An anti-imperialist coalition would greatly escalate the class struggle, so COINTELPRO is trying to stop its formation

The failure of Washington’s Ukraine proxy war has created the conditions for an opening to emerge within the imperial center’s internal class struggle. If the empire’s geopolitical maneuver had succeeded, and the sanctions had proven effective enough to cause Russia to collapse, the empire would soon be in the process of subduing China and revitalizing global neoliberalism. Then American capital would be strengthened, the system would be fortified, and the prospect of revolution would be made distant, because the American hegemony which props up the system would be reinforced. The climate crisis will devastate the capitalist world regardless of the outcome of our geopolitical struggle, but the imperialist bloc’s losing that struggle has accelerated the revolutionary process. On a macro scale, it’s allowed for China to hasten its project to develop the productive forces of the peripheral countries, which is incrementally making neo-colonialism untenable. This makes the success of the class struggle more immediately probable in the core.

Our victory has been made more probable because with this great strategic miscalculation of the empire—which may be looked back on as its final defeat prior to when it began to truly unravel—has come the demise of the empire’s foundational myth. This is the myth that the USA is exceptional, that the laws of history don’t apply to it. The world, and the American working class, are seeing that the USA is absolutely capable of falling to the same errors which have destroyed past civilizations. That it can do heinous and reckless things to try to hold onto its imperial spoils, such as provoke a war and then sacrifice the material wellbeing of its own people in order to prolong the conflict. The imperialist narrative managers will always insist that Russia is to blame for it all, but anyone who’s honest can see that this is the U.S. empire desperately trying to deflect responsibility. This deflection won’t work, because the consequences are coming for our ruling class no matter what. Those consequences being an increase in the severity of the country’s social crises, to the effect that the people’s discontent becomes irrepressible.

As we’ve already been seeing in Europe, where the process of imperial decay is further along, unrest is inevitable when the ruling class has destroyed the people’s livelihoods. Across Europe, America, and the other capitalist countries, with this last year’s increase in inequality will come increases in popular revolts. Which the system can survive, but only if it manages to sufficiently co-opt and divert these uprisings. That’s where the initial job of the communists comes in.

Our responsibility is to guide the people’s outrage at their conditions in a direction that can actually bring about the overthrow of the bourgeois state, rather than another protest movement that gets redirected into reformism or suppressed due to lack of sustainable organization. We have to bring the education, training, and mobilizing structures to the people which are required for creating a genuine threat towards the ruling class. This is a project that depends on purging our radical spaces of the ideas which the system uses to keep the popular movements ineffectual. In the core, those ideas foremost consist of pro-imperialist narratives. Particularly the ones that get promoted by our imperialism-compatible “left.”

Since the communist movement got suppressed in this country, the people’s liberation causes have been monopolized by the manufactured scam which is the “new left.” This is a version of the “left” that’s fundamentally averse to class struggle, and claims class can be fully replaced with identity issues. Essential to selling this lie is the reinforcement of U.S. imperialism’s propaganda. By cultivating a “left” that’s committed to defending pro-imperialist narratives from a “progressive” perspective, COINTELPRO has created a buffer against the emergence of a vanguard. Of a force that can provide revolutionary guidance to the people. The “leftist” organizations and social media brand-builders which decry Russia’s anti-fascist war, promote the atrocity propaganda against countries like China and Syria, or direct unfounded critiques towards anti-imperialists have been granted a certain kind of power by the state. This is the power to gatekeep who and what is considered acceptable within radical spaces, to decide how the liberation movements are run.

They wield this power unilaterally, without giving the people they’re speaking for the chance to truly choose who they want to be in charge of organizing efforts. As Parenti observed, the essence of their purpose is to block the advancement of class struggle:

Seizing upon anything but class, U.S. leftists today have developed an array of identity groups centering around ethnic, gender, cultural, and lifestyle issues. These groups treat their respective grievances as something apart from class struggle, and have almost nothing to say about the increasingly harsh politico-economic class injustices perpe­trated against us all. Identity groups tend to emphasize their distinctiveness and their separateness from each other, thus fractionalizing the protest movement. To be sure, they have important contributions to make around issues that are particularly salient to them, issues often overlooked by others. But they also should not downplay their common interests, nor overlook the common class enemy they face. The forces that impose class injustice and economic exploitation are the same ones that propagate racism, sexism, militarism, ecological devastation, homophobia, xenophobia, and the like.

The “anything but class” left, as Parenti calls it, has in the age of the new cold war weaponized imperialism’s demagogic narratives to advance this goal of diverting from class politics. The left anti-communists, as well as the self-identified communists who oppose Operation Z, are campaigning to vilify and exclude those who have principles. These types exploit the anti-China, anti-Russia cultural consensus that the media has manufactured, using the anti-imperialist stances of the serious communist parties to portray these parties as untouchable within an activism setting. Their goal is to portray us as supporting a “genocide” against the Uyghurs, a “war of aggression” against Ukraine, and every other evil that Washington’s targets get fraudulently accused of. 

The desire to utilize this opportunistic smear tactic is the true reason why these anti-Marxist leftists care so much about upholding the State Department’s narratives. To effectively wreck movements, they have to sell just how much they feel for the peoples who Washington’s adversaries are supposedly violating the rights of. They perform outrage against those who challenge the atrocity narratives because this lets them curry favor with the Democratic Party, and the State Department by extension. Which are the entities that their loyalties truly align with, because it’s these entities that put forth the foreign policy ideas that provide them with effective narrative weapons against communists. They believe imperialism’s lies not because they’re naive, but because they’re corrupt. That’s what separates them from the majority of the American working class, who at present only believe imperialism’s lies because they’re all the average American has so far been exposed to.

The less power these wreckers have, the better the working class will be able to escalate the class struggle. The struggle’s left-wing enemies perpetuate their monopoly over radical spaces through the illusion that without support from them, no communist will ever be able to succeed. The truth is the other way around. It’s only until communists fully stop caring what these frauds think that we’ll gain the leverage necessary for mounting a serious opposition to the bourgeoisie. The more unified and large we make the anti-imperialist coalition which Washington’s Ukraine failure has produced the conditions for, the less power the left movement wreckers will have. That’s why they’re at present trying to discredit the idea of such a coalition, seeking to discourage anti-imperialists from allying with anybody who they haven’t approved as worthy of working with. No matter what we do, the wreckers will always say we’re doing it wrong. That’s their game, to sow doubt in perpetuity. The more we stop listening to them, the more effective we can be.

—————————————————————————

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 Ukraine psyop is being destroyed, placing the war machine in unprecedented peril

The Ukraine psyop, like happens at some point to all imperialist psyops, has reached the state where its foundational myths are getting broken down. Where the category of individuals who disbelieve it includes not only the anti-imperialist minded ones who were standing against it from the start, but also mainstream society. This happened to the Iraq psyop when it was shown that subduing Iraq would be a long-term task, then the Downing Street memo revealed the WMD story to be a lie. This happened to the Syria psyop when WikiLeaks showed there had been a coverup of the evidence proving Assad’s innocence on the “gas attack” accusations. It’s these kinds of events that force imperialism’s narrative managers to at least partially give up on a propaganda narrative. 

Even though these managers are always going to try to argue against the evidence disproving the narrative (as they’ve done by attempting to discredit the WikiLeaks revelation, or by arguing Bush didn’t lie but was misled), in the long term they have no choice but to stop relying on it as a narrative asset. It’s at that point too easy for their stance to be rebutted, and they must switch to a new war narrative.

This is what’s happening with Ukraine. During this last month, appropriately the same one in which the war started a year ago, several things have happened which represent irreversible changes to the way the Ukraine conflict is thought about. First Seymour Hersh put out his findings which conclusively prove what everybody who’s been paying attention always suspected: that the USA blew up the Nord Stream pipeline. The attempts to discredit his report follow in the same pattern as the arguments that WikiLeaks didn’t disprove the Syria narrative, because they both give the benefit of the doubt to sources which have shown themselves utterly untrustworthy. Anti-imperialist commentator Peter Schwarz observes about these reactions to Hersh, and why they’re not coming from a place of honest critical rigor:

One of the main accusations against Hersh was that he relied on a single source in the US security apparatus whose identity he is keeping secret for security reasons, whereas journalistic due diligence requires at least two sources. In fact, one of Hersh’s primary sources is the president’s threat and Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, who made similar comments. After the attack, she exulted that she was pleased “Nord Stream 2 is now, as they say, a pile of junk at the bottom of the ocean.” Knowledge of US responsibility for the attack was widespread, Hersh told the Berliner Zeitung. “The people in America and Europe who build pipelines know what happened… The people who own companies that build pipelines know the story.” He said he “didn’t hear it from them,” but he “quickly learned that they knew.”...That Washington planned and executed the attack is the only plausible explanation for the destruction of Nord Stream. Hersh has provided ample circumstantial evidence and facts to support this. The claim spread after the attack that Russia had destroyed the pipeline itself is so absurd that it was quickly dropped. Even Attorney General Frank has publicly confirmed that there is no evidence for this.

With there being no truly compelling argument against the evidence that Washington was behind the explosion, unless one has a preexisting motive to want it not to be true, the media has mainly decided to omit reporting on Hersh’s statements. But this hasn’t been able to prevent a rise in public awareness of the anti-imperialist arguments about Ukraine, because this week the Rage Against the War Machine rally forced the Ukraine debate back into our discourse. By gaining coverage from the big networks, it introduced the general population to anti-imperialist ideas, provoking the psyop machine into attacking America’s internal revolutionary movement. COINTELPRO rallied its traditional radical liberal agents to direct vitriol towards the rally, claiming it aided reactionary politics because it was led by the Libertarian Party. 

If these critics were coming from a place of anti-imperialism, they wouldn’t have been denouncing RAWM in the first place, as they would see it’s their responsibility to build the antiwar movement’s left flank. But they don’t support the goal of ending U.S. hegemony in the first place, so they’ve been glad to amplify the smear campaign against the rally. The fact that this debate over the rally continues to be a sore point for the online left shows it did serious damage towards imperialism’s narrative control. Or else the imperialist-aligned left wouldn’t be so passionate about discrediting the rally’s legacy.

Along with this raising of anti-imperialist consciousness in the core has come an affirmation from China of RAWM’s core argument: that it was the U.S. which provoked the conflict. Ambassador Zhang Hanhui has said that “As the initiator and main instigator of the Ukrainian crisis, Washington, while imposing unprecedented comprehensive sanctions on Russia, continues to supply arms and military equipment to Ukraine.” The only reason China’s officials haven’t outright endorsed Russia’s intervention, like the DPRK’s have, is because the PRC is diplomatically invested in too much of the globe to be acting that controversially. It’s apparent to every Marxist who’s seriously studied the conflict that Russia was justified in taking action against fascist Ukraine. Kiev’s violations of ceasefires during the days leading up to Russia’s action, in which the Ukrainian shelling of the Donbass increased by 400%, alone vindicate the project to demilitarize Ukraine. Those who are committed to the pro-imperialist ideology will never take the perspectives of the PRC and the DPRK seriously, but thanks to Hersh and RAWM, the amount of minds who may be receptive to such ideas has been growing.

Which is what’s created better conditions for the proliferation of the additional anti-imperialist ideas the PRC has recently put forth. Those ideas, articulated in the Chinese report titled U.S. hegemony and its perils, are summarized by the report’s text as follows. They describe the global evils that Washington carries out:

I. Political Hegemony -- Throwing Its Weight Around

II. Military Hegemony -- Wanton Use of Force

III. Economic Hegemony -- Looting and Exploitation

IV. Technological Hegemony -- Monopoly and Suppression

V. Cultural Hegemony -- Spreading False Narratives

Everyone who’s studied U.S. imperialism already knows the things the report details. The report is necessary because it’s a tool to bring such an education to those who haven’t yet gained this knowledge. The American media won’t publicize it, but in the long term, it and other anti-imperialist sources like it can succeed at changing America’s consciousness. This is because we’ve reached a stage in history’s progression where the means which the U.S. empire has historically used to control the narrative are becoming no longer effective. To sell its false narratives, America has to first sell the idea that it’s the “greatest country on earth,” the “leader of the free world,” the central promoter of “human rights” and “democracy.” The Ukraine proxy war’s failure has made the sustenance of this foundational myth untenable. The Afghanistan and Iraq invasions had already done grievous damage to the myth, then Washington’s Ukraine miscalculation made this decline truly irrecoverable.

Washington’s War of Terror discredited the USA in the view of most of the globe, making it unable to sway key countries in the geopolitical power struggle. Ukraine affirmed this shift by prompting virtually all countries, aside from the imperialist ones, to reject Washington’s call to participate in the sanctions. Washington’s investment in aiding Nazi terrorists, and a highly corrupt Ukrainian government that’s increasingly anti-democratic, has created a further narrative liability. The world overall sees that Washington is no defender of “sovereignty” or “freedom,” but a hypocritical actor whose true goal is to advance the geopolitical interests of its ruling oligarchs. The Ukraine psyop isn’t capable of intellectually countering this, not enough to convince the majority of the globe’s people to support the proxy war. The more this global anti-imperialist consciousness bleeds into the core—a process that players like China are working to help along with—the closer the core gets to revolution.

—————————————————————————

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.

U.S. hegemony is the globe’s primary contradiction. Defeating it is vital for workers revolution.

If one is committed to bringing total victory to the world’s workers, they’ll aid in the fight against U.S. hegemony. That means taking geopolitics seriously. That means recognizing how as inhabitants of the imperial center, we Americans have the ability to prevent our government from inflicting violence against the peoples who imperialism targets. When we mobilize against the sanctions on Cuba, the aid to Israel’s colonial war upon the Palestinians, or the aid to fascist Ukraine’s war on the Donbass, we’re weakening the war machine. This is because the war machine depends on the State Department’s view of global affairs being shared by the people. And the stronger the anti-war movement is, the less effective this narrative control becomes. At this stage in the decline of U.S. hegemony, the American anti-war movement’s purpose is to speed up that geopolitical shift by sabotaging the workings of American militarism.

The only way to do this, at least until we overthrow the bourgeois state which American militarism depends on, is by exposing imperialism’s narratives. To find precisely what lies these narratives consist of, look at which ideas you aren’t presently allowed to challenge: the NATO account of the actions of Serbia in the Yugoslav war, Assad’s supposed chemical attacks, the “Uyghur genocide,” the concept of north Korea as an undemocratic regime, the notion that Russia is a fascist state which acted against Ukraine unprovoked. Even though these things are easily able to be refuted, they still can’t be acceptably referred to as false, like the Iraq psyop can. This is because unlike Iraq, the Balkans, Syria, China, the DPRK, and Russia are still crucial for the imperialists to shape perceptions of. Iraq has long been spent as a narrative asset, and the empire has made it into one of the many places Washington wages war against unquestioned. The situation with the other named countries and areas is more fluid. 

The empire still needs to perpetuate its decades-old mythology of atrocity propaganda against Serbia, so that it can continue its campaign to assimilate all of eastern Europe into the EU’s neoliberal model. It has to portray Washington’s greatest geopolitical rivals as representing a new “axis of evil” so that it can justify its efforts to destabilize Eurasia. Efforts which extend to not just the Ukraine proxy war, or the Taiwan provocations, but the Iran color revolution attempts. This mission of driving Eurasia to collapse also involves the Syria sanctions, which were designed to exacerbate emergencies like this month’s earthquake. Should the DPRK win the narrative war, Washington’s ongoing efforts to menace it with military exercises will become an international liability. So the imperialists have to keep playing the victim, portraying the country’s responsive missile tests as unprovoked threats from a “crazy dictator.”

As Washington’s new cold war develops, additional fronts within it are being opened up, many overlapping with others. The idea that Ethiopia's government is committing a genocide against the Tigrayans, which obscures the context that Tigray’s people have been held hostage by the U.S.-backed TPLF terrorists, is essential for justifying the campaign to destabilize Ethiopia and Eritrea. A campaign that’s motivated by a desire to prevent further development of China’s BRI project, via destroying the states which have the most potential to advance the initiative. Washington’s operations to destabilize Afghanistan and Myanmar have the same goal, though the atrocity propaganda directed at them doesn’t need to be so extreme due to how they’re respectively governed by a theocratic regime and a military junta. The context that both countries have found themselves in such situations due to Washington’s own policies isn’t considered in our media’s analyses on them. The central objective of our foreign policy thinkers at this moment is to handicap China’s rise, and the economic uplifting of the peripheral countries that this rise is bringing about.

This great-power competition is where imperialism’s efforts are now concentrated within. No longer is Latin America the primary target, because with the economically desperate situation the Ukraine proxy war has created for the imperial powers, Washington sees that it must at least learn to coexist with the hemisphere’s anti-imperialist governments. Washington still carries out coups where it can, like last December’s one in Peru, but these regime change operations become less viable the more the region’s anti-imperialist movement gains strength. Even in Peru, the backlash from the people has already rendered the new coup regime’s survival uncertain. A speedily waning empire like Washington has to make compromises, in this case conceding the losses of several of its neo-colonies so that it can continue its drive to destabilize Eurasia.

The real trouble has come when the Russia sanctions have proven to be not effective enough to make the country collapse, and this goal of destroying Eurasia has therefore been revealed as unreachable. If the sanctions were that effective, Washington would feel comfortable with trying to carry out regime change against Lula for building strong ties with the PRC. But because the empire hasn’t managed to rally more than 20% of the globe’s countries around its war against Russia, and has consequently had to sacrifice American and European living standards to bolster the sanctions, Washington is losing the economic war. So it has no choice but to build or maintain economic relations with countries like Venezuela and Brazil, watching helplessly as they work to accelerate the transition to multipolarity. 

The empire’s encouragements of new Balkan tensions, weaponization of Ukraine and Azerbaijan against other former Soviet states, and use of Israel as a regional terrorist proxy have not brought the empire victory on the Eurasian geopolitical chessboard. This is because the BRICs countries, which are far bigger and more economically pivotal than Washington’s destabilization proxies, have been strengthening their ties. Even ultra-nationalist India has been continuing to fortify its relations with Russia while de-escalating its border dispute with China, because it knows which path is in its best interests.

In this timeline where multipolarity has come even faster than the Pentagon was expecting it would, and this sudden hastening of history’s advancement has come precisely because of Washington’s reckless actions, our ruling class can only turn to the same option Germany’s bourgeoisie embraced after losing World War I. This option is to consolidate the capitalist state’s control, and ally with the most reactionary elements in order to create a force for counterrevolutionary terror. 

The revitalization of industry so that the country can prepare for a great new war is also part of this fascist playbook, which is another reason why we must resist the war machine. The logical conclusion of the route the imperial powers have taken is a scenario where they morph into Nazi states, like Ukraine has. There’s no telling which part of the globe they’ll pick when they repeat Hitler’s invasions, though given how successful Operation Z is set to be at denazification, it’s possible this new military campaign will also be directed at eastern Europe. We must stop this decayed version of NATO from starting World War III, which it’s already come unprecedentedly close to simply through its liberal proxy war. Imagine how these countries will act if they’re in the equivalent state that Germany was a century ago, and their fascist movements lack sufficient internal opposition.

With the explosion in inflation, we’ve fulfilled yet another historical prerequisite for such a fascist takeover. This is how the colonial countries implode during capitalism’s imperialist stage: when they encounter the crises that imperialism creates for them, their ruling classes react by trying to maintain the system through tremendous violence. Once the U.S. is kicked out of Asia in a fuller sense, the situation in the core will grow even scarier than it’s already become. The terror campaign against transgender people is a manifestation of this 21st century fascism, and it’s set a precedent for what the forces of reaction will do to every other group they seek to subdue. We communists in the core can only win against this enemy by building a movement that’s global in its focus. By allying with the world’s anti-imperialist governments, both so we can combat liberalism and so we’ll have friends to turn to when the class conflict escalates. 

We must understand that liberalism is only the initial layer of the resistance we’ll face, and that when we’ve become too powerful for the liberals to stop, they’ll send the fascists to try to physically exterminate us. The same applies to U.S. hegemony, because the more successful we get at aiding its decline, the more aggressive the counterinsurgency within the empire will get. Liberalism and unipolarity are losing, making way for the final confrontation between capital’s enemies and capital’s fighting wing. Every day, that decisive moment of conflict gets closer.

—————————————————————————

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.

Backlash to Rage Against the War Machine is about trying to sabotage an effective anti-imperialist movement

By deciding to provoke Russia into intervening in Ukraine, the U.S. empire took a geopolitical gamble. A gamble that it lost. It’s been left with accelerated social crises in the core countries from the sanctions blowback, at the same time that these sanctions have failed to destabilize Eurasia. The war profits and NATO unification that the conflict brought have not precipitated an actual expansion of imperial power, but a hastening of the transition into multipolarity. The proxy war’s “benefits” for the empire are hollow, having come in the context of a decline for U.S. hegemony which this war made more severe. The proxy war guaranteed the coming of multipolarity by proving that even when the imperial powers sacrifice their own people’s living standards to try to crush the Chinese bloc, their efforts to reverse history’s progression are futile.

The outcome that isn’t yet guaranteed is the coming of a phase of historical development which, should the forces of class struggle prevail, will follow multipolarity. That phase is the end to the USA as an international player, due to the imperial center experiencing a proletarian revolution in which America’s workers end neo-colonial extraction. That’s how serious communists view multipolarity: not as an end goal, but as a necessary chapter within the story of how the U.S. empire vanishes altogether. U.S. imperialism won’t truly end until the United States, with its dependence on exploiting stolen indigenous territories and subjugated Latin American neo-colonies, itself gets abolished. That’s what will allow the hemisphere’s working class to unify in building a new world, and that will render whatever remaining imperial powers too weak to carry out counterrevolution.

To bring this full victory over the imperialists, we must infuse the class struggle in this country with the principles of anti-imperialism. As long as our liberation movements are too significantly influenced by the ideological poison of the pro-imperialist “left,” they’ll continue to be co-opted to the extent that they can’t pose a serious threat towards the state. The inherent benefit which this week’s Rage Against the War Machine rally in Washington DC brought towards the class struggle, even though many of its participants weren’t Marxists or leftists, is that it took away a large amount of this pro-imperialist narrative control over American radical politics. It introduced the broad masses of the people, beyond the online and organizing niches which the left is concentrated within, to anti-imperialist ideas. 

That’s made it uncertain whether the state’s counterinsurgency against revolutionary politics is going to succeed, and therefore more likely that the empire will be totally defeated. Because when anti-imperialism is made into something on the mind of the average worker, there’s an opening for the anti-imperialist radical organizations to build power, and the pro-imperialist radical liberals have lost their monopoly over our social movements. The rally didn’t fully bring us towards this, but it brought us closer.

The role which communists must assume within this new cultural landscape from after the rally is one where we lead the construction of an anti-imperialist coalition. A coalition that like the rally is open towards Libertarians, non-Marxist progressives, and others who wouldn’t be compatible within a Bolshevik party, but who are essential to work with in the way that the reactionary trade unions had to be worked with during Lenin’s time. Like Lenin, our job is not to shun the non-socialist elements to the point where we sabotage our own power, but to ally with these elements where needed for advancing the class struggle. With our end goal being to establish a new order where the social systems these elements depend on no longer exist, parallel to our broader goal of replacing multipolarity with a post-American world. It’s all part of the same process of acting strategically so that we can disrupt the power balance, and ultimately render all enemies of revolution powerless.

I say that working with these other elements in the antiwar coalition is essential, insofar as we can use their platforms to proliferate anti-imperialist ideas. The ideas which our movement needs to become popularized in order for us to succeed. The Libertarian Party has proven itself capable of wielding a platform of culturally impactful proportions when it comes to anti-imperialism, therefore when it uses that platform, we should promote its antiwar actions simply for the sake of proliferating those ideas. Our collaboration can stop there, as anything further than a strategic alliance would entail changing our own stances to appease Libertarianism’s reactionary aspects. We simply need to have the empire’s psyops discredited in the eyes of a greater amount of the people, then we’ll be better able to build the anti-imperialist coalition’s Marxist flank, educate the people on the other revolutionary ideas, and defeat the state.

This is what Rage Against the War Machine’s attackers, at least the ones who aren’t part of the pro-imperialist NAFO trolling group but rather the activist “left,” don’t want to see. They’ve made the false calculus that building a multi-tendency anti-imperialist coalition will help the right opportunists. The truth is that if we Marxists put in the work to advance anti-imperialist practice, if we help debunk the pro-war psyops, organize anti-NATO events, and incorporate geopolitics into our analysis of today’s conditions, we’ll make it so that the right opportunists are ultimately irrelevant to this story. They won’t matter if we manage to destroy the social system that makes their bourgeois politics, culture war demagoguery, and promotions of the anti-China psyops possible. If enabling the rightists is what one hopes to avoid as a Marxist, that shouldn’t make you so scared that you willingly cripple your own potential for attaining victory. You’re a Marxist, you have your principles, you see a path towards achieving power, if you stay consistent with these traits then you won’t have to worry about helping Marxism’s enemies. All you have to do is build the anti-imperialist coalition, combat imperialism’s narratives by any means necessary, and continue with your work to build the workers movement.

A Marxist who knows what they’re doing is too confident to be paralyzed by the complexity of their conditions, or so willing to second-guess a decision that they neglect clear opportunities for their bringing victory closer. They do what they need to do, and aren’t affected by whatever the radical liberals have to say about what they’re doing. The radical liberals aren’t on our side, so their input isn’t relevant to us. Not anymore than the pro-capitalist arguments from Libertarians are relevant to us. We have a goal, this being the liberation of the global working class, and we’ll achieve that goal with no apologies towards those who don’t like it.

This is what we’ll need to remember as the state’s radlib wreckers try to undermine our anti-imperialist practice in reaction to Rage Against the War Machine’s success. We must speak the truth about imperialism’s psyops and crimes without wavering, without being convinced that we’ve “done it the wrong way” or “haven’t been nuanced enough” by those whose goal is absolutely not to help the anti-imperialist movement. Any criticisms we accept must come from those in our internal spaces, and we therefore have to investigate whether somebody criticizing us is genuinely an anti-imperialist or LARPING as one. It’s easy to put a hammer and sickle in one’s profile picture, but harder to stand with a consistent anti-imperialist agenda. That’s why one can find so many who claim to be “Marxists,” but who both-sides Russia’s anti-fascist war or uncritically defend NATO’s atrocity propaganda against targets like Serbia. Don’t be intimidated into compromising your anti-imperialism. Act with a center that can’t be shaken. Only then can you win this struggle.

—————————————————————————

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.

American capitalism’s growing dysfunction is what makes it so vulnerable to revolt

The systemic breakdown that our socioeconomic system is creating has the potential to do more than worsen the suffering of the people. Capitalism has survived so long because it’s been able to exploit the crises it creates, to profit off of wars, depressions, pandemics, and environmental catastrophes. Yet in certain instances, these crises have instead produced victories for the working class. World War I made the Russian revolution possible, World War II made the Chinese revolution possible, the living standards crisis that the IMF engineered across the Global South made the formation of many anti-imperialist governments possible. When the capitalists disrupt society, they do so with the risk that the outcome will be not greater profits but an end to their rule.

This is the great hope for America’s working class as they’re subjected to a devastating series of events, brought about by how their government places corporate interests over the people’s safety or survival. This month’s train wreck and chemical contamination disaster, having taken place in a community appropriately named East Palestine, was a crime perpetrated by unaccountable ruling forces upon an underclass. Like the residents of Flint, Michigan, its people are viewed as disposable, their mass poisoning seen as worthwhile to satisfy the plastics lobby that was behind the contamination. In combination with the country’s inadequate rail regulations, the plastics industry has produced an actual explosion of pollution that’s made entire neighborhoods inhospitable; directly because of the leak, residents are getting sick.

Corporate crime and deregulation aren’t even half of the destructive risk factors that have been created by our society’s ubiquitous corporate takeover. The aging of the country’s infrastructure as funds go to waging endless wars, the selling of utilities to predatory companies, the dismantling of social services, the deregulation and consolidation of the banks, the exacerbation of inflation by a proxy war; they’ve all rendered the people without the resources to be able to absorb emergencies. The costs of our crises are multiplied by things as fundamental as our diet, which has been designed to cause mass obesity and thereby contributed to America’s unsurpassed Covid-19 deaths. The country’s role as the center of global capitalism, and therefore the primary arbiter of imperialist violence, is in great part to blame for what will be humanity’s most traumatic and long-term crisis. It’s largely because of the unparalleled institutional polluter which is the U.S. military that global warming has become severe enough to be on track for triggering multiple climate tipping points.

These events are the parts within one big crisis, the capitalist crisis. It’s the logical conclusion of an economic model that was made to function through perpetual growth. Should our society’s collapse advance enough, our government will start having to think in the same terms that countries undergoing famines or total war scenarios have historically had to: who should be allowed to access the limited supply of food, how to maintain order when a large fraction of society isn’t having its basic needs met, how to keep an economy running when keeping a “free market” model will inevitably make the situation untenable? It’s the latter two questions that our ruling class is already having to face. The neoliberal paradigm is producing shocks to society with growing frequency and severity, as well as driving up food insecurity. Should the state’s counterinsurgency efforts against our popular movements fail, these social stressors could lead to revolts that change the balance of class power.

As long as the state can keep doing what it did during the 2020 George Floyd uprising, and sufficiently neutralize mass movements, the ruling class can keep its system alive by furthering the capitalist contraction process. But this requires forcing ever larger numbers of people into the economy’s peripheries, de-proletarianizing them or driving down their wages through further inflation. As well as advancing the police militarization, infrastructural decay, and environmental destruction which inflame the people’s discontent. The decisive factor behind these developments producing a revolutionary scenario, rather than another mass outrage that goes nowhere, is a party that can lead the people to victory. Whose cadres have trained, organized, connected with the people, and spread proletarian education enough to be able to defeat the state.

Co-optation by the Democratic Party, anti-communist psyops, and infiltration of organizing spaces are at present the primary means the state is using to try to prevent revolutionary politics from growing that strong. They’re the optimal counterinsurgency tools, because should they become insufficient at stopping the rise of revolutionary organizing, they’ll have to be substituted with the inflammatory options of police repression and civil liberties crackdowns. In a situation where wealth inequality is at its highest in the last hundred years, and the foundations of our social system are breaking, it wouldn’t be sustainable for the state to enter into a war with its own people. The social unrest that the state seeks to end would simply continue to escalate, like how it has in Peru in response to the coup regime’s massacring anti-imperialist protesters.

The factor that’s making Peru’s situation ever likelier to happen in the USA is the insistence by our ruling class to maintain the neoliberal model. In terms of keeping stability during the climate crisis, the state’s best long term option is to transition into a war economy, like the kind the UK had during the Churchill era. Implementing a centrally planned economy was the only thing that could keep Britain from collapsing, and in the case of the climate crisis, states will need to go even further by making the de-privatization permanent. The states that don’t do this will face the same fate that Ukraine now is: a breakdown of governance and a huge loss of economic strength, due to the country’s continuing to further privatize during a total war scenario. Ukraine has shown that keeping neoliberalism during a sustained emergency equates to ensuring one’s future as a failed state. The pandemic has also proven this rule of a privatized economy being national suicide during a crisis. Whereas China’s dictatorship of the proletariat has avoided what would have for it been millions of Covid deaths, and has kept its economy relatively strong, highly neoliberalized countries like the U.S. and Brazil have had some of the most death and dysfunction.

The reason our ruling class clings to the neoliberal model is that at this stage in the decline of the rate of profits, the system is too weak to afford anything other than perpetually intensifying war against the working class. The raising prices, longer working hours, and disappearing public services that working people keep being subjected to are necessary for keeping profits up in a post-70s stagflation crisis global economy. In accordance with the dialectic of historical development, where opposing forces react to each other proportionally to how much impact their counterpart has, the forces of class struggle are increasingly working to create a new model. One that doesn’t have to exclusively function in the form of a downward spiral, like capitalism does. 

China is de-liberalizing, countries like Mexico and Chile are dismantling neoliberalism by the mandate of their labor movements, and countries like Venezuela and Cuba have not gone so far as to implement neoliberalism during their recent economic compromises. Peru’s return to the imperialist-preferred model has represented such an affront to the people’s material interests that the people have effectively withdrawn their consent to be governed. The extractive global order that American capitalism depends on is in decline, incrementally being replaced by China’s equitable new developmental program for the peripheral countries. That’s why the failure of the Russia sanctions represents a defeat for neoliberalism by extension: because Russia can’t be destabilized, U.S. hegemony and its exploitative global arrangement can’t survive. This gain for the class struggle applies to both sides of the conflict, because strikes are increasing in Russia as a reaction to the bourgeois state’s not protecting workers’ interests during wartime.

When the USA’s class conflict has escalated as much as Peru’s, or even Russia’s, the weakening of infrastructure, supply chains, and economies that our capitalist crisis has brought to most of the country’s communities will represent openings for revolutionaries to deal fatal blows against the system. The methods of systemic sabotage that Che Guevara described in his guide to guerrilla warfare would be made more effective by the destabilizing factors which American capitalism has already created for itself. If Che were here to see the modern state of the imperial center, he would find reasons for encouragement that weren’t present when the empire was at its peak. He was in essence able to predict our situation of great revolutionary potential when he said: “I envy you. You North Americans are very lucky. You are fighting the most important fight of all. You live in the belly of the beast.”

—————————————————————————

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.

Why Operation Z is a victory for class struggle: it’s shrunk the imperial sphere’s extractive reach

Whether you view Russia’s decision a year ago to intervene in Ukraine as correct from an anti-imperialist perspective depends on which metric you’re using in your strategic calculus. When one is only looking at the events from inside the imperialist benefactor countries, and the eastern European countries where Nazi nostalgia has created support for Ukrainian fascism, Operation Z’s impacts appear to be overall positive for the forces of reaction. When you look at the wider context, and account for the events from the wider globe, it’s obvious that Z’s impacts have been overall positive for the revolutionary forces. And that Z therefore is historically progressive in character.

To be able to correctly navigate our conditions, we have to analyze Z and other developments from that wider perspective. From a perspective that’s informed by a global, comprehensive way of viewing history. To only look at what’s happened inside the parts of the world the imperialists still solidly control, and make judgments about the correct courses of action based on this limited amount of information, is to embrace a myopic analytical framework. An adequate education on our conditions requires a willingness to consider what’s happening across the entire globe, in every place where developments like Z are relevant. Only then can we learn the right lessons from these developments.

In the case of the Ukraine conflict, a global analysis firstly shows that Russia’s decision, made via pressure from the country’s communists to combat the fascist menace in Kiev, was strategically sound. Not as strategically sound as it should have been, as Putin made the war harder by refusing to intervene for the first eight years after the Euromaidan coup. Yet still sound enough that it’s since managed to accelerate the transition to a multipolar world order, and therefore to the post-American order which communists ultimately seek to replace multipolarity with. Multipolarity is only one necessary step in the process of fully defeating the U.S. empire, and of completing the victory of the globe’s workers. 

Z has hastened this process by weakening U.S. hegemony, prompting the vast majority of the world to side against Washington on the Russia question and thereby rendering the empire more isolated. This has better enabled Russia to both avoid being destabilized by the sanctions, and assist China in building a global developmental project which is making neo-colonialism untenable. Because of what Russia’s communists helped get Putin to do, the peripheral countries are now closer to gaining the economic self-reliance to be able to reject Washington’s predatory loans.

It’s these victories for the revolutionary forces on the global scale which have rendered all the “benefits” this proxy war has brought the imperialists ultimately not worth the costs of provoking Russia. The expansion of NATO, the further militarization of Europe, the opportunities for corporations to profit from the conflict, the suppression of antiwar voices, the solidification of pro-NATO narratives in our discourse, all of these “victories” for the empire are hollow. They’re hollow because they’ve been gained in the context of Washington failing to achieve the proxy war’s foremost goal, which was to sanction Russia effectively enough that it could be destabilized along with China. Without that geopolitical victory, all the empire’s “gains” from the war are only momentary, coming at the cost of the acceleration of class conflict. Because without the restoration of U.S. hegemony which Russia’s destruction would have brought, the conditions of the core can only continue to become untenable. Amid the decline of neo-colonial profits, our ruling class has to keep imposing more austerity to maintain American capitalism. Which produces further discontent among the American people, and greater probability of revolt.

As revolutionaries in the core, the lesson we can learn from this is that we now pose more of a threat to the ruling class than was the case prior to multipolarity’s rise. Our bourgeoisie’s system of control has been weakened, because it’s a system that depends on perpetually expanding its exploitation of the peripheral world. The world insulated within the walls of colonialism and imperialism can’t function on its own, it needs to be able to rob the places which it shuts out. 

Prior to the war, many of these places had already rendered themselves unable to be exploited by adopting socialism. Cuba and the DPRK are the ones most advanced along this communist developmental path, and have naturally been some of the biggest targets for U.S. sanctions. With Washington’s decoupling from China in the 2010s, to the effect that Vietnam is now America’s big Asian manufacturing source, U.S. capital became cut off from the profits afforded by the productive forces that U.S. corporations had given up to China. Then with the full decoupling from Russia, these corporations further lost market access. They’re now losing even more of their extractive reach as the Belt and Road Initiative expands. All that’s left is the completion of the BRI and the coming of a new wave of revolution, which will make the empire too weak to be able to persuade countries like Vietnam to stay loyal towards its “rules-based” international order.

Through the Obama-style “anti-corruption” coup model, the imperialists are still able to delay the liberation of neo-colonies like Peru. But even these kinds of “victories” for the imperialists are proving to also be hollow, because the global anti-imperialist movement is growing stronger. It’s growing stronger because those in the peripheries have no choice but to resist the empire. The empire has driven them to an unprecedented state of desperation by imposing additional IMF measures during a pandemic, a climate crisis, and a global supply chain breakdown caused by Washington’s proxy war. As a consequence, Peru’s coup regime continues to be undermined by an irrepressible resistance movement. The unrest is overwhelming, it’s made tourist sites have to be shut down and made the State Department’s Peace Corps members have to flee the country. The regime is only holding onto control through blunt force, which is never a good sign for the survival of a governance project.

Such is the situation that imperial rule finds itself in more broadly: it increasingly can no longer function so much through economic leverage, placating privileged elements of the people, or narrative control. The sanctions have had to rely on sacrificing Europe’s economy, and have still been insufficient; the social base of well-paid workers that imperialism depends on is shrinking as inflation drives down American and European living standards; the Ukraine psyop has failed across the peripheral countries, and is at growing risk of failing in the core countries as workers become discontent over the war’s impacts on them. Washington’s neo-colonial states have to routinely massacre their own people to keep revolution from happening. And Washington itself can only keep neo-colonies like Haiti from breaking free by employing military force, a tactic that’s long been effective for it but only when that’s not the only tactic available to it. 

Imperialism works best when it can employ not just hard power, but numerous other means for maintaining the extractive arrangement, from utilizing psyops to letting certain populations share in the imperial wealth. The range within which these tools are effective or possible is shrinking, forcing the walled-in imperial sphere to become even more of an insulated fortress.

The fragility of the system we live under has been revealed. As soon as U.S. hegemony became threatened, our ruling class began to worry about the future of its rule. The imperial project is having to remake itself in miniature form, turning eastern Europe into a new source of extraction by imposing further privatization policies onto it. The exploitation of the core’s proletariat continues to be intensified, even after half a century of progressively crueler neoliberal austerity. Depending on how effectively our liberation movements are able to throw off the influence of imperialism’s psyops, and bring the people into the anti-imperialist struggle, the state will have to maintain control through massive repression. 

This is what the erosion of civil liberties throughout the War on Terror has been about. The War on Terror was the catalyst for the recent foreign policy failures which precipitated the empire’s decline, so the empire has had to contract. Using these same self-destructive militarist projects as a pretext, our ruling class has created the legal precedents for an undisguised dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. A dictatorship that can only be overthrown by building a mass movement, a movement that’s internationalist in nature and connected to the global fight against imperial rule.

—————————————————————————

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 Ukraine proxy war has failed. This means a vast acceleration of America’s internal class struggle.

Why do I say the U.S. empire’s Ukraine proxy war has failed? Because by the unspoken admission of the empire’s own narrative managers, Ukraine is no longer a narrative asset. It’s now a narrative liability. The propagandists have admitted this by pivoting away from Ukraine as their rhetorical focus during recent months, now moreso seeking to co-opt the liberation struggles which have grown amid the latest law enforcement atrocities. This new goal of theirs is dependent on the Ukraine debate, with its new perils for the imperialists, never again becoming prominent in our discourse. They want us to forget about it.

The imperialists always knew Ukraine would never be able to militarily win this war, and in the last half-year this has been shown by Russia’s managing to carry out vast new mobilizations at the same time Ukraine has had to struggle to hold on to key strategic locations. Washington never expected Kiev would achieve its strategic objectives, because that was never the point. The foremost motive behind Washington’s provoking Russia into taking action was to weaken Russia so much in the following conflict that the country gets destabilized and balkanized, leaving China vulnerable in the new great-power competition. Without the fulfillment of this objective, the arms profits and NATO expansions the war has brought will be surpassed by the drawbacks the conflict is having for the empire. Those drawbacks being the decline in American and European living standards caused by the sanctions, and the acceleration of the transition to a multipolar world.

Because the peripheral countries have rejected Washington’s calls for participating in the Russia sanctions, the costs of trying to economically crush Russia have had to be foisted onto Europe, and onto the American working class people who’ve been strained by the inflation. Because America and Europe are no longer as economically powerful as they used to be, increasingly rivaled by China and its growing global developmental project, they’ve proven unable to sufficiently weaken Russia. The consequence is that a year after the war began, it’s clear our ruling class will never see the reversal in the geopolitical power balance which would make the war’s sacrifices worthwhile for them. They’ll never see a divided and recolonized Russia, or a subdued PRC. All they’ll see is a population that continues to economically suffer, and that will more and more desire to take away the ill-gotten wealth of the elites. The last year’s gains for multipolarity won’t be reversed, this is the new international normal.

The point was always coming when Russia would gain too many victories for the media’s illusion of imminent Ukrainian victory (which it was still promoting just last fall) to still be worth using as a propaganda tool. What the warmongers didn’t anticipate was that when this happened, the empire would be starting to face the consequences of a failed geopolitical gamble. A gamble so big and so reckless that it could prove fatal for the rule of the American bourgeoisie.

At this stage, Ukraine is a radioactive topic for the empire. The different lies that made up the Ukraine psyop are being categorically debunked through new revelations, like the ones exposed by Seymour Hersh’s recent investigation into how the U.S. orchestrated the Nord Stream explosion. And the psyop machine is ultimately defenseless against these journalistic efforts, because Ukraine has expired as an effective narrative weapon. Like Vietnam, Iraq, and so many of the empire’s other wars from its last half-century of incremental decline, it hasn’t brought the new neo-colonial benefits it was supposed to produce. 

America is no longer in the phase of rising imperial power, where each war means an expansion of its capital strength and greater capacity to create a bribed labor aristocracy. The labor aristocracy has been shrinking since the implementation of neoliberalism, leaving a hollowed out country where most people are effectively living in poverty. Ukraine was the foreign policy failure that facilitated the entry into an unprecedented stage of American crisis. A stage that parallels the one of the Russian empire during World War I, which was followed by a workers revolution. That’s what’s different about the obsolescence of the Ukraine psyop, compared to the obsolescence of the Vietnam or Iraq psyops: Washington’s foreign policy defeat by Russia has catalyzed the coming of the most dire era the empire has ever been in. An accelerated retreat of imperial power is now guaranteed, along with an acceleration of America’s internal social crises.

What remains to be determined is whether the workers will win in America following its imperial collapse. Victory for the workers is never guaranteed, it always depends on how well the revolutionaries navigate their conditions. In our case, liberation depends on whether we can overcome the multiple layers of counterinsurgency that the imperial state has created to try to stop us in the midst of social breakdown. The system is capable of surviving this crisis in a diminished form. Corporations profit off of catastrophes like the climate’s destabilization, and neoliberalism has provided a model for letting capital survive its contraction. The deterioration of the people’s livelihoods can only lead to revolution if we build the mass mobilization networks and cadres to be able to defeat the state.

The counterinsurgency’s initial layer is narrative control, which keeps the people from mobilizing in a truly threatening way. This is where imperialism’s psyops still hold power. Washington’s narrative on Ukraine has so far overall failed to compel the people across the peripheral countries, but has (for now) mostly convinced the people in the core countries, because the core countries aren’t yet as far along in their process of capitalist collapse. Their bourgeois systems still have the relative strengths afforded by being benefactors of neo-colonial extraction. Their people, even after half a century of neoliberal living standards decline, haven’t yet become materially detached enough from imperialist interests to view the empire with the same intuitively hostile mentality which most of the globe does. But this situation is fluid, increasingly fluid. These “benefits” that Americans see from imperialism are at this point marginal. They exist in the context of severe exploitation of the country’s working class, to the extent that almost two-thirds of Americans now live paycheck to paycheck.

There are still plenty of individuals in the core who cling to pro-imperialist ideology out of a corrupt desire to continue benefiting from imperialism. There will always be individuals like this for as long as imperialism remains in existence. The unprecedented thing about our situation is that these decidedly imperialist-invested actors have become marginalized by the intensifying breakdown of the empire. The majority of society has become proletarianized by the austerity policies of the last two generations, and this has made them compatible with anti-imperialist ideas. The only missing factor is the proliferation of these ideas to the people on a sufficiently large scale.

Most Americans only believe the Ukraine psyop at present because it’s the only story they’ve so far been exposed to. When they’re exposed to the anti-imperialist account of the events within and surrounding Ukraine, many of them will be receptive to it. Thereby, many of them will be receptive to the additional revolutionary ideas which are tied to the anti-imperialist account of Ukraine, from Marxist-Leninist theory to the information debunking imperialism’s other psyops. 

Rage Against the War Machine is bringing the counterarguments to the Ukraine psyop to a mainstream audience. For this strategic reason, communists must support it. It’s breaking the narrative grip the Democratic Party holds over our liberation movements, creating the possibility for revolutionary politics to replace reformist politics as the vehicle through which these movements are represented. When this defeat of the Democrats is complete, the class struggle will escalate, and we’ll be prompted to work to overcome the counterinsurgency’s other layers.

—————————————————————————

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.