Anti-NATO movement is key to stopping Democrat attempts at co-opting the anti-police struggle

The murder of Tyre Nichols, combined with the development of the vast law enforcement training program “Cop City,” has catalyzed a new wave of American mass unrest. The people see the evidence that their government is inhumane, and that it’s giving itself the tools to inflict even more violence. They’re mobilizing to revolt, in a repeat of the George Floyd uprising that has the potential to do something unprecedented: actually start off the sequence of events which end with the defeat of our militarized police state, and with the other components of the U.S. empire’s rule. 

The present moment’s unprecedented revolutionary potential 

The reason for this hope is not that the coming weeks and months of rebellion will successfully pressure the Democratic Party into abolishing the police. The Democrats have shown they’ll never abolish the police, but rather continue to equip them with weapons leftover from our bipartisan forever wars. Yet this obstinate refusal by the state to meet the people’s needs, whether it comes to ending state violence, undoing the neoliberal austerity policies, addressing the climate crisis, or stopping the wars, is itself what will give this latest revolt the potential to change our circumstances. 

Because neither party will ever do the right thing, it’s becoming apparent to more and more that overthrowing the state is the only way to get justice. And because of this consciousness shift towards revolutionary politics, made more profound by how the Democrats have been in the White House for two years and won last year’s midterms, the anti-police movement could enter a new stage. A stage where it becomes capable of not being co-opted by the Democrats with their false promises, and going forward as an independent campaign against state violence.

Nichols was able to be murdered, and Cop City was able to be built, because three years ago the Democrats managed to sufficiently absorb the anti-police struggle. This was the end goal in a counterinsurgency strategy against the Floyd uprising that had many tactics, both hard and soft. As the police shot out people’s eyes and imposed weaponized curfews, the Democrats and their associated NGOs worked to demobilize the people through soft power. 

They diverted the people’s passions towards futile reformist projects, telling them the murders would stop if they voted blue. They deradicalized the movement, substituting “abolish the police” with the functionally meaningless “defund the police.” The state sent in agent provocateurs to manufacture violent incidents within the demonstrations, then the media portrayed these incidents as representative of the movement while emphasizing the “solidarity” statements from the police. All the while, COINTELPRO stopped the revolutionary organizers from gaining influence within the movement through surveillance, infiltration, harassment of activists, and targeted rumors designed to divide the struggle. 

With the revolutionaries unable to establish a substantial presence, the Democrats could carry out the procedures described by Martin Schoots-McAlpine in Anatomy of a counter-insurgency:

At the beginning of the uprising, the Democratic Party machine jumped into motion but was unsure how to act. While top Democrat strategists spoke to media about how the uprising could affect the election (indicating that they were in fact working on a response), there was little in the way of official high-level statement or actions for almost a week. Then on June 2 two fairly major events occurred. First, Biden publicly brought Julian Castro into his campaign; Castro had been a vocal proponent of liberal police reforms during his bid to become the Democratic nominee for president. Second, Pelosi, the multi-millionaire Speaker of the House, asked the Congressional Black Caucus to draft a series of police reforms. On June 8, following a ridiculous display in which Pelosi and other top Democrats took a knee wearing Ghanaian kente cloths, the Justice in Policing Act was revealed. The act is fairly milquetoast—far behind the nebulous demands of the uprising—and includes provisions for more easily prosecuting police in cases of brutality, mandatory body cameras, as well as a ban on chokeholds. The Act does absolutely nothing to abolish or even defund police departments. Nor is the act likely to become law.

To prevent the state from neutralizing this new revolt, we must properly navigate our conditions. This means anticipating that the Democrats will again try those tricks from several years ago, so that we can better discredit them as frauds. This means employing a combination of security within organizing spaces—where we train ourselves to cut ties with those who show the signs of being infiltrators—and ideological struggle against the Democratic Party’s ideas. Because if we both make the jobs of movement wreckers too difficult, and make the Democrats unable to influence the ideas which inform our practice, we’ll be impervious to the soft facet of the counterinsurgency. From there, our main obstacle will be the counterinsurgency’s hard side of state and paramilitary violence, which we can overcome through tactical training.

Those steps of security and militancy training are obviously crucial to engage in and easy enough to understand, but when it comes to that task of rejecting the ideas of Democratic Party infiltrators, more complex educational work is needed. We need to know how to spot the lies that the Democrats use to gain influence over radical spaces. In the age of the Ukraine proxy war, those lies all trace back to the pro-NATO propaganda campaign.

The left-wing allegiance to imperialism that must be fought against

The older propaganda campaign that the state of our present foreign policy discourse can be traced back to, the one which provided the ideological foundations for the Ukraine psyop, is Russiagate. Through several years of conspiratorial rhetoric, founded upon the idea that Trump had colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election, the Democrats fully brought the American left into neoconservative ideology. If this sounds like an overgeneralization, think of what kinds of ideas a leftist from the present day needs to overcome in order to develop into a serious Marxist. 

After all of the geopolitical propaganda narratives that U.S. imperialism’s psyops used Russiagate to insert into left-leaning politics, American leftists no longer simply have to unlearn the anti-Sovietism which Parenti talked about. Nor America’s longstanding prejudices against the DPRK that communists have long noticed are shared by U.S. leftists. They also have to unlearn the “gas attack” propaganda against Assad; the perception about Putin being the equivalent of a modern czar; the myths about Chinese “imperialism” and “concentration camps.” 

So long as leftists hold these beliefs, they can’t be revolutionary actors, but agents for the state’s additional counterinsurgency against the anti-imperialist movement. And so long as the communist movement’s practice is influenced by the idea that liberals are the only ones worth trying to bring into communism, it will be influenced by these Democratic Party agents. Because this kind of thinking inevitably leads to the softening of one’s anti-imperialist stances, in the hope that this will alienate less liberals.

To see why this calculus of “it’s okay to compromise on imperialism if this wins over more liberals” is self-defeating for Marxists, I had to learn just how fundamentally pro-imperialist this country’s modern left has become. Which required me to learn just how extensive imperialism’s lies are. It’s far too easy for even somebody who identifies as a Marxist to absorb the empire’s deceptions, and to repeat pro-imperialist falsehoods which harm their own cause.

The narratives that vilify China, Russia, and smaller geopolitical leverage points like Assad’s Syria have become the default within not just traditionally liberal thought, but broader leftist thought. This is because Russiagate established the myth that the Republican Party has “sold out to Putin,” associating support for Russia’s anti-fascist military action with right-wing politics in the minds of American leftists. 

Within this analytical framework, Russia’s war against Ukrainian fascism can’t even be recognized as anti-fascist in character. The profit-based interests of Russia’s ruling class are seen as the primary factor behind why Russia intervened, ignoring the context that Putin had delayed taking action for eight years until Russia’s communists helped pressure him into rescuing the Donbass people. It’s a mentality of paranoia towards Russia. One which elevates Putin and his personal beliefs to the only possible factors driving Russian foreign policy, and which projects Putin as a wannabe imperial conqueror. From this can come the kinds of left pro-imperialist statements that have been made by Slavoj Zizek, as described by Jonathan Cook:

Zizek is horrified by Putin’s conceptual division of the world into those states that are sovereign and those that are colonized. Or as he quotes Putin observing: “Any country, any people, any ethnic group should ensure their sovereignty. Because there is no in-between, no intermediate state: either a country is sovereign, or it is a colony, no matter what the colonies are called.” The famed philosopher reads this as proof that Russia wants as its colonies: “Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Finland, the Baltic states … and ultimately Europe itself”. But if he weren’t so blinded by NATO ideology, he might read Putin’s words in a quite different way. Isn’t Putin simply restating Washington realpolitik? The U.S., through NATO, is the real sovereign in Europe and is pushing its sovereignty ever closer to Russia’s borders.

When U.S. hegemony isn’t treated as the primary contradiction, when it’s seen as acceptable to neglect geopolitics in one’s practice despite living in the center of imperialism, it’s inevitable that one falters in their task of resisting the empire’s psyops. Due to the partisan nature of today’s left-wing neocon ideas, where the Democrats have become the primary drivers of anti-Russian cold war maneuvers while pro-Russian sentiments are seen as necessarily reactionary, it’s possible even for leftists who’ve rejected the anti-China and anti-DPRK narratives to embrace the anti-Russian narratives. This can happen with the Syria psyops as well, but since Syria stopped being the biggest dividing line on imperialism when the Ukraine war started, neocon leftism now mainly focuses on discrediting anti-imperialists when it comes to Ukraine. 

For example, the fanbase of the left pro-imperialist streamer Vaush enjoys ridiculing those who challenge the notion that Wagner is fascist. What they ignore is that “Wagner,” in addition to not even being a cohesive organization but rather a disparate collection of mercenaries, is associated with a different Dmitry Utkin than the neo-Nazi of the same name. That Nazi with the name of Utkin was falsely claimed to be associated with Russian mercenary activities, in a psyop that involved spreading a photograph of his hate symbol-tattooed upper body next to assertions that he’s a member of “Wagner.” Such context is deliberately ignored by the leftists in Vaush’s camp. 

These types of leftists are more consistent in their pro-imperialism, also promoting the propaganda myths about existing socialist states. But even Marxists who support existing socialism can come to believe these same psyops which portray Russia as a “fascist state.” Because they can’t distinguish between primary and secondary contradictions, and therefore see Russia as “fascist” simply because it’s a bourgeois government. The Marxist definition of fascism, which recognizes that something is fascist not because it has negative attributes but specifically because it’s the fighting wing of finance capital, shows it to be undialectical to call Russia fascist. By a standard as inclusive as “if a state is at odds with the workers then it’s fascist,” or “if a state has socially retrograde policies then it’s fascist,” every bourgeois state is fascist, including the ones Marxists defend like Iran.

This misinterpretation of modern Russia’s conditions, along with the perception that Operation Z has strengthened imperialism despite its accelerating the transition to multipolarity, are excuses for tailing the Democrats. For taking the “both sides are bad” stance in an anti-fascist conflict, because this stance will placate the types of committed liberals who have no hope for becoming Marxists anyway. It’s a practice that’s dependent on accepting the anti-Marxist analyses and disinformation that imperialism’s propagandists put forth.

Forcing a boundary of demarcation to be drawn between radicals & the Democrats

It feels ridiculous to be referencing a streamer’s fanbase in this analysis of how the anti-police movement can become effective, but the absurd reality of today’s conditions is that the state is capable of frustrating revolutionary organizing by flooding online leftist spaces with geopolitical psyops. These psyops, if embraced by those who consider themselves Marxists, neutralize the people’s outrage by maintaining the Democratic Party’s influence over our movement. Because liberation struggles can therefore continue to be influenced by liberals, they can be demobilized and turned into tools for reformist opportunism. 

The way to break this cycle of liberal co-optation is by fighting against NATO in a serious fashion. An effort that’s now being primarily led by Rage Against the War Machine, which we know is worth supporting because it’s getting attacked by radical liberals over its refusal to condemn Russia’s anti-fascist war. During this stage in the failure of Washington’s Ukraine proxy war, these radlibs are the state’s best weapon against the anti-imperialist movement. That the counterinsurgency must now rely on these scandal-mongers and grifters shows how weak the U.S. empire’s narrative defenses have become.

Because Washington is losing the proxy war both militarily, and in terms of its failure to destabilize Russia through sanctions, the Democrats have had to cease their aggressive promotions of the Ukraine psyop. The psyop is losing its power. Events aren’t matching with what the propagandists said would happen, and the reality of Washington’s Ukrainian Nazi ties keeps getting exposed. 

The Democrats now have to pivot towards a narrative about their fighting against state violence. Except events will also show this narrative to be based in lies, forcing a rupture between the bourgeois black politics that’s loyal towards the Democratic Party, and the working class black politics that’s always been fated to become the Democratic Party’s enemy. Ajamu Baraka recently articulated the apathy which black workers have come to feel towards the Democrats: 

Democrats who historically had been associated with labor and the common man even during the period when it was the party of racist segregation under the apartheid system in the South, is today the party controlled by U.S. based monopoly capital. For workers, this form of bourgeois democracy has no space or structure representing the interests of workers, the poor and structurally oppressed. The working class and poor are slowly beginning to understand that.  That is why early evidence suggests that African/Black workers did not participate in numbers that were necessary for the Democrats to have prevailed in some of those key races. The Democrats have nothing to offer, no policies, no hope, and no vision…We cannot allow ourselves to fall prey to the slick propaganda that diverts attention away from the failures of the capitalist system. January 6th and Trump, evil Putin, the calculating Chinese, the exaggerated crime issue, and immigration issue, are all meant to divert us away from the fact that our lives are empty, that we have no time for friends and family, mindless soul crushing work characterizes our existence, if we have it, and the fear and anxiety that comes from a precarious existence saps our spirits and turns our confusion and anger inward.

With the building of a principled anti-imperialist coalition, Leninist ideas can come to fill this political vacuum that the Democrats have created within black politics, and within the broader sphere where class struggle is relevant. The work that Rage Against the War Machine is doing can make communism a mainstream phenomenon again, and end the ability of bad actors to so easily frustrate revolutionary politics.

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Profit-motivated violence is inseparable from liberalism. Its “human rights” rhetoric is about hiding this.

The essence of liberalism—and that’s “liberalism” as defined in its broad sense of the stage where bourgeois “freedoms” became paramount—is violence. Structural violence that can’t be ended unless liberalism itself gets defeated. It was innate to the system from its beginning, because the function of liberalism was to preserve capitalism and its extractive mechanisms following the defeat of feudalism and monarchism. Capitalism requires an impoverished class in order to survive, along with tools for preventing that disenfranchised element from resisting this system that exploits, displaces, and destroys them. So subjugation and brutality are always present under liberalism, because the socioeconomic order that liberalism was designed to reinforce is a parasitic one which entails an imbalance of power.

To portray itself as the optimal societal model, as worth defending from the “autocrats” and “authoritarians” who the anti-imperialists get labeled as, liberalism conceals or minimizes this power disparity. Its partisans in the media and in electoral politics hide the reality that under liberalism, the vast majority of the globe is exploited by a corporatized modern version of colonial extraction, and that this inequality can’t be rectified so long as liberalism remains. They act like minor public service measures can solve the poverty that’s come to impact most of the population, keeping in place the austerity policies that liberalism has come to be defined by in its “neo” form. What they do is shrink politics, creating a myopia where our discourse only focuses on the things that don’t bring to attention the cruelties of our social order.

When Ukraine’s President Zelensky calls for military aid by saying “freedom must be armed no worse than tyranny,” he’s putting on a performance, the performance that liberals require in order to have their hypocritical sensibilities pleased. He and the U.S. empire that puppets him couldn’t care less about “freedom.” By the same definition of the liberals who call anti-imperialist leaders like Maduro “dictators,” Zelensky at this point more than meets the criteria for a dictator. He’s banned every single opposition party; consolidated the media into a state-run project; and continued the original Euromaidan coup regime’s practice of using fascist paramilitaries and the National Guard to inflict terror. Taking direct example from Israel’s occupation of Palestine, he’s now building a police state where the National Guard gets incorporated into daily life. 

Those who will suffer the most are the country’s Russian speakers, Jews, Romas, African diaspora, and LGBT community, who are all targeted by the fascists which hold foremost ideological influence over government. As well as the broader working class of Ukraine, who’ve been subjected to unprecedented neoliberal austerity measures as the imperialists exploit the conflict to intensify the country’s exploitation. In accordance with U.S. imperialism’s inward turn amid the broader defeat for American hegemony, our own ruling class continues to accelerate its war against the U.S. working class. Both through further austerity, and through police state expansions. Which especially escalates state violence against the descendants of the African slaves.

Ukraine has more in common with Nazi Germany than with the open capitalist societies which liberals praise, such as the Scandinavian countries. And those countries, despite how often they’re pointed to by the social democratic types of liberals as ideals in governance, economically depend on imperial extraction as much as the more nakedly imperialist United States. All of these contradictions originate from the same dynamic inherent to liberalism: the fostering of a domestic and global order where the interests of the bourgeoisie get prioritized above all else. As a consequence of this rule by the capitalist class, our “democratic” institutions—such as NATO and the U.S. Congress—decide to do things like back Ukrainian Banderite Nazis when this advances Washington’s strategic goals. These goals lead to fascism, and to all the other types of violence which liberalism produces, because they aren’t about “human rights” or “liberty.” They’re fundamentally about ensuring profits.

This is what makes liberalism innately lacking in integrity: that whatever altruistic intentions its upholders claim to have, it’s a system for protecting the material interests of a bourgeois class whose role became obsolete two centuries ago. Liberalism is inherently counterrevolutionary. Moreso even than capitalism, because capitalism’s emergence was at least necessary for advancing society’s development according to Marx and Engels. Liberalism did not inevitably come out of capitalism, but rather came to dominance because it actively fought to gain this control as the old feudal order experienced disruption. 

The more progressive types of bourgeois revolutionaries, like the abolitionist framer Benjamin Franklin, anticipated that this new model of capitalist electoralism would be in immediate danger of coming to act as a counterrevolutionary force. That’s why Franklin concluded that ideally, a new revolution would follow 1776 every twenty years. If Franklin’s wish had come true, by the time capitalism had ceased to be a revolutionary force in the mid-to-late 19th century, the USA would have been replaced by a post-colonial socialist confederation, and would never have become a global empire that ravaged the globe.

Such additional advancements in historical progress haven't yet sufficiently materialized, because the liberals have used evolving mechanisms of violence to preserve capital. Beyond police repression, which the liberals made ubiquitous by the early 19th century in accordance with the growing need for keeping down the workers, the foremost tool the liberals have used to delay workers revolution is the expansion of imperial extraction. They converted the old form of imperialism, where the core capitalist countries exported goods to the peripheries, into an arrangement where these countries exported capital itself. 

This was what let capitalism continue beyond the point when it peaked in its robustness. The bourgeoisie created a bribed element of the workers within the core countries, turning them into a labor aristocracy. They made up a sizable enough minority among the workers that the ruling class could afford a “democratic” system, one designed to guarantee that the proletariat was never represented.

So it’s remained for well over a century. The ruling elites have prevented the global proletariat’s liberation by waging imperial wars that have collectively murdered tens of millions, as well as by installing fascist dictatorships that have taken millions more lives. They’ve kept capitalism alive beyond the 70s economic crisis by imposing cruel neoliberal policies onto the globe, greatly lowering the living standards of proletarians and progressively taking away their rights. Liberalism has been the narrative and cultural tool they’ve used to make this vile reactionary project, its detrimental effects on humanity so readily apparent, appear worthy of respect. Because the bourgeoisie have been able to use imperialism to maintain a pampered minority of workers, naturally leading these labor aristocrats to share bourgeois ideology, they’ve managed to cultivate the illusion that liberalism represents a “democratic” order. 

If the labor aristocrats continue to vote in favor of the bourgeois, imperial system, then the liberals can point to this as proof that this system is what “the people” want. Even though these materially comfortable voters make up an increasingly small portion of society within the imperialist countries, whose workers see their livelihoods decline more with each decade. And even though these countries make up a small minority of the global population, which remains under the despotic rule of a U.S. hegemon that enforces its control through coups, sanctions, dirty wars, and military occupations.

Such a “democracy” is not sustainable. The illusion of freedom that liberalism cultivates is nothing more than a way to try to keep class conflict from escalating for as long as possible. The more U.S. imperialism declines, the more the rate of profit falls, the more capitalist crises like Covid and climate disruption intensify, the more that liberalism abandons its “democratic” pretenses. Where the class war is most in motion, the bourgeoisie can’t indulge the people under its jurisdiction in the luxury of civil liberties. That’s why the War on Terror has seen the destruction of so many of our freedoms, to the extent that they existed in the first place under the dictatorship of capital. 

The era following the start of the Ukraine conflict, in which American power’s decline has further sped up, is to see this process advance even more. As the murder of Tyre Nichols and the alarming “Cop City” police training program provoke popular outrage, the country comes close to another wave of revolt. Pay attention to how our government responds to this. Because now that the Democratic Party has been in the White House for two years following their vows to end police brutality, liberalism has been fully exposed as a fraudulent protector of “human rights.” Which means liberalism is desperate, and more prone to wage open war upon the people. 

The incremental failure of the Ukraine psyop, in which Washington’s backing of Nazis increasingly becomes common knowledge, is combining with these developments to end the illusions of a friendly liberalism. The system has shown its violent essence, now it must try to fight off the people’s resistance through increasingly violent means.

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What makes NATO so evil: it exploits the same crises it creates

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization represents the stage of capitalism where the imperialists, after making nuclear annihilation a possibility, have taken advantage of this horrific reality that they themselves engineered. The equivalent has happened with Covid-19, in which the IMF has used the pandemic as a pretext for imposing further austerity measures onto 81 countries. As the climate crisis intensifies, the same pattern is appearing, with the U.S. empire making plans for future wars predicated on responding to climatic disasters. It’s already invaded Haiti using climate-related emergencies as an excuse. This is what capitalism as a whole does as its unsustainable social model leads to ever more catastrophes: portray these catastrophes as only solvable through the same system that produced them, and seize power so that it can inflict even more profit-motivated violence.

NATO’s role in this vicious cycle was to be the “solution” to how capitalism, as shown by the first and second world wars, necessarily leads to conflicts. So long as world workers revolution is delayed, there’s no way to avoid war, because states as they exist under bourgeois rule depend on war’s perpetuation. Even when there’s “peace” under capitalism, that peace only represents a period where the imperial powers are preparing for new wars. 

This situation is the inevitable conclusion of the colonial project. After the imperialists finished their theft of territories, and their division of the world’s new borders, the only thing they could do next was go to war with each other. Capital needs perpetual expansion in order to survive. It must keep growing into new markets, or it won’t be able to displace its inevitable crises and the bourgeois system will collapse. So the imperial powers, the “core” countries which developed according to this principle of requiring always-growing extraction from the “peripheries,” could only respond to the reaching of colonialism’s territorial limits by competing with one another.

This was the real reason for World War I, not an assassination of one European leader like bourgeois education teaches. When the imperial powers were finished with their initial great clash, Germany happened to be the one that mainly lost its imperial holdings. The fascists were then able to exploit the capitalist crisis which consequently ravaged the country, blaming the people’s suffering not on the bourgeois system but on the Jews, the Russians, the Romanis, the Freemasons, the communists, and other substitutes for the true culprits. The Nazis, along with the fascists of the other imperialist countries who had won by exploiting imperialism’s crisis, then reproduced the first world war. Except in a form even more destructive, and infused with a program for exterminating capitalism’s scapegoats. As the Nazis murdered 11 million in the Holocaust, murdered 27 million Russians in its eastern land grab attempt, and turned most of Europe into a de facto colony, fascist Italy invaded Abyssinia—the only African country that hadn’t been colonized—using mustard gas. Spain, after undergoing its own imperial collapse and fascist takeover, carried out the equivalent by intensifying exploitation of Spain’s rural areas, amounting to an internal colonialism facilitated by brutal dictatorship.

When this latest horror was finished, the imperialists who took over for the early 20th century’s fascists as the chief arbiters of violence devised yet another way to exploit this destructive pattern. Taking advantage of the fears about European countries again going to war with one another, they formed NATO, an arrangement for unifying the imperialists in their efforts to expand exploitation of the peripheries. They employed former Nazi officials to run the organization, and let Germany become one of the world’s richest countries by giving it a great share of the neo-colonial profits. They got all of the imperialist countries, including Japan, to support the U.S. as it assumed the role of the foremost purveyor of bloodshed for capital. Washington murdered tens of millions over the next several generations, invading dozens of countries and installing genocidal dictatorships in dozens more. NATO acted as a tool for preventing the inter-imperialist conflicts that had in the past hindered the imperialists in fighting revolutionary movements.

When the Cold War ended, NATO couldn’t be disbanded, because it still had to be there to uphold American hegemony. As soon as one of the organization’s major justifications for existing vanished, it began to manufacture a fresh crisis that could ensure its political survival. After British intelligence predicted in 1992 that Ukraine and Russia were likely to eventually go to war now that they weren’t unified, NATO did everything it could to bring about such a scenario. It broke its vow to Russia not to expand, it refused Putin’s offers for cooperation, then in 2014 its principal power the USA perpetrated the act of political meddling that ensured this war would come. The State Department instigated reactionary riots that brought down the democratically elected government, then in defiance of even the EU, Obama’s team maneuvered to ensure that an anti-Russian regime came to power. Even if this regime was a fascist one that sought to ethnically cleanse the Russian speakers in Ukraine’s east.

When Russia inevitably intervened to demilitarize this regime, and ensure its own security while rescuing the eastern separatist republics from invasion by fascist Kiev, NATO used this to unite its members and fully expand into the Nordic states. NATO used the same tactic that worked in Yugoslavia: perpetrate atrocities, then blame a designated target for the violence, then intervene. Once Operation Z started and war became no longer theoretical, the empire’s foremost goal was to exhaust Russia with a war of attrition. This is indicated by how from the way imperialist leaders have talked about their decisions prior to the conflict, it’s clear that they at the least knew war could easily come about from the ways they were provoking Russia. They engaged in a gamble by making all of these decisions that increased the likelihood of Russian action. Their hope was that imperialism would be strengthened.

In macro terms, this wish has not come true, and imperialism has instead been weakened. NATO has become stronger only as an institutional presence within the imperial sphere, not as a driver of geopolitics. Most of the globe beyond the imperial countries has not participated in the sanctions, forcing Washington to coerce Europe into taking on most of the costs from this economic war. Consequently, the process of imperial decay has accelerated. The capitalist contradictions in these countries have intensified, the livelihoods of their working classes being sacrificed for the sake of a geopolitical maneuver that hasn’t even succeeded. The sanctions weren’t enough to destabilize Russia and broader Eurasia, as the imperialists hoped. 

Because of this strategic failure by NATO, and because of the war crimes by Kiev so obvious that even Amnesty has reported on them, the Ukraine psyop isn’t effective enough to prevent the people from rising up. Unrest has again erupted in France, and the U.S. population only needs another major provocation to revolt like it did in 2020. This is in part because of NATO’s own past crimes. Because of the 2011 bombing of Libya, the country’s oil supplies are now cut off from Europe due to being controlled by an anti-imperialist faction in the civil war. So Europeans are now left with a historic energy crisis as neoliberal austerity intensifies. The imperialists continue to steal oil from Syria because in this dire situation, such primitive accumulation is the only way it can delay its own collapse.

NATO is not just evil, it’s a failure. The latest failure by capital to maintain the extractive dynamic that the bourgeoisie depend on to keep profits up. It’s failed because of the nature of the system to produce wars. When wars between the imperial powers ended, they then had to be started in other areas. When the U.S. empire applied this principle to catastrophic effect by invading Afghanistan and Iraq, Washington lost its international respect, and the empire unraveled amid a Chinese rise and Russia’s breakaway from client state status. 

NATO reacted to this imperial unraveling by instigating the war in Ukraine, then hoped this would reverse the transition to multipolarity by making Eurasia collapse. This hasn’t happened, and ultimately all the imperial powers are left with are the tremendous economic costs. Given the last century’s history of how capitalism reacts when it’s desperate, we’ll keep seeing a resurgence of fascism across the imperialist countries prior to imperialism’s final defeat.

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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 American left has been fully assimilated into neocon ideology. Principled Marxism is the solution.

Russiagate, and the Ukraine psyop that succeeded it, have done fatal damage to the integrity and effectiveness of the communist movement in the United States. Because that damage is fatal, the left must be replaced by the communist movement as the vehicle through which our liberation movements are represented. 

This is because using a combination of propaganda and political pressure, the U.S. empire has assimilated the American left into neoconservative ideology. And because the U.S. communist movement hasn’t yet fully separated itself from the opportunistic big tent category which calls itself “the left” in this country, this ideological influence has also come to impact the predominant currents within American communism. The only way communists can win is by fully getting rid of the Democratic Party’s influence over our movement.

The way that Russiagate had this corrosive effect on the left, and thereby turned the left opportunistic to such an extent that I can now broadly characterize it as such, was by manufacturing a new divide within America’s partisan polarization dichotomy. This divide was designed to shift the left far to the right on foreign policy, because it created the perception that if somebody doesn’t go along with U.S. imperialism’s cold war maneuvers against Russia, then they’re necessarily a reactionary. This idea was predicated on the assertion that Russia had interfered in the 2016 presidential election, and on the conspiracy theory that Donald Trump’s campaign had colluded with Russia to win. When the 2019 Mueller report failed to produce evidence for the latter claim, the media pivoted towards a new era of demonizing China, no longer seeing it as worthwhile to continue promoting the debunked story that Russia had hacked into the Democratic National Committee in 2016.

The DNC hacking story was a lie invented out of desperation. The empire’s psyop machine fabricated it in reaction to the publication by WikiLeaks of emails which revealed that top Democratic officials had shared intent to exclude Bernie Sanders from the electoral process. With the anti-democratic nature of the bourgeois political system exposed, and the discontent of the younger generation over America’s oligarchy vindicated for all to see, the ruling class needed to find a way to regain narrative control. The solution they came to was to divert attention from the actual content of the DNC leaks, and towards the source that WikiLeaks had supposedly gotten the information from. This “source” was decided to be Russia, which is the secondary country that Washington’s new cold war strategy is directed at (the primary one being China), but at that moment was America’s most familiar foreign villain due to the Crimea annexation from two years prior.

Because Russia was now seen as waging war against American “democracy,” and Trump was seen as Russia’s instrument for inflicting damage within this strange conspiratorial mythology, the left was faced with a choice. The choice was to accept the hacking accounts and the Russiagate conspiracy, and thereby cede control to the Democratic Party establishment it had just been challenging; or to reject these narratives, and instead embrace the antiwar and Free Assange movements. The boundary of demarcation on this was clear, because accepting the Russian hacking claim meant also accepting the state’s attempt to discredit Assange by portraying him and WikiLeaks as Russian assets. Many on the left chose the latter option of starting on the path to revolutionary politics, but more of them chose the former option of embracing the Democratic Party. 

The consequence of this opportunistic decision by most of the left was that after Biden won, he was enabled to continue provoking Russia without enough resistance for these provocations to be prevented from reaching their logical conclusion: a scenario where Russia was forced to intervene in Ukraine.

The vindication of the Russiagate skeptics in 2019 did damage towards the new cold war’s narratives, but not enough that the narrative managers couldn’t redirect their propaganda towards China without substantial success. The 2019 Hong Kong protests politically failed, yet they acted as an opportunity for the imperialists to propagate their fabricated accounts of a “Uyghur genocide.” Like how the atrocity stories about Assad had been internalized by the left’s opportunistic elements during the initial propaganda campaigns against Russia, the Xinjiang narrative was absorbed by these types of leftists as well. Going into the Ukraine proxy war, these two issues in particular represented dividing barriers in the left’s ideological conflict, able to predetermine who would support aid to Ukraine and who would resist the aid effort.

We’re now in a situation where the Democratic Party’s leadership, as well as the Democratic voters who remain loyal towards this leadership or even towards Sanders and the “Squad,” have been decisively brought into neoconservatism. This was partly true by 2019, when a survey showed that more Democrats than Republicans now supported military involvement in Afghanistan. Those pro-war Democrats were the Clintonites who made up the traditional petty-bourgeois Democrat voters, and the petty-bourgeois former Republican voters who the DNC decided to pivot towards in 2016. Four years later, this category of neocon Democrats has expanded to include the Berniecrats as well, because at this point Sanders and the other social democrat leaders, as well as the DSA, have made it abundantly clear that they align with the Democrats and their foreign policy. The Democratic Party, and the broader parts of the left that it controls by default, have been fully assimilated into the neocon orthodoxy. These forces collectively have a vested interest in defending the Ukraine psyop’s narratives from all who may challenge them.

In this situation, tailing the Democrats as a communist is especially opportunistic and self-sabotaging. A communist should never engage in tailism, or act like only one demographic (in this case liberals) is valuable to appeal to. But now that the Democrats have been entirely brought towards the neocon stance, exclusively trying to appeal to them can lead to only one thing: softening one’s anti-imperialism out of fear of alienating even one liberal, no matter how pro-war they are. Doing this limits the extent to which one can advance revolutionary politics. On the Ukraine question, it compels one to take the softly liberal stance of “I support neither NATO nor Russia.” Rather than the revolutionary stance of “I support Russia’s anti-fascist war, as it’s rescuing the Donbass people and advancing multipolarity.”

The rebuttal which these types of communists have made to this argument is that multipolarity is not the end goal of Marxists, since we seek revolution in the imperial center and the end of the USA as a global power. But because they point out this fact to justify not backing Operation Z, they’re telling the truth for the wrong reason. It’s possible for Marxists to support a military action that brings global workers revolution closer while pointing to the contradictions of the state behind this action, there is precedent for this. The opponents of Soviet revisionism largely took such a stance in regards to the USSR’s Afghanistan intervention, recognizing both the progressive impact of the military action and the ways in which the USSR wasn’t committed to class struggle. U.S. Marxists can do the same with the effort by Russia’s bourgeois state to defeat Ukrainian fascism and U.S. hegemony. In turn, we can be pro-Z without compromising the principles of class struggle which are instrumental for achieving revolution in the core.

And so long as we abandon the dogma that only liberals are worth reaching, we can build an effective movement while fully challenging imperialism’s narratives. If you have to abandon serious anti-imperialism to reach all of the people you want, your priorities are fundamentally flawed. Our goal should not be pleasing those who will never believe in class struggle or anti-imperialism. It should be to build an anti-imperialist coalition that’s ideologically broad, and therefore effective at damaging the U.S. empire. The stronger this coalition becomes, the weaker the structure of U.S. capital gets, and the more opportunities we have to win victory for the workers.

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The U.S. empire’s Ukraine miscalculation could bring revolution—if we expose its lies about the war

In The Myth of Capitalism, Michael Parenti said:

No ruling class rules nakedly…they take strenuous efforts to justify their rule. I tell students when they say, 'Oh they don't care what we think. They ignore us', and all that, and I say, 'Oh no, no. That's the only thing they care about you. The only thing they care about you is what you're thinking. They don't care if you eat correctly, they don't care how your living conditions are, they don't care that they've built up an inhuman and irrational traffic system that's strangulating us and polluting our air, they don't care about anything. What they... the only thing about you they care about is what you're thinking. In the morning, they start, “What's going to be the story today? How do we manipulate, how do we control, how do we contain, how do we influence, how do we act upon what it is that they have in their minds?”

This potential that the narrative battle has to change history is known by both sides in today’s geopolitical competition between the imperial powers, and the powers challenging U.S. hegemony. The Communist Party of China stated in 2021 that “the Central Committee has made it clear that failure in the cyberspace domain will spell disaster for the Party's long-term governance. The Party therefore attaches great importance to the internet as the main arena, battleground, and front line of the ideological struggle.” This risk that online anti-Chinese disinformation has to undo the revolution’s gains is why the imperialists have put so much effort into propagating these lies, and into trying to get anti-communist content to bypass the Great Chinese Firewall. 

The vulnerability goes two ways. The imperialist governments are also in potential peril due to the power that the internet has to sway public sentiment. With Washington’s strategic gamble in Ukraine, this informational threat towards imperialism has been magnified.

U.S. imperialism has created an unprecedented danger for its global strategic success, and therefore for the survival of its core’s state, by making the perceived credibility of NATO dependent on three factors: Ukraine’s victory, the success of the sanctions to the degree that Russia gets destabilized, and the victory of the narrative that Russia’s intervention was “unprovoked.” Those committed to pro-imperialist ideology will never recognize that Russia was in fact provoked, or that its intervention is being carried out foremost to advance anti-fascism. But to the observers who aren’t biased in favor of the empire, it became common knowledge months ago that victory for the Ukrainians is now logistically impossible. 

By the fall of last year, when Russia had used only around a fifth of its potential military capacity in contrast to a Ukraine so desperate for manpower that it was freeing sexual predators to fight, Russia had already made inevitable the fulfillment of its strategic objective: the demilitarization of Ukraine. It made this inevitable by rendering Kiev utterly dependent on foreign aid in order to keep fighting, and the longer the war continues, the more thorough Kiev’s exhaustion becomes.

The imperialists knew from the start that such an outcome would come if Russia decided to take on Ukraine. Washington’s provoking Moscow was foremost about weakening Russia enough that it would collapse, and become able to be broken up like Yugoslavia, so that China could then be subdued. If Washington had won the economic war, and brought about this scenario of Eurasian collapse, it would be able to claim victory in the war despite Ukraine having been successfully demilitarized. That’s what the imperialist media has been trying to do by putting out headlines proclaiming that Russia has already lost the war, with the argument being that no matter what, Russia will still be recolonized by the empire. But it won’t be recolonized, so that argument will never be proven right by tangible reality. 

The imperialists will have to invent an alternate reality where they’ve won, which many won’t be willing to believe. When actual events so obviously contradict what the imperialists have said, there’s inevitably a consciousness shift towards distrust of the empire. That’s what happened when the Americans were exposed as war crimes perpetrators in Vietnam, and when the promise of a “cakewalk” intervention in Iraq was followed by a decades-long war.

This isn’t the first time imperialism’s propaganda has been discredited. From the Spanish-American War, to the Gulf War, to Libya, to Syria, there have been moments when Washington’s assertions get shown to lack substantiation. Being an empire, and therefore by definition a power which wages wars for profit rather than defense or humanitarian need, it’s inevitable that it gets routinely caught in these lies. The strategy the empire has used to prevent these lies from bringing revolution in the core, fatally extensive international loss of support for the USA, or both is the standard public relations model of making society forget about the damaging information. Imperialism’s narrative managers have censored the facts revealing the lies, while creating new accusations against the targeted countries to distract from how the previous accusations were debunked.

There’s a limit to the effectiveness of this diversionary practice. Those most willing to forget about Washington’s lies and atrocities are the ones who have a material stake in maintaining imperial extraction, and that means most of the world has always been perpetually on the verge of turning against the empire. It was unavoidable that at some point, the balance that U.S. hegemony depends on would be lost, and an unprecedented global trend towards anti-Americanism would appear.

This irrecoverable decline in international respect for Washington started with the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and has accelerated with Washington’s Ukraine proxy war. Most of the world responded to Bush’s crimes by coming to no longer view the U.S. as a worthy global leader, and that’s been shown in the last year when almost no peripheral countries have participated in the Russia sanctions. Bitter U.S. officials have signaled they interpret this as these countries siding against Washington, and they’re right. Like was the case in 2019, when Washington tried to isolate Venezuela by asking the world to recognize its fictitious new coup government, Washington has instead isolated itself. 

The only countries which are usually willing to aid U.S. imperial schemes are the other countries that benefit from neo-colonialism. And even they are increasingly threatening to break from Washington’s “rules-based international order,” simply out of practical self-interest. The costs of the sanctions are so severe that even after the unification and expansion which the Ukraine conflict has brought to NATO, the European countries are being newly divided due to how much destruction this economic war is bringing upon them. This increasingly threatens to turn into a new inter-imperial rivalry, which as Stalin observed inevitably leads to the mutual weakening of the imperialists, the heightening of capitalist contradictions as war harms working people’s interests, and the practical necessity of proletarian revolution.

Due to the decision by most of the world to challenge imperialism, it’s now inevitable that multipolarity will continue to emerge, and that the U.S. empire will continue to weaken. Yet this on its own doesn’t guarantee revolution in the imperial center. This is because whereas the empire’s psyops are in the process of failing across the peripheral countries, to the consequence that the imperial powers are isolated in fighting the new cold war, the psyops haven’t experienced this failure within the core itself. At least not yet. 

If we work to expose the lies behind the Ukraine psyop, and behind the other psyops used to justify Washington’s geopolitical maneuvers, the state within the core will be the one which experiences a fatal disruption in its task of maintaining social control. At the same time the PRC, and the other countries challenging Washington, will keep becoming more fortified against imperialism’s desperate destabilization schemes.

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The lies liberals tell to obscure Operation Z’s anti-fascist nature, & discourage anti-imperialist struggle

When almost two-thirds of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck because of the inflation that the Ukraine war has accelerated, the U.S. empire can only continue its proxy war by carrying out an unprecedented amount of psyops. The war machine’s narrative managers have had to innovate, or else the social base for their Eurasian destabilization project and arms profit source would disappear.

This social base consists not just of the Americans who are specifically pro-Ukraine, but of the Americans who are simply apathetic towards the conflict. Mass opposition exists towards U.S. policies like militarized racist police brutality, but as long as the ruling class manages to prevent sustained mass movements, these policies can continue. The defeat of the empire’s violent machinations requires a massive, long-term resistance movement that isn’t co-opted by the Democratic Party, or broken up through COINTELPRO tactics. Presently, the weakest front within U.S. imperialism is Ukraine, because if the imperialists continue failing to destabilize Russia, their maneuver on the geopolitical chessboard will backfire on them. They’ll have accelerated the transition to multipolarity, while worsening the contradictions within the imperialist countries. Which will make revolution in the imperial center far more likely.

This scenario is inevitable. The sanctions have already failed to do as much damage as would be required to make the Russian Federation collapse, and as I’ve covered, the conditions of a place like Yugoslavia were far more befitting of an imperialist breakup scheme than are the conditions of Russia. Russia will come out of this with more international influence than it had a year ago, whereas the U.S. will come out of it with less. Yet this positive international development doesn’t translate to a guarantee of revolution in the core. Not unless we properly navigate our conditions, which requires identifying and combating the Ukraine psyop. Because the lies contained within this psyop, though ineffectual at reversing the multipolar trend, can bring success to our government’s internal counterinsurgency. Now for the first big lie:

“Operation Z is being waged foremost for the interests of the Russian bourgeoisie”

The foundation of the Ukraine psyop’s deceptions is the cultivation of an analytical framework which obfuscates the war’s anti-fascist nature. To understand why Russia’s Operation Z is anti-fascist in character, one must study the historical context behind Russia’s struggle against Ukraine’s Banderite fascist regime. The musician Marcel Cartier describes this context as follows:

27 million sacrificed,

27 million who gave their lives,

27 million who lost their breath,

so the world could live free after all of this death

27 million sacrificed,

27 million who gave their lives,

27 million who lost their breath,

So the world could live free after all of this death.

You wanna falsify history, skew and pervert it

Nullify, tame it, change and revert it

And put Joseph Stalin on par with Hitler

But nothing could really be more sinister

Than equating the fascist nazism

Which is really a desperate capitalism

Compared with the world's first workers state

That fought against racist and sexist hate

Russia won the war against fascism, but it still hasn’t recovered from the crime the Nazis committed, not in terms of historical trauma nor in terms of numbers. The Russian population is still declining because of those lost 27 million. That blow against the Russians—which was made possible by how U.S. capitalists backed the Third Reich’s rise while the imperialists covertly enabled Hitler in the hope this would defeat communism—is now being followed up by a repeat of imperialism’s previous attacks upon Russia. 

The U.S. has installed a regime in Ukraine that’s directly influenced by National Socialist ideas, particularly National Socialism’s goal of carrying out a genocide against Russians so that those considered the “superior” race can grab up the leftover land. The regime’s plan was to ethnically cleanse the Russian speakers in the Donbass, forcibly relocating them to make more room for the favored group. It doesn’t matter that the separation between the “true” Ukrainians and these new Russian “outsiders” is completely arbitrary, or that the Russian and Ukrainian cultural identities both originated in the Kievan Rus. The Banderites, the faction dedicated to advancing the legacy of the Ukrainian Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, seek nothing less than a genocidal land grab in eastern Ukraine.

With such vile creatures in charge of Ukraine, is it any wonder why the Russian people have overwhelmingly supported the intervention? The Russians have a disparity to address with the Nazis. To get justice for the evils that the Nazis perpetrated against them, they need to continue the Great Patriotic War. That’s why Russia has taken action: to fulfill its people’s mandate for the rescue of their kin in the Donbass, and the holding to account of those who seek to complete Hitler’s plans for Russian extermination.

What this means is that in an honest analysis, this can not be called Putin’s war. To call it his war is to make the mistake of focusing on one personality, when the conflict’s context shows this situation to be a product of a far deeper history. NATO’s big lie about Z is that it’s being waged purely for the interests of Putin and the rest of Russia’s ruling class. Z is foremost the Russian people’s war, an anti-fascist campaign that the people pressured Putin into carrying out. It wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t in the interests of the Russian people as a whole, who collectively have a vendetta against fascism. Putin is nothing more than the one who happened to be in charge when this action became necessary. Z’s strategic success can’t be attributed to him, because he didn’t want to undertake the operation in the first place. He declined to take action for eight years after the humanitarian threat to the Donbass first appeared in 2014, and waited until he could delay the operation no longer. That success is attributable to the revolutionary forces within Russia, who recognized from the start of the Ukraine crisis that fascism and imperialism urgently needed to be combated.

From the premise that Z is an “imperialist war,” or at least a war whose motives are reducible to advancing the Russian bourgeoise’s interests, comes the liberal argument that Z was undertaken without strategic soundness. That it was reckless due to supposedly having been started without adequate measures by Russia to get international support for intervention in Ukraine. This idea comes from the softer type of liberal stance that knows U.S. hegemony as bad, and recognizes how NATO provoked Russia, but still seeks to distance oneself from “supporting Putin” by disavowing Z. In addition to treating the urgent need for humanitarian action as an abstract or even irrelevant factor, as if letting Kiev continue its genocidal invasion of the Donbass would have been the correct decision, it’s a notion that’s predicated on the liberal worship of “international law.” 

International law as we conceive of it was created to uphold imperialism. It was designed to make it so that no matter how clear the need is for military action to protect a population from imperialist violence, a country which takes this action can be accused of “violating international law.” The system of international law was rigged against Russia. And if Z has unintentionally strengthened imperialism, why has the transition to multipolarity accelerated directly because of Z? Why has most of the globe revealed itself to not fundamentally be on Washington’s side by refraining from sanctions participation? Why have the sanctions backfired on the imperial powers both economically and geopolitically, leaving the American and European economies crippled while the sanctions have failed to achieve their goal of destabilizing Russia and China? 

The increased censorship of dissent, unification and expansion of NATO, and anti-Russian demonization that the imperialist countries have seen during the last year do not amount to an overall strengthening of imperialism. They’re simply the consolidation of control within the internal imperial sphere, while this sphere’s external reach is diminished. And they’re leading towards unprecedented internal losses for imperialism, from new European divisions amid economic pressures, to social unrest brought on by declining living standards, to a victory for the anti-imperialist movement (should anti-imperialists choose to sufficiently challenge the empire). 

Z is not a project for military adventurism that’s only helped the Russian ruling class. It’s an instance of U.S. imperialism’s provocations backfiring on the imperialist bloc, to potentially fatal consequences for this bloc. Russia didn’t fall into a trap by the imperialists, it combated imperialism in the most effective way possible short of intervening in 2014. That’s actually a valid criticism of Z: that it was carried out years later than it should have been. But that’s not the criticism these liberals have of it. Their criticism is that Russia ever decided to challenge imperialism to a serious degree.

What this means is that backing Z is entirely compatible both with opposing U.S. imperialism, and with opposing Russia’s existence as a bourgeois state. There’s a reason why even among younger Russians, who lack the older generation’s direct Soviet era nostalgia and who are the most intensely alienated by Russian capitalism’s contradictions, support for Z is at 60 percent. There are young Russians whose skepticism towards their government has brought them towards opposing Z based on liberal pacifist impulses, like the Trotskyist youths within the communist movement. But the majority of them recognize that supporting Z isn’t supporting the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie; it’s supporting a just project by the Russian people to set right a massive historical wrong.

Liberals see those contradictions within Russia, and portray them as the factors which have the foremost importance when analyzing the conflict. They’re not the primary contradictions in this context, they’re the secondary contradictions. The fact that Russia’s capitalist class has money to make off of the war, and the fact that Putin is a bourgeois leader who initially wanted to cooperate with the west, do not negate the anti-fascist and anti-imperialist nature of what Russia is doing. Nor will they reverse Russia’s transition into being an anti-imperialist country, as Russia has thoroughly alienated the imperialists and therefore now has no choice but to keep partnering with China.

The primary contradiction is U.S. imperialism, which has restarted its project to utilize fascism for a genocidal campaign against the Russian people. Even though fascist Kiev hadn’t attacked within Russia’s borders a year ago, it had attacked the communities in the Donbass that make up the broader population which can be called culturally Russian. It had been shelling the Russian-speaking neighborhoods for eight years, had imposed discriminatory laws against those who don’t speak Ukrainian, and was now actively moving to invade the Donbass. The Russians were within their rights for defending their own people, who only lived on the other side of a border at the time because a century ago Ukraine’s eastern boundaries had been drawn outside the Russian socialist republic. With how strongly those in these territories identify with Russia, it’s no wonder they’ve since voted to become part of the country.

“Russia is a fascist state”

In addition to this humanitarian component of the Russians saving their fellows from ethnic cleansing, there’s the progressive impact that Z is having on the global class struggle. Because it’s the communists who’ve influenced Putin into taking action, the fascists within Russia’s government have become relatively marginalized due to the conflict, while the communists have gained a prominence that’s brought them out of their former status as a threatened political faction which fears the government’s retribution. It’s this detail that’s crucial for debunking the other lies that liberals tell in order to discourage anti-imperialist action.

The chairman of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation has been meeting with the Belarusian Ambassador to Russia, discussing the foreign and domestic policies of the two countries. The Party’s officials have in the past met with leaders like those of Vietnam, but Z has increased the Party’s diplomatic reach within Belarus, a country that’s pivotal for advancing both the region’s class struggle and the defeat of U.S. imperialism. With the communists holding great sway over the bourgeois government of Belarus as well, this means that Russia and Belarus are being driven closer both towards socialist restoration and towards closer partnership. The great influencing factor behind this is Z.

Should Russia and Belarus go socialist, and merge to start a new Soviet Union, it will accelerate the process of intensifying global class conflict that this war has brought. The war’s economic destruction has heightened capitalist contradictions worldwide, including within Russia itself. The globe’s proletarians are seeing how their bourgeois dictatorships disregard their wellbeing amid intertwining capitalist crises, from a pandemic to a new economic unraveling to a climatic crisis. As the international polarization that the war has created speeds up the multipolar trend, these workers are gaining unprecedented opportunities to combat their capitalist states. In Russia, where there’s a strong memory of Marxism-Leninism’s advantages and a visible Marxist-Leninist presence that’s guiding the country, this could easily lead to workers revolution. In the imperial center, however, the prospect of revolution is made more difficult to realize by the prevalence of the war’s psyops.

To defeat the bourgeois state, it’s essential for the workers movement to combat NATO. This is as true in the U.S. as it is in Russia. The path to Soviet restoration is being disrupted by the Trotskyists, who are rallying their youth wing towards creating cleavages within the CPRF’s anti-fascist and anti-imperialist struggle. They’re raising the complaint that the military action in Ukraine shouldn’t be taking on an offensive nature, and purely focus on defending the Donbass. As if it would be the most strategically sound decision to keep trying to beat back Kiev’s relentless attacks on the Donbass, without destroying the military that Kiev uses to perpetuate these attacks. Such sentiments come from the liberal phobia of ever dealing the aggressive blows against the reactionaries that are absolutely necessary for defeating the reactionaries. Of embracing the costs that come with advancing the class struggle.

Such is the lack of commitment to anti-fascism and anti-imperialism that characterizes the anti-Z facet of the U.S. left. This is essentially to say all of the U.S. left, because in America it’s only certain communist parties that support the operation and Marxism is ultimately separate from “the left” as an ideological force. A crucial distinction between the two which Lenin identified is that whereas the communists who cling to the “left” impulses refuse to work with reactionary trade unions, the serious communists make strategic alliances. Which as I’ll explain applies to our present situation.

The solidly anti-NATO communist parties, and the principled anti-imperialist ideas they represent, play a unique and crucial role in defeating U.S. imperialism. Because though many conservative-leaning Americans dislike the Ukraine aid project for being wasteful, they are not Z supporters. Tucker Carlson, the biggest ideological leader of the right-wing opposition towards aid to Ukraine, has said he simply doesn’t care what Russia does. This isn’t anti-imperialism, this is apathy for the sake of advancing partisan interests. It’s among the communists where the progressive nature of Z is understood, and therefore where the most effective type of opposition towards imperialism can be found. The communists say “I do care what Russia is doing, because what it’s doing is important.”

In the imperial center, what are the consequences of taking a soft stance on NATO? Of capitulating to the Ukrainization of our public discourse, and normalizing any parts of the lies that make up the Ukraine psyop? The consequences are for all the movements which intersect with the anti-imperialist movement to be compromised in their effectiveness. It’s intuitive knowledge among serious activists that when one neglects to sufficiently address one type of injustice, it hurts the ability to address all other types of injustice. This is because a liberation struggle can’t survive without solidarity between all who have an interest in bringing down the existing power structure.

Solidarity with the Donbass people’s resistance against Banderite fascism helps complete a synthesis of liberation theory, as much as solidarity with the Palestinian people’s struggle against Israeli colonialism or the Syrian people’s struggle against U.S. sanctions. Every evil that U.S. imperialism is perpetrating must be combated, to be selective in which evils one fights against would be surrendering the struggle to the opportunists. The Democratic Party wants us to act blind towards the need for the Donbass people’s rescue, and wants us to ignore geopolitics while exclusively focusing on our own conditions. Because when you don’t narratively combat the schemes of the U.S. empire, its war machine will be enabled to continue running. And the war machine, with its perpetuation of global market reach by U.S. capital, is what keeps the power structure as strong as it is.

With there being such a clear progression of events in this phenomenon, where forsaking anti-imperialism out of convenience leads to the defeat of the domestic liberation struggles, the mandate for combating empire is apparent. The obstacle to our unifying behind a consistently anti-imperialist program is that because we live in the center of imperialism, where our media, educational, and political institutions are devoted to reinforcing imperialist narratives, the pressure to compromise on imperialism appears overwhelming. The Democratic Party, and the reformist “left” organizations that it’s adjacent to, make up the vast majority of the activist presence, and can therefore subject any group that deviates from imperialism’s orthodoxy to what are effectively sanctions. They can cut off access to platforms and partnerships that feel indispensable. At least they feel indispensable so long as one has been led to believe they should be treated as such.

One should never refuse to work with a potentially compatible group of one’s own accord. Yet it’s also important to recognize when softening a stance in order to stop an organization from refusing to work with you would do more harm than good to the proletarian revolutionary cause. Another lie that’s preventing unity between the imperial center’s liberation movements, and the anti-fascist movement of the Donbass, is the notion that breaking from the liberal foreign policy stances would be guaranteed political suicide for the U.S. workers movement. The liberals don’t hold as much power as it appears they do, and when the proletarian movement sufficiently stands up to them, this limitation on their power will become apparent.

The liberals are able to justify their anti-Russia stance (which is an extension of their deeper pro-imperialist stance) by perpetuating a series of narratives. What these narratives do is inflate the degree to which Russia has contradictions, so that to the leftist or Marxist who hasn’t been sufficiently trained in how to recognize imperialist psyops, it looks reasonable to conclude that “there are no good sides in this war.” The left coming to this apathetic conclusion leaves room, both rhetorically and in the actual activism spaces, for the Democrats to promote their outright pro-imperialist stance of “Ukraine is the good side.”

One of these narratives is that both Ukraine and Russia are fascist states. This claim takes a piece of the truth, and exploits it in order to equate a government that’s heavily influenced by Banderites with a state that’s now heavily influenced by communists. The little bit of truth in the narrative is that there are indeed fascists in Russia’s government. The context is that because of the conflict, these fascists have been sidelined. The liberal view of Russia’s political situation in relation to Z is that the fascists have been empowered, because according to liberals, any kind of national pride that the war has been nurturing in Russia is by definition “fascist.” But the Russian fascists, and adjacent reactionaries like the czarists, are a minority who’ve only been able to rally or convert a certain number of people because of the war. 

Most Russians aren’t fascists or monarchists, two-thirds of them view Stalin favorably. So the patriotism that they’ve embraced in response to the war is overwhelmingly not a reactionary one, but a revolutionary one. They’re proud not of some racial concept or romanticized monarchical past, but of their collective effort to defeat fascism and get justice for their 27 million murdered ancestors. This is a kind of pride that’s intertwined with pro-communist sentiments, as the present anti-fascist conflict is an extension of Stalin’s Great Patriotic War. And as the class conflict accelerates, it gets likelier that the end outcome of this surge in anti-fascist solidarity will be a return to socialism. Because Putin is a bourgeois politician, and therefore by definition an opportunist, he and the ruling class he represents have cynical interests. Yet these interests in this instance align with the interests of the communists, who are being brought closer to victory by the disruptions the war is causing to the body politik. Waging this war is in the interests of the Russian bourgeoisie for the moment, but in the long term, they’re speeding up their own demise.

This trend towards the extinction of fascism within Russia, and the return of proletarian democracy to the country, appears to be contradicted by Russia’s use of the fascist Wagner group. Or at least that’s what the liberals want us to believe. The truth is that what the imperialist media calls the “Wagner group” is neither fascist, nor does it even exist. The “Wagner fascists” who liberals refer to are fictional characters, written to play villains in U.S. imperialism’s narrative on the conflict. An honest look at the empirical evidence surrounding it shows that Wagner is in essence a conspiracy theory, only accepted to be true because it’s a conspiracy theory that the media promotes.

There’s no mercenary company called the “Wagner group.” It’s an umbrella term used by the imperialist media to refer to every Russian who participates in mercenary activities. We know this because Bellingcat, the outlet that’s being paid by UK intelligence contractors to promote imperialist propaganda about western Eurasia, has admitted on Page 12 of its Wagner report that there’s no evidence of a connection between the Rus Fed military and an entity called Wagner. If “Wagner” were real, it would be shown to be connected to the military, just like the U.S. mercenary company Academi (formerly known as Blackwater) is connected to America’s military. The story the liberals tell is not supported by the facts.

To use the Wagner psyop to make it look like there are “fascists on both sides,” imperialism’s narrative managers have flatly fabricated a Nazi tie to Russia’s network of mercenaries. They’ve spread a photograph of Dmitry Utkin, a Russian neo-Nazi, and claimed that he’s the same person as a different Dmitry Utkin, one who truly can be linked to the Russian government. The Nazi Utkin has no ties to the government at all. In instances of media lies like this, the only thing perpetuating mass belief in what the media says is the psychological principle identified by one NATO-funded neuroscience study, in which it was found that human minds will accept an assertion if presented with “evidence” for it even when that evidence is itself based in assertions. All the liberals need to believe Wagner is real is for the media to tell them that Wagner is real, because they’re operating off of motivated reasoning.

When the empire’s own hired liars are being forced to debunk the narratives that demonize Russia, there’s a fundamental weakness within the foreign policy argument that liberals make. The facts aren’t aligned with the case they’re presenting, and that creates the potential for an anti-imperialist consciousness shift.

“Only reactionaries support Russia”

As the new cold war has developed, the imperialist psyop machine has worked to cultivate a new dichotomy within the American political spectrum. A dichotomy that works to neutralize opposition towards imperialism by assimilating the left into neoconservative ideology. The narrative managers have done this by normalizing the perception that the Republicans are now the “party of Putin,” and that therefore if you oppose the Republicans, you’d be undermining your own cause by challenging anti-Russian propaganda.

This narrative is nothing more than the logical conclusion of the polarization which the new cold warriors have manufactured, where any statement that deviates from what the DC think tanks say about Russia is now seen as “right wing.” The liberal view is that the Republicans have “sold out” to Putin, and are working to undermine U.S. interests. When you actually look at the things right-wingers have been saying about Russia, it’s clear that idea gives them too much credit. Their opposition towards Ukraine aid comes not from an anti-imperialist stance, but from an amalgamation of conspiracies about Ukraine representing “woke” and “globalist” agendas, or from the glorification of Putin as a “strong leader.” Like the liberals, the reactionaries make the mistake of viewing Z as Putin’s war, because both of these factions lack a materialist analysis of the situation. The rightists are fools who simply happen to be right in this one instance, and that’s why they haven’t been able to mount any serious opposition towards Biden’s Ukraine policy.

The publication of the Mueller report in 2019, which revealed the lack of evidence behind claims that Trump’s campaign had colluded with Russia to win the election, proved this absence of strategic ties between the American right and the Russian government. The Republicans are only superficially posturing a sense of support for Russia, because their party doesn’t overall oppose the Ukraine aid project and they would no doubt be the ones leading it if they were in the White House. 

The social base of support for Russia’s anti-fascist war does not lie in the fascists, the minority of committed reactionaries who support the present GOP stochastic terror campaign. It lies in a broad coalition, a coalition that we can build between the more left-compatible libertarians who’ve adopted an anti-imperialist stance, the communists who back Z, and the many working class people who as of yet have little to no opinion on foreign affairs. With educational help, those among the latter category can be brought towards anti-imperialism, because they’re neither materially nor emotionally invested in the empire’s attempt to destabilize Eurasia. They have no class incentive to be pro-imperialist, and every class incentive to be anti-imperialist.

These educational projects depend on a campaign to gain the attention and participation of those who aren’t already involved in the antiwar activism scene. Which requires embracing antiwar practice that’s robust in its work, uncompromising in its opposition towards NATO’s narratives, and lacking in the opportunistic habit of only trying to appeal to Democrats. When you want to only reach liberals, you take the “neither NATO nor Russia” stance, or the “NATO is the good side” stance. When you want to reach a wider range of people, you take the “Russia is fighting an anti-fascist war” stance. Which will cost you support from liberals, yet provide you with a caliber of potential for mass mobilization that wouldn’t be possible if you treated liberals like the only ones you need to try to appeal to.

This is what Rage Against the War Machine is doing. Its events are being sponsored by organizations and individuals from a broad range of ideological tendencies, including both libertarian and communist ones. That these people mostly wouldn’t be optimal for membership in a Bolshevik party doesn’t take away from the ways in which RAWM is advancing the revolutionary cause. Because this context is equivalent to the one which prompted Lenin to say that communists must work with reactionary trade unions, should this be necessary for bringing proletarian revolution closer. In both cases, the decision by communists to make strategic alliances has aided, not hindered, the progression towards socialism.

It’s helping the class struggle because when you do the alternative, and embrace a practice designed exclusively to appeal to liberals, you’ll end up weakening yourself. When the communists in the American Student Union have joined with RAWM in building an antiwar coalition which extends beyond liberals—and in this case excludes liberals, since liberals by definition aren’t anti-NATO—they’ve established a practice in which they take revolution seriously. In which they act like they’re working towards a future without the Democratic Party. When you compromise your anti-imperialism to appease liberals, and perpetuate the narrative that Russia was wrong to intervene, you fail not just in anti-imperialism and anti-fascism, but in the project to bring our own conditions towards revolution. Tailing the Democrats by capitulating to their foreign policy narratives can’t produce the Democratic Party’s demise, and therefore can’t produce the demise of the bourgeois state. It can only reinforce the existing political order.

No better endorsement of RAWM’s practice can be imagined than the recent editorial denouncing RAWM published by The Militant, the Trotskyist paper that’s been seeking to sow sectarianism within the communist movement for nearly a century. The Militant writes:

Bourgeois politicians here, especially in the left wing of the Democrats and right wing of the Republicans, seek to pressure the capitalist government in Kyiv to cede territory occupied by Moscow in return for “peace talks.” A bogus “new peace movement,” a coalition of Stalinist and middle-class radicals, is trying to gather forces to act as shills for Putin’s war, calling rallies and “teach-ins.” Some of these forces, such as Medea Benjamin of Code Pink, are also joining a “Rage against the War Machine” rally in Washington, D.C., Feb. 19 organized by currents both right and left, including the Libertarian Party and People’s Party. Demands center on calling for Washington to cut off funding and arms shipments to Ukraine and press Kyiv to make concessions to end the war. Behind the slogans, “NATO Expansion, No! Peace in Ukraine, Yes!” a Jan. 14 rally in New York drew over 100 people, organized by the ANSWER coalition, People’s Forum and others. This self-proclaimed “new peace movement” is determined to give aid and succor to Putin’s war.

There’s the proof that RAWM’s model is the correct one for revolutionaries to follow: an attack against it from one of the original publications that led to the formation of neoconservatism, Trotskyism’s direct ideological descendant. 

In a statement that makes it apparent how The Militant and the other facets of Trotskyism gave rise to neoconservatism, the editorial directly repeats NATO’s core piece of propaganda about the origin of the Ukraine crisis: “All these forces peddle the slanderous canard pushed by Putin that the massive, popular Maidan uprising in 2014 that overthrew the dictatorial pro-Moscow regime of Victor Yanukovych was in reality a fascist coup engineered by Washington. The idea that the millions of Ukrainian working people who fought to take control of the destiny of their nation were nothing but a band of neo-Nazis is absurd.” Here, The Militant reveals its class allegiance with the bourgeoisie, and with the Democratic Party neocons who The Militant aligns with in this power struggle. Because the Maidan uprising’s defining social base was not the working class of Ukraine, but rather the big capitalists and the petty bourgeoisie, who were upset that Ukraine’s pre-Maidan government had refused to accept an EU deal for intensified neoliberal free market measures.

The imperialists nurtured this reactionary outrage, and harnessed it to install a new regime, one which was picked by Obama’s team to assist in Washington’s great-power competition with Russia. Almost a decade later, Washington’s subsequent militarization of Ukraine and backing of regime-aligned Nazi terrorist organizations has produced a conflict, one so tense that it’s made the threat of nuclear war unprecedented. And as RAWM’s demands page says, this war has become so perilous also because of the U.S. empire: “The US instigated the war in Ukraine with a coup on its democratically-elected government in 2014, and then sabotaged a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine in March. Pursue an immediate ceasefire and diplomacy to end the war.” 

The lackeys for U.S. imperialism in the Democratic Party, the corporate media, and the neocon-aligned “socialist” publications don’t want that peaceful outcome, because their interests fundamentally align with those of the Banderites. They want to complete the project to destroy Russia that Hitler started, because this project advances U.S. imperialism’s strategic goals. And the left opportunists will always side with U.S. imperialism.

Such is the great dividing barrier that’s emerged between the revolutionaries and the reformists. One side wants peace and an end to imperialist-backed fascist terror, while the other side wants to perpetuate the terror because this aids their own class interests and opportunistic political projects. Those who know the truth about Ukraine’s fascist 2014 fascist coup have a responsibility to reject the lies which these opportunists use to obfuscate Z’s anti-fascist character, to portray Russia as fascist, and to discredit the project for a serious anti-imperialist movement.

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