue, which is that the Soviet Union isn’t around anymore and Russia’s government (despite what imperialism’s propagandists say) doesn’t view Soviet restoration as worth pursuing. Putin doesn’t care about bringing back the USSR, as a bourgeois politician he has no incentive to. If the USSR returns, this will prevent Washington from using countries like Azerbaijan and Ukraine as launching pads for its militarist adventures. It will allow for fascism to be suppressed across Eastern Europe. It will keep Russia and Kazakhstan unified in their objectives. And it likely won’t produce a repeat of the Sino-Soviet split, as today’s Communist Party of China doesn’t share the ultra-left adventurism of the CPC from the Mao era. Modern China is prioritized around fostering international cooperation, and will do so whenever possible. The only thing preventing it from becoming friends with every country is that there haven’t yet been enough new socialist revolutions. Not in Eurasia, Africa, Latin America, or the imperialist countries that seek to perpetuate division between China and the peripheral countries.

The coming of multipolarity is only one step towards our end goal, which is global workers revolution. Class struggle is the ultimate solution to all of humanity's crises, with multipolarity merely being capable of ending the threat of a third world war while making the global economy more equitable. With the next wave of revolutions, imperialism will lose the last of its global grip, and the transition into a new human developmental phase will be made possible.

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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.

The billionaire plot to impose full corporate dictatorship in the core of a declining empire

The arc of capitalism is one where the system contracts, losing the robustness that it had when it was in the process of replacing feudalism. Its demand for limitless growth inevitably runs into obstacles, and that forces it to eat itself. Because there’s no way for capital to reverse its decline, and the interests of our ruling class necessitate that the system continue, society’s trajectory becomes one where inequality and unfreedom get ever more severe. Capitalism’s self-cannibalization can’t be stopped, so the bourgeoisie increasingly resort to the only rational option for their class: engineer a restoration of feudalism, completing the cycle. The consequence is that bigger and bigger amounts of both humanity and nature get sacrificed to keep the dying machine of capital running.

A theory for counterrevolution

This is the historical development that’s made Peter Thiel possible. An individual with a profoundly cynical mindset about how power relations should work, and intentions for reshaping society to perfectly fit that mindset, would neither exist nor be able to gain influence if not for our present conditions. What makes Thiel so dangerous is not his personal potential for changing history—he’s only one person, and “great man theory” ignores the role of the surrounding circumstances—but rather the ideas that Thiel represents. His radical agenda for accelerating the process of neoliberal anti-egalitarianism, in which democracy must be wholly discarded even in its bourgeois sense, is consistent with where our socioeconomic model is headed. The unhinged far-right politicians who he’s trying and failing to get into office are still part of a trend that the ruling class as a whole seeks to foster.

If Thiel weren’t here, capitalism’s decline would still progressively incentivize the ruling class to do what he’s doing. He and the others who embrace anti-democratic capitalism see the logical conclusion of where our social order is going, and they’ve decided to view it as a good thing rather than fight against it. The capitalists and capitalism sympathizers who don’t want such a rejection of an open society aren’t relevant to this historical process, except for how they serve to slow the transition towards that scenario. Their moderate thinking only delays the trend towards complete corporate dictatorship. Under our current socioeconomic order, the trend is incurably one in which the elites fight off revolution by utilizing capital’s fighting wing, i.e. fascism. The only way to stop this is by creating a different system, which our cultural hegemony views as unthinkable. Therefore as long as one hasn’t broken from this hegemony, they’re knowingly or unknowingly acting as a historical agent in fascism’s favor.

What Thiel has done is adopt an unapologetic, uncompromising program for maximizing the advancement of his own class interests, and consequently come to act as a billionaire who’s trying to bring about fascism. He bases his ideas off of the dark enlightenment, a “neo-reactionary” strain of thought which views the democratic and egalitarian values of the Enlightenment as hindrances to liberty. 

The reasoning behind this, shared by the original architects of the neoliberal era, is that letting the people decide how the economy should run would amount to a tyranny of the majority. In his book about the theory behind the dark enlightenment, the strain’s guiding philosophical writer Nick Land states as such, referring to “the reactionary insight that democracy poses a lethal menace to liberty, all but ensuring its eventual eradication…democracy is fundamentally non-productive in relation to material progress, is typically under-emphasized. Democracy consumes progress. When perceived from the perspective of the dark enlightenment, the appropriate mode of analysis for studying the democratic phenomenon is general parasitology.”

Land argues that democracy creates parasitology because from the neo-reactionary perspective, and by extension from the perspective of modern bourgeois self-interest, economic and political democracy sabotage the individual’s potential for utilizing capital to advance “progress.” It does this by turning the population into “parasites,” who siphon the resources which the capitalist needs to help society. Such an idea presupposes that capitalists are the only ones with a social role that can enable somebody to advance society, which is self-evidently absurd. 

One doesn’t need to be a capitalist to create great art, or to be a great architect, or to be a great inventor. In many cases, somebody can contribute to societal progress simply by being a worker, as it’s the workers who create the basis for an economy. Under socialism, the workers are better able to use this power to advance progress, now unhindered by the extractive presence of a capitalist class. This presence is ironically a parasitic one. The dark enlightenment’s central myth is that a capitalist’s role is not as a parasite, but as an innate facilitator of progress, therefore needing to be given the authority of a dictator.

Thiel’s ilk don’t embrace this myth out of an honest analysis about how historical progress works, they embrace it out of material self-interest. The past and present socialist projects have carried out progress that capitalism hasn’t been capable of: bringing about economic development while avoiding capitalism’s recession cycle; reducing poverty while it’s gone up across the capitalist world; building prosperous economies that haven’t depended on imperialist extraction. This has made them able to reduce the phenomenon of people living off the government, not by punishing those in need but by giving them opportunities. Socialism has brought enough economic robustness to give everybody upward mobility, while capitalism proves itself increasingly unable to do so. By Land’s reasoning of wanting to minimize welfare dependency and maximize productivity, supporting socialism is the rational stance. 

Then there’s the fact that Land’s measuring societal progress solely according to how much work the population is doing assumes modern capitalism’s high proportion of “bullshit jobs” (jobs with no function other than to generate profits) are actually essential. By the reasoning of an ideology that solely prioritizes profits, any job is innately in service of “material progress,” regardless of whether it’s necessary outside the profit-obsessed framework. In the long term, a socialist society is capable of using technology to render essentially all of our current jobs bullshit jobs. Outsourcing virtually all labor to machines, while maintaining prosperity, is an achievable goal.

The only reason socialism’s achievements are dismissed by reactionaries is because reactionaries seek to defend the interests of a certain social class, and therefore define “progress” in terms of what benefits this class rather than what benefits society as a whole. In turn, they fetishize the concept of work, acting like the full outsourcing of labor under communism would merely turn everybody into parasites. Would we all truly be parasites, or would we simply be functioning without having to serve a parasitic minority class? To insist on keeping the paradigm of mass-scale labor when this has been technologically outmoded would be as illogical as wanting everyone to continuously dig and fill in a hole. Why do something objectively pointless? The increases in labor and growth that existing socialism has achieved aren’t the end goal in the development towards communism, they’re only steps in the transition towards a higher stage of civilization. Capitalism at this point does nothing besides keep us stuck in a lower stage.

I’m engaging with the dark enlightenment’s ideas not because they pose the biggest ideological threat to class struggle—the minority who share them are neither likely to change their minds nor winning over many others to their side—but because exposing their intellectually dishonest nature illustrates the viable alternative to capitalism. The success of China’s socialist project refutes the argument that capitalism is indispensable for material progress. The PRC’s workers' democracy is behind all of the communist achievements I’ve listed. And helping the American left recognize this fact, thereby rejecting the propaganda narratives our ruling class has created about China, advances the class struggle.

The goal of Thiel, and of the social force he represents, is to prevent this reality from being recognized so that their necro-political project can continue. Land describes the dark enlightenment’s goal as “a functional dis-solidarization of society that tightens feedback loops and exposes people with maximum intensity to the consequences of their own actions.” The fallacy in Land’s reasoning is again apparent, as on a mass scale, the only people who can apply these lessons about how to get by under capitalism are exceptions. Statistically, the vast majority will live their entire lives in poverty, whether or not they absorb these lessons. Only a small fraction can thrive under such a system, and in the long term few can even survive it.

Imposing dictatorship in the midst of societal collapse

To defend his taking this stance that virtually everyone should be condemned to feedback loops of misery that they can never escape from, Land ridicules “The Universalist creed, with its reflex identification of inequality with injustice.” He clarifies that: “This does not compel even the most hard-hearted neo-reactionary to suggest, in a caricature of the high Victorian cultural style, that social disadvantage, as manifested in political violence, criminality, homelessness, insolvency, and welfare dependency, is a simple index of moral culpability. In large part – perhaps overwhelmingly large part – it reflects sheer misfortune.” Yet his argument is nevertheless that trying to eliminate this misfortune is futile. He points out how the anti-poverty measures of social democracy aren’t compatible with the goal of keeping capitalism functional during its contracting stage. If capitalism isn’t compatible with egalitarianism, he concludes, egalitarianism should be rejected as an obstacle towards a working society.

This idea too depends on disregarding what the PRC has proven, which is that building a sustainable economic system can be compatible with eliminating poverty. The key variable is whether dictatorship of the proletariat gets implemented, which social democracy is opposed to doing.

The partisans of our social order have constructed a fictional reality in which we don’t have any successful examples of socialism to point to, and therefore the current socioeconomic system is the best possible one. Cuba’s superior Covid vaccine; China’s greening of its desert lands; the high-speed rails of the four Asian socialist republics; all of these examples are ignored, overridden by CIA fairy tales about Xinjiang concentration camps and north Korean abuses. The people under our capitalist dictatorship are deprived of an accurate standard of comparison for their conditions, versus the conditions of the socialist countries. Which blunts the development of their class consciousness. So capital’s consumption of everything is allowed to continue in increasingly unrestricted fashion as the decades go by, its destruction of the climate slowed only by the work the socialist republics are doing to bring down emissions.

Thiel and the other tech billionaires have convinced themselves they’re proving right the notion that capitalists are indispensable for advancing society. In practice, all they’re doing is providing better tools for the state to inflict cruelty upon those the system has made most vulnerable. Thiel’s data mining firm Palantir is among the companies that have been assisting ICE with catching immigrants. ICE has used its surveillance information to either put these people in inhumane detention facilities, or deport them back to the Latin American countries imperialism has made inhospitable. As the global working class suffers due to the Ukraine war that U.S. imperialism provoked and perpetuates, and as the Ukrainians themselves undergo a humanitarian disaster, figures like Thiel and Musk are profiting from it. Every other facet of our necro-capitalist order, from the prison-industrial complex, to big pharma, to big oil, to the private military contractors, to the utilities corporations, to the Wall Street stock trade betting on water, is in its own way exploiting today’s growing catastrophes.

Necro-politics is defined as when a particular group exercises its power to decide who lives or dies. The longer capitalism lasts, the bigger the feedback loop of crises, and subsequent projects to exploit those crises. The more the system becomes necro. Capitalism has never not been necro, like how the United States in essence has never not been fascist. What’s happening in the 21st century is that these most destructive components of our system are growing more and more pronounced, to the effect that the system’s existing destructive impacts get multiplied. 

It’s estimated that global warming, which has already exacerbated global inequality, will bring the largest upward wealth transfer in U.S. history. In terms of the costs of human lives that the climate crisis could have, the anticipated number is 83 million during the next few generations. It’s likely that the refugees will be in the hundreds of millions. And that’s not including internally displaced people in places like America, who will encounter inhospitable scenarios in the millions. All of these processes started decades ago, we’re experiencing the initial stages of the chaos right now. The proliferation of pandemics is another part of it; Covid-19 may not be the deadliest virus we see during our lifetimes, because global warming has greatly heightened the risk for outbreaks of all kinds. 

If the ruling class keeps succeeding in its campaign of de-solidarization, there’s nothing we’ll be able to do to fight against civilization’s unraveling. The people won’t have a means for banding together for support during these hellish times. The capitalist world’s transition into a series of failed states will accelerate to the point where places like the U.S. and Canada resemble devastated imperialist target countries like Ukraine and Libya.

Land, who wrote The Dark Enlightenment in 2013, has to at some level be feeling encouraged by the coming of the pandemic. So must Thiel, along with Musk (who’s a longtime partner of Thiel’s that’s likely absorbed Land’s theory, in his own intellectually shallow way). This is because after explaining the dark enlightenment’s program for reshaping society into total corporate dictatorship, Land concludes that a great shock to the system is what’s needed for carrying forth these changes:

(1) Replacement of representational democracy by constitutional republicanism (or still more extreme anti-political governmental mechanisms). (2) Massive downsizing of government and its rigorous confinement to core functions (at most). (3) Restoration of hard money (precious metal coins and bullion deposit notes) and abolition of central banking. (4) Dismantling of state monetary and fiscal discretion, thus abolishing practical macroeconomics and liberating the autonomous (or ‘catallactic’) economy. (This point is redundant, since it follows rigorously from 2 & 3 above, but it’s the real prize, so worth emphasizing.) There’s more – which is to say, less politics – but it’s already absolutely clear that none of this is going to happen short of an existential civilizational cataclysm.

The longer revolution is delayed, the more society will come to resemble this. The shrinking of government’s functions to law enforcement and the military, with even law enforcement being incrementally replaced by private police forces, is the logical conclusion of neoliberalism. Biden has overseen bipartisan coordination towards furthering austerity, waging war, growing the police budgets, and expanding the migrant camps. Within this corrupt and hollowed out state is a growing network of vulture capitalists. Mercenary contractors have appeared in the racial tensions epicenter Minneapolis to violently detain bystanders, and to surveil local civil rights activists. Prison profiteers are using forced labor contracts within the ICE facilities. Big tech has exploited the pandemic to expand its reach, working with the intelligence community to build an unprecedented mass surveillance apparatus. Palantir is part of this, operating closely with the CIA. And in our political system itself, the tendency is towards the full abandonment of democratic pretenses that Land describes.

The intensification of gerrymandering, bought elections, other types of rigging is in effect bringing an end to representative democracy, reverting our political order to its original state of settler authoritarianism. The final step will be a version of the January 6th coup attempt that’s successful, and that has the backing of the military/intelligence centers. The likely scenario is an extreme crackdown against dissent in reaction to the next big social unrest spike, resembling the martial law that the U.S. military imposed on Baghdad during the Iraq insurgency. In that environment, there’s no way even the illusion of democratic representation will be possible, as the population will be getting terrorized on a mass scale. Both by the government, and by the fascist paramilitaries, which are getting training via the Ukraine conflict.

All Thiel has to do to facilitate this anti-democratic shift is supply the instruments for repression which the state, along with the neo-feudal corporate states emerging from society’s breakdown, will use to wage counterrevolution. On the level of individual journalists or activists, big tech’s role is to carry out the monitoring of their output, the censorship of their revelations, and the coordination of black propaganda campaigns against them; Palantir once formulated a scheme for using strategic disinformation to target Wikileaks, an operation that’s since been applied throughout the persecution of Assange. On the level of mass terror, their role will be to supply the state with the data necessary for an expanded version of the ICE raids. Incarcerating, torturing, and executing large amounts of people for political reasons is how dictatorships always function. And when fascists say “constitutional republicanism,” dictatorship is what they mean.

To resist this, the people must be educated about the psychological operations that the ruling class is using to carry forward these reactionary processes. Thiel is an insidious presence, because he’s built a power structure pervasive enough to often make it so that people assist in his movement’s schemes without knowing it. The biggest example of this is the Ukraine psyop. 

Most Americans, including essentially all liberals and many leftists, have absorbed the idea that Russia’s action was unprovoked. By thinking in the way the military/intelligence complex wants them to, they’re unintentionally supporting the historical dynamics which are leading them to an extremely dark fate. War profiteers like Thiel depend on the Ukraine conflict, fascist militias are being strengthened by it, big tech censorship is being advanced by it, and war in itself is the health of the state. The best thing we can do at this juncture to stop Thiel’s movement is combat NATO’s propaganda on Ukraine. This both disrupts the war machine, and readies more workers for absorbing the revolutionary theory that they need to assert their class interests.

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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.

As the Ukraine proxy war fails, U.S. strategists prepare to fight off revolution in America’s borders

The U.S. empire took a gamble on the geopolitical chessboard by provoking Russia into intervening in Ukraine. Now that it’s losing this gamble, having the U.S. and its allies economically suffer worse than Russia is while Russia remains on track to achieve its goals in Ukraine, there are going to be fatal implications for the future of the imperialist superstructure. These implications go beyond a faster transition towards a multipolar world, or a hastened decline of neo-colonialism as the Global South rejects Washington’s Ukraine psyops, or an acceleration of the decay of the exploiter countries. These things mean that the imperial center now has greater potential of having its social stability shattered, of entering into a civil conflict that destroys its capitalist state.

It’s important for Marxists in the core to study the ways in which these global developments are impacting our own conditions, because recognizing this breakdown that our society is headed towards affirms the need to overthrow the bourgeois state. Multipolarity is not the end goal of the communist movement. Multipolarity is only a stepping stone towards a scenario where the United States has been not only weakened, but abolished in itself, made no longer able to wield any of the global power which it uses to exploit the peripheral countries. Operation Z is the catalyst for U.S. imperialism’s final stage of decline. The more this decline progresses, the more potential there is for the core’s proletarian movement to defeat the state.

Imperialism’s global vulnerabilities mirror its internal ones

Russia took action because it saw that even though Washington would retaliate by inflicting great economic harm upon it, and by rallying the imperialist countries to the effect that Sweden and Finland would join NATO, these costs would ultimately be outweighed by the strategic benefits. The U.S. bloc, not the Chinese-Russian bloc, is the side that’s going to lose in this conflict. NATO’s expansion, and the economic breakaway of Germany from Russia and China, have only sped up the decay of the U.S. bloc. Europe and the U.S. have condemned themselves to an incurable energy crisis and depression, exacerbated by their past sabotages of stability in oil supplier countries like Libya. 

The overall outcome is going to be that Russia and China come out of this stronger than Washington, because they’ll be able to rely upon partnership with the Global South. Washington’s grip over the formerly colonized world is going to continue to slip, leaving it and its partners too isolated to function. The Ukraine proxy war was intended to reverse the decline of neo-colonialism by weakening Russia so much that it can be Balkanized and taken over, leaving China vulnerable to Washington’s hybrid war campaign and in turn destroying the BRI. But Russia won’t be broken, so it’s guaranteed that the BRI will keep undoing the global inequities which neo-colonialism needs in order to survive.

Because Russia, with the guidance of its leading communist party, has identified the growing vulnerabilities of imperialism, Russia is now exploiting those openings for shifting the global power balance. Communists in the core must take example from our Russian counterparts. We must identify the weaknesses that are appearing in the empire’s internal workings due to this geopolitical defeat, and figure out how to exploit them. Like how Russia’s strategic competence has brought about the liberation of the Donbass from Ukrainian fascism, the strategic competence which we’ll hopefully show will liberate the American working class. A task that first will entail the freeing of the colonized nations which are currently confined within the prison house of nations that is the USA. This parallels how the Donbass has had to free itself from fascist rule as a most immediate necessity.

To get an idea of how to liberate the land currently occupied by the USA, we can look to how the occupier’s global interests have been undermined by its own imperial deficiencies. The Viet Minh were able to defeat the U.S. because the U.S. didn’t have goals that were in the interests of the Vietnamese people; it only sought to prevent the people from democratically deciding their own fate, and it did so by committing genocide against them. Naturally, the people backed up the anti-imperialist forces. The Taliban was able to defeat the U.S. for the equivalent reasons, with Washington’s counterinsurgency in Afghanistan including its own set of atrocities. The people responded by not acting loyal to Washington. The Russians are defeating Washington because the pro-U.S. regime exists due to a 2014 coup against Ukraine’s democratically elected government. This regime is committing war crimes, destroying its ability to win the people. So the people of the Donbass have provided the social base for a separatist insurgency, and have recently voted to let the separated area become part of Russia.

They’re all the same story: imperialism goes against the people’s interests, then the people make it possible to throw off imperial control. The conditions that can re-create this story in America are not yet present, as if we were to try to launch a revolution in the U.S. today, it would fail. What gives the U.S. government reason to be concerned is that our conditions are not static, and will continue to change in favor of revolution. Society under capitalism has never been stable, it’s always been in a state of disequilibrium due to the economic system’s naturally creating crises. When these crises reach a breaking point, and an adequate revolutionary organizational structure is in place, revolution happens. 

A number of our crises have already reached critical proportions. There’s the pandemic that’s wiped out over a million American lives and disabled millions more; the rise in police violence that’s provoked the largest protest movement in the country’s history; the economic inequality that’s made almost two-thirds of the population have to live paycheck to paycheck. The stagflation and financial crises are combining to produce an unprecedented economic unraveling, and the climate crisis is anticipated to produce history’s largest upward wealth transfer during our generation. The decline of the people’s conditions is reaching a stage that will make for the demise of the state, so long as the people have been sufficiently organized towards asserting their agency. The state aims to stop them from attaining this goal, using the same warfare methods it’s employing abroad.

U.S. strategists preparing for a civil conflict scenario 

We know the U.S. government is alarmed about the potential for those revolutionary conditions to be met, because military strategists are engaging with the idea that civil conflict is coming. This year, senior fellow for the Homeland Defense Institute Franky Matisek reacted to the Ukraine conflict by calling for a greater effort to ensure against instability within U.S. borders. Matisek concluded in an essay for the U.S. Army War College’s “war room” blog that “the average American must be a part of the solution and contribute to the resilience of civil society.” With the implied problem being that Washington’s geopolitical challengers allegedly seek to undermine support among U.S. citizens for warfare measures:

China, Russia, and other adversaries have figured out the lessons of what happens when the U.S. military is directly confronted, as seen in Iraq in 1991 – and again in 2003. America’s enemies understand that the nature of American political willpower is directly linked to the likelihood of the U.S. mobilizing and projecting great amounts of national power — diplomatic, informational, military, and economic. Hence, there is every incentive to cause damage against the U.S. on par with another Pearl Harbor or 9/11 but without provoking a major American response. This is why China and Russia increasingly pursue sociopolitical-information warfare strategies against the U.S. and other Western democratic nations. Inflicting damage against civil society “by amplifying racial, cultural, political and religious cleavages” weakens democratic institutions, norms, and values – not to mention preventing the creation of coherent policies to confront China and Russia. Adversaries exploit this new battlespace blind spot and prevent a robust Western response.

This perspective is influenced by the standard paranoia among new cold warriors. Yet that paranoia serves a purpose, which is to rationalize treating dissent like a military threat. These statements about antiwar sentiments being products of foreign interference all rely on the premise that such sentiments are necessarily based in incorrect ideas, and therefore can only exist due to deceptive foreign propaganda. This premise is of course silly. If foreign powers weren’t waging any kinds of information warfare, opposition to U.S. war would still exist based on its own merits. To stop the people from coming to anti-war ideas—and by extension from coming to revolutionary ideas—the state needs to convince them that truly organic opposition to war does not exist. That all ideas which dispute the need for aid to Ukraine, U.S. military presence in Taiwan, military buildup in Africa, sanctions on disobedient countries, etc. originate from lying foreign powers. And that any anti-war outlets or individuals which aren’t tied to these powers are only repeating the lies.

The idea that the state’s cognitive warfare must train citizens to preemptively reject information which goes against imperialism’s narratives has come to be consistently shared by national security thinkers. Matisek states that “Critical thinking skills and resisting foreign attempts to polarize and divide Americans along various societal cleavages, also means not sharing divisive memes created by an adversary.” This builds upon what a 2016 Army War College document on the future of urban warfare said about how the military will need to handle the propaganda battle should fighting break out in U.S. cities: “The user-friendliness of mass media and mobile technology allows adversaries to manipulate and garner favorable public opinion and recruit support. For these reasons and more, civilian and military leaders cannot afford to ignore the requirement for compelling narratives.” 

The solutions the document offers are surveillance, censorship, and carefully crafted media stories, with the goal of tracking down and countering individuals who seek to expose the war crimes the military will no doubt commit in that scenario. It will be a repeat of the Ukrainian regime’s campaign to brutally silence dissent, and to spin stories which portray the dissenting views as not factually grounded.

The idea that opposition to the U.S. government can invariably be traced to foreign interference is a useful lie for national security strategists. But a lie which doesn’t serve them, and which gets promoted in Matisek’s analysis, is that action on Washington’s part necessarily brings strategic defeats for those challenging American hegemony. This idea has and continues to be orthodoxy within the foreign policy sphere, as evidenced by how Washington is still sending aid to Ukraine despite it being unrealistic for Kiev to reach its objectives. And it’s an idea that leads Washington to undermine its own interests out of hubris. 

Within the definition of victory that Matisek uses, where defeating the intended target in symmetrical warfare is counted as a win, Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom were “victorious.” But in the macro context, Washington undermined itself with these actions. Because of the genocidal violence the U.S. has perpetrated against Iraqis during recent memory, the Iraqi people have refused to consent to Washington’s wishes, and have joined up with Iran. They’ve also waged a revolt against occupation, one too strong for Washington to be able to make its operations in Iraq clean. Consequently, Washington’s global credibility has diminished, exacerbating the imperial death spiral that Afghanistan started. When the military starts domestically applying the insurgency methods it’s used in these places, it will be met with an equivalent popular reaction. The American people will become alienated from their government, because it will have inflicted the same kinds of violence upon its own people.

We know that our government is at some point going to impose an internal version of the Baghdad military crackdown not just because the War College has named U.S. cities as potential future intervention locations, but because the conditions are headed for a scenario where the ruling class will be incentivized to make these plans a reality. The only reason why they didn’t go this far in 2020 is because the Democratic Party was sufficiently able to co-opt the black liberation struggle. Trump wanted to take the repression to that level, but the national security state decided there wasn’t yet a need for it. The crackdown won’t come until we’ve built our revolutionary institutions into serious threats to the state. The ruling class knows what kinds of costs would come from showing the people just how little human lives mean to our government, and wants to hold off on it for as long as possible. But eventually, that escalation will happen.

Ukraine’s slow defeat foreshadows the USA’s fate

Another flaw in Matisek’s point about the impacts of U.S. actions is that Ukraine has shown Washington doesn’t even need to directly wage wars to bring unintended consequences upon itself. The Ukraine proxy war was supposed to incrementally render Russia too unstable to function, but the blowback is bringing the U.S. bloc closer to itself suffering such destabilization. I’m not just talking about the catastrophic impacts the sanctions are having on America and Europe, I’m talking about how Russia is effectively demilitarizing both Ukraine and NATO. 

The spare weapons of the U.S. and its allies are running out. Now that Ukraine’s military has been essentially exhausted, Russia is able to also start exhausting the supplies that NATO is sending. NATO is at this point having to give Ukraine sub-bar equipment, such as hummers in place of tanks or military vehicles and outdated technology in place of the current models. 

Russia still has arms factories, which are keeping its weapons production robust. The U.S. is increasingly needing to sacrifice the amount and quality of its aid to Ukraine, making Kiev have to stretch out its resources. This deficiency is both because Washington has a global series of occupations to maintain, and because the U.S. military-industrial complex is not prioritized around ensuring victory but around making profits. The USA’s nature as an empire has handicapped its combat ability, rendering the American war machine crippled by its own corruption and bloat. Russia, being a semi-peripheral country that only intervenes in response to imperialism’s provocations, can focus on one military effort at a time.

Russia is using on the USA the classic combat technique of conserving one’s own fighting capacity, while letting the other fighter tire themselves out. Ukraine has only been gaining control over increasing numbers of localities because Russia has decided to trade land for time. It’s having Ukraine exhaust itself by fighting for strategically unimportant soil, while only a comparative fraction of Russia’s forces get used up. At some point Russia’s territorial “losses” will be reversed, and Ukraine will be reduced to nothing more than a devastated shell which Washington uses to carry out ineffectual terrorist attacks. Should the fears of the War College come true, and the U.S. government find itself fighting against domestic insurgents, the equivalent will happen. At least so long as the U.S. repeats its current pattern of reactively massive military efforts, and so long as the government’s opponents act according to Russia’s model of letting your enemy defeat themselves. 

The crucial factor is restraint on the part of the rebels. Whether the revolutionary crisis in the United States will produce a confrontation parallel to Cuba’s guerrilla war, or something different in which the revolutionary side needs not so much military capacity, the state’s demise is ensured if the revolutionary side avoids recklessness. The most important goal for our revolutionary cadres at this moment is to win the support and participation of the people, with militancy being something that must not be excessively focused on. However much or little need for combat may be brought about by our conditions, the state will be subdued only if we have the people on our side. Whether the state undoes itself by going too far in its repression and provoking an uprising, or by expending too many arms in a military confrontation, the variable which brings revolution will be a social base for that revolution. We can only cultivate that social base by acting in a pragmatic fashion, by not rushing to action with haste.

Just as applicable is the advice that we shouldn’t underestimate the importance of militancy. History not only shows that militancy training without mass support brings defeat; it also shows that mass support without militancy training can bring even worse defeat. In Indonesia, the communist party had the support of the people, holding hundreds of thousands of members and exercising great sway over the country’s government. The party’s leaders, who were influenced by the Khrushchevite idea of seeking peace between the classes, ignored advice to arm their members. When the CIA installed a military dictatorship, and coordinated a mass murder campaign against communists and leftists, the party’s members were wholly unprepared to defend themselves. They were prey.

The idea which Russia’s slowly unfolding victory in Ukraine conveys about military theory, and about power struggles more broadly, is that it’s possible for those who would otherwise be vulnerable to become the predators. For the less powerful players to turn those with the supposed advantage into the prey. 

Under fascist Ukraine, the Ukrainian speakers enforce an order in which they’re placed above the Russian speakers, so much that the marginalized people are viewed as pests who don’t deserve to exist. “Ukrainian nationalists openly declare they view Russians as sub-human,” the journalist Eva Bartlett has written. “School books teach this warped ideology. Videos show the extent of this mentality: Teaching children not only to also hate Russians and see them as not humans, but also brainwashing them to believe killing Donbas residents is acceptable. The Ukrainian government itself funds neo-Nazi-run indoctrination camps for youths.” The equivalent dynamic of abuse is perpetuated by Americans against the rest of the globe, with American children taught that their country is exceptional while their government routinely commits genocides. Yet even with all this power, both the fascist Kiev regime and the American empire are being drained of their strength. As assessed by a Donbass commander who Bartlett has interviewed:

America is running the show here. It builds foreign policy on the basis of how its domestic policy is built, which is through conflicts with external countries. They are accustomed to proving their power to their people through terrorism around the world, inciting fires in Syria, in the east. They played the card of radical Islam there. And now they are playing the card of fascism. They do not see themselves on the other side of good. They need wars, blood, cruelty, and they signed Europe up for this. However, they’ve missed one point: Russia, since the days of the Soviet Union, has never retreated in large scale wars. They took Europe and pushed it to slaughter Russia, and they put Russia in such a position that it must secure its national interests. Europe needs to understand this, to pay attention to history, to stop being led by the United States.

NATO is unraveling. Washington is waging war against at least one NATO member, that being Turkey in retaliation for Erdogan’s war against Washington’s Rojavan terror forces. The U.S. empire is meddling in Germany’s politics to ensure the country goes against its own economic interests by turning away from Russia and China. America and Europe are responding to their crises by retreating into a fascist cocoon, in which reactionary terror is intensified but the system’s global extractive base can’t be restored. Operation Z has accelerated the decline of imperialism, and this has made the core of imperialism better able to be defeated from within.

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