Left sectarian attacks on Rage Against the War Machine enabled the indictments of black communists

Image from Tampa Bay Times

When Marxists Speak Out wrote their recent May Day statement The Escalation of the World War Danger and the Need for a New Communist International, they were prompted to respond to a bit of drama. Not drama that they or the others in their principled anti-imperialist tendency were at all responsible for, but drama that had been entirely started by those they were having to critique:

We do not want war, but nor are we pacifists. We must break with the politics of pacifism and Russophobia. The organizers and leaders of the March 18th protests in the USA for example tried to isolate and censure the organizations that support a Russian victory over imperialism in the war and instead aimed to pressure the imperialist Democratic Party that is waging the war. Such politics only cowers in the face of public opinion and serves imperialist governance. No progress will be made appealing to either of the vicious imperialist Republican or Democrat wings of the US ruling class.

To the credit of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, the organization behind the March 18th event, it’s since co-sponsored the legal defense fund for the black communists who’ve been indicted. The point Marxists Speak out make is that when members of the antiwar movement attack others in the struggle in the ways that these organizers did, it has a completely counterproductive effect. The correct practice for a Marxist is to be principled in their criticism, and even then, there’s a responsibility to investigate what one aims to criticize and rescind that criticism should the facts prove one wrong. By being sectarian against Rage Against the War Machine—the coalition of largely pro-Russia organizations that the statement refers to—these actors on the left who view the movement through a lens of competition have helped the state’s aims. What the state wants is the narrative precedents required for carrying out these indictments, and all the future repression that’s been made possible by these actions.

The Department of Justice couldn’t have done this without there still being a lack of an anti-imperialist movement that’s strong enough to challenge its activities. These indictments were carried out in reaction to how much strength the movement has gained compared to a few years ago, but the movement still has to attain more influence to be able to politically challenge the DOJ. Unlike the CIA, which operates with a scary level of undemocratic impunity, the DOJ can only function as long as there’s enough popular will to support its activities, or at least enough of an absence of organized opposition. By targeting RAWM with unprincipled criticisms, then refusing to properly investigate what RAWM’s nature and purpose truly are, the sectarian elements in our movement have helped let the DOJ feel comfortable enough to carry out this attack against freedom of speech and assembly.

More impactful has been the absence of solidarity with the indictment’s targets from the left’s most prominent figures and organizations, such as Sanders, AOC, the “Squad,” and the DSA. It’s ironic that despite how much the supporters of these kinds of reformists claim that pro-Russian orgs like PCUSA and CPI should be treated as untouchable, those two orgs are some of the only ones that have actually come out with solidarity statements for the indictment’s targets. The members of these two orgs have even shown solidarity with the Black Hammer leader who’s been caught up in the charges, simply because they’re principled in their opposition towards political repression. If somebody is acting like Black Hammer’s own contradictions—however strange and even disgusting they’ve been—vindicate the actions of the feds or represent the primary issue in this particular situation, they’re not being principled. The left’s opportunists would say that PCUSA and CPI are simply supporting the indictment’s targets out of opportunism. But if these pro-Russian orgs are the ones that should be distrusted so intensely, why have the anti-Russian orgs been so silent on the DOJ’s actions? What’s more opportunistic than refusing to challenge the DOJ out of expediency?

The reason why there’s such a lack of principle within the left, and within the parts of the communist movement that view “the left” as the only element of the people worth trying to reach, is that in the imperial center there’s an incentive for leftists not to prioritize winning. Most of what we in America call the left isn’t actually concerned about victory, or else the class struggle would by now at the least be in a vastly more advanced stage. What it’s primarily concerned with is engaging in “movementism,” where actors build political projects as an end in itself. Or with building platforms within the “left” discourse spaces, wherein one can only maximize one’s popularity by adhering to a set of approved ideas. Trying to fit into such an insular and toxic environment is not conducive to a serious type of Marxist analysis. At best, it allows for selectively using quotes from Marxist theorists to support one’s assertions, while ignoring the parts of this theory which vindicate stances that challenge the circle’s beliefs.

During the era of the resistance to the Ukraine proxy war, one of these pieces of theory that conventionally respectable left spaces reject is Lenin’s conclusion about finding the “real masses.” Lenin provided a proper perspective for what relatively small societal elements these insular spaces represent, saying the parts of the labor movement which ally with imperialism are the “privileged minority” of well-bribed workers. There’s a quiet majority of the workers who are compatible with the anti-imperialist stance, we only don’t hear about them because they lack access to any bourgeois platforms. Those among them who are already involved in the anti-imperialist movement represent the most advanced element of the workers, the ones we should prioritize reaching at this stage as opposed to those who reject anti-imperialism from a “left” angle. 

Just because somebody is on the left of the political spectrum, or purports to be the most “radical,” doesn’t mean they’re compatible with revolutionary politics. Given the insidious influence the Democratic Party has over the left, and how easy it is for the “ultra” lefts to aggressively side against anti-imperialist stances out of misplaced righteousness, these types can be among the most dangerous. We need to build connections with those who are most compatible with the pro-Russia, pro-China, and otherwise revolutionary orientations. Not with the “left” actors who will betray the class struggle as soon as they find a contradiction in one of the countries that’s fighting U.S. hegemony.

Which is where we must take example from another lesson of Lenin’s: be willing to work with those who aren’t communists when we have the organizational strength to act as equals to them, and when allying with them is overall beneficial to the struggle. The key part is when we have the sufficient institutional strength. Because if we were to work with our opponents on social and economic issues while lacking organization, we would simply be tailing the right. That’s not what the communists who joined the Rage Against the War Machine coalition earlier this spring have been doing. They had the institutional support of the CPI, of the American Student Union, or of the PCUSA. The latter of which built the coalition’s left flank by organizing a RAWM rally in the Bay Area, making communists the dominant organizational force within the coalition on my side of the country. They proved they have the credibility as movement-builders to be able to collaborate with forces like the Libertarians, without adopting Libertarianism’s right-wing ideas as a consequence.

When I’ve told this story about the PCUSA’s role in RAWM, even skeptics of RAWM have at least taken it into consideration in their thinking about how to organize. But that’s only the skeptics who are serious Marxists. The ones who aren’t serious, but rather leftists or “Marxists” who lack a real desire to win, have reacted to it by saying that PCUSA’s helping the coalition is simply another reason to oppose RAWM. This is because these types, being opportunist sectarians, have embraced the lies about the party that got propagated last year. The lies from the wreckers who hacked into the PCUSA’s site, and replaced its content with a doc consisting of allegations that have been entirely disproven. These opportunists are still willing to promote those smears because smears are the only way they have hope for discrediting the project that anti-imperialists are carrying out.

This is the project to overcome the obstacle we can’t ignore, which is U.S. hegemony. Which isn’t to say that revolution in the core can’t necessarily happen without first ending U.S. hegemony, rather that the psyops which perpetuate American dominance are at this stage the primary factors holding back the escalation of class struggle. As long as we accommodate these psyops within radical circles, the Democratic Party will maintain de facto dominance over liberation movements, and communism won’t be able to become mainstream again except in its truncated “Vote Blue” form. We’re making progress at changing the power balance within these spaces. The ongoing existence and strengthening of RAWM’s coalition is a hopeful development. As is the fact that the less serious, culture war-focused figures who used RAWM as a profile-boosting opportunity haven’t joined this coalition. Those who will lead the effort to combat imperialism’s psyops, and in turn propell the class struggle to victory even if they’re not communists, are those who’ve realized that U.S. imperialism is the globe’s primary contradiction. And that no true progress will be made until we’ve sufficiently fought against it.

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To escalate the class struggle, we must end the Democratic Party’s influence over the communist movement

The fight against NATO is a revolutionary movement. Its character is so innately radical that it’s proving impossible for liberals to co-opt, as you can’t transform an effort to destroy U.S. imperialism’s crucial tool into something sanitized and safe. It’s a threat towards the ruling class, a threat that can at this point only be truly fought through direct repression. Which is what the RESTRICT Act, and the recent DOJ indictments against black communists for “Russian interference,” are about advancing. This persecution campaign is a reaction to the weakening of the Democratic Party, and of COINTELPRO, as instruments for suppressing revolutionary politics. With the rise of the movement to end the Ukraine proxy war, these tools for counterinsurgency are becoming less useful, and must increasingly be replaced with undisguised war against our rights to speak and assemble.

This is why from a perspective of developing the class struggle, the coming of this new era of repression is encouraging. It shows that as inequalities and imperial decline have gotten more severe throughout recent years, we revolutionaries have succeeded at making the proletarian movement more and more of a threat. We’ve been successful enough that the capitalist state now sees it as necessary to sacrifice its “democratic” pretexts, in the hope that this will be sufficient for defeating us.

The post-modernist thought that the Democratic Party uses to keep its grip over the left

The way we’ve succeeded to this extent is by largely breaking from the influence of the Democratic Party. And the way we’ll keep up this series of victories is by taking our rejection of the party even further, by becoming more radical in our opposition towards the imperial order.

The way that much of the working class movement in America initially freed itself from the Democrats was by abandoning its strategic alliance with them. The Bernie Sanders movement brought in a great mass of proletarians into politics, then presented them with a choice: work within the Democratic Party, or explore alternatives. As we saw the DNC rig the primary, then Sanders endorse Clinton, then the “democratic socialist” movement’s newer representatives like AOC prove themselves to be reformists and opportunists, those among us with principles had to stop following Sanders and the anti-revolutionary parts of his ideas. Many of us joined the communist movement, which itself has a myriad of paths to choose from. Paths that, in our post-Soviet age where liberalism has gained such an insidious grip over activist spaces, don’t all lead towards revolution. Even if they come with the “communist” label.

Even prior to the USSR’s dissolution, and the destructive impact this event had on America’s own communist movement, any serious workers movement had been replaced by a version of the “left” that’s compatible with imperialism. After McCarthyism overwhelmingly wiped out communism, Herbert Marcuse and his CIA-tied Frankfurt School propagated a distorted new version of “socialism.” One based not in genuine class struggle, but in the ruling class-compatible ideas which make up the “New Left.” The destruction of the Black Panther Party ensured that communism wouldn’t become mainstream again for a long time. And when the USSR fell, those in the United States who claimed to be Marxists but who shared Gorbachev’s class collaborationist impulses deradicalized their own section of the struggle. Angela Davis, and other leaders who had been informed by Marcuse, created a new CPUSA splinter group that rejected the “authoritarian” socialist model. By default, this reformist element became the new dominant mode of “communism” in the United States.

The legacy of this American equivalent of Perestroika has been what Gabriel Rockhill calls the “global theory industry.” A business where public intellectuals like Slavoj Zizek build careers by selling “theory” that’s based not in proven realities about the workings of class conflict, but in loose, post-modern analyses which conceal how to actually bring change. In Theodor Adorno, one of the Frankfurt School’s original social science scholars, Rockhill identifies the class origins of this impulse to merely analyze capitalism’s contradictions rather than take the practical steps towards rectifying those problems:

Adorno’s fierce rejection of actually existing socialism was also on full display in his exchange with Alfred Sohn-Rethel. The latter asked him if Negative Dialectics had anything to say about changing the world, and if the Chinese Cultural Revolution was part of the ‘affirmative tradition’ he condemned. Adorno replied that he rejected the “moral pressure” from “official Marxism” to put philosophy into practice. “Nothing but despair can save us,” he asserted with his signature panache of petty-bourgeois melancholia. Adding, for good measure, that the events in communist China were no cause for hope, he explained with memorable insistence that his entire thinking life had been resolutely pitted against this form—and presumably others—of socialism: “I would have to deny everything I have thought my whole life long if I were to admit to feeling anything but horror at the sight of it.” Adorno’s open indulgence in despair and simultaneous abhorrence of actually existing socialism are not simply idiosyncratic, personal reactions but are affects arising from a class position. 

“The representatives of the modern labor movement,” Lenin wrote in 1910, “find that they have plenty to protest against but nothing to despair about.” In a description that anticipated Adorno’s petty-bourgeois gloom, the leader of the world’s first successful socialist revolution then proceeded to explain that “despair is typical of those who do not understand the causes of evil, see no way out, and are incapable of struggle.”

The version of “radicalism” that maintains post-modernism’s dominance

What the three-letter agencies did by cultivating the New Left was combine this petty-bourgeois infantile disorder of discontent that lacks serious action plans, with the elevated passion of radicalism. Thereby came the rise of petty-bourgeois radicalism. The consequence of petty-bourgeois radicalism’s domination over “left” organizing and discourse spaces has been a consistent lack of a serious threat towards the capitalist state, even as this state has intensified its siege upon the working class.

The most common manifestations of petty-bourgeois radical thinking throughout this era are well-known among Marxists: insistence on voting blue as the Democratic Party grows more brazenly pro-imperialist every election cycle; continued vilification of existing socialism that makes use of modern psyops like the Uyghur genocide hoax; sectarian attacks against “Stalinists” or “Dengists” that do nothing besides feed an insular toxic discourse. In the post-Operation Z era, new manifestations of this thinking have appeared. To seize today’s opportunity for escalating the class conflict, serious Marxists must be aware of these ideological threats.

The most obvious type of this thinking, the one that’s been easiest for serious Marxists to reject, is the reinforcement of pro-NATO narratives. The efforts to minimize the Nazi policies and ideology of Ukraine’s government, deny the 2014 U.S. coup within the country, and obscure Operation Z’s humanitarian nature are intuitive things for properly informed Marxists to combat. Yet there still isn’t a consensus among self-described Marxist-Leninists on the most important among these issues, which is the justifiably of Russia’s operation. Not everybody in these circles recognizes Z’s anti-fascist nature, and in many cases, that’s not because they’re simply under-informed about historical context like the Donbass shelling. It often has to do with a particular type of framework that these individuals have for analyzing our own conditions. A framework which maintains the Democratic Party’s insidious influence over our movement.

This is the idea set that says only the left is worth trying to build a party base off of. It’s a dogma that goes against Lenin’s call to go “lower and deeper” into the people to find the most advanced among them, but that doesn’t dissuade the dogma’s adherents. This is because they view leftists as synonymous with the most advanced elements. That you can find many “leftists” who are in effect imperialist agents, and who’ve shifted closer towards the neocon stance since Russiagate, is ignored within this framework. As is the increased compatibility with the anti-imperialist movement that’s been emerging among libertarian-leaning conservatives throughout the new cold war. If somebody isn’t on the left, they’re automatically considered less valuable than those who identify as leftists, even as “the left” is showing itself not to be reliable on anti-imperialism or even on class struggle.

This is how the Democratic Party maintains its ability to co-opt liberation struggles during this stage in capitalism’s crisis, even as the social base for our socioeconomic system has dwindled. As long as the communist movement is primarily guided by a thinking that considers appealing to liberals more important than taking a principled anti-imperialist stance, the Democrats won’t see a serious challenge from the communists. Only an effort by the communists to tail them. 

Trying to replace anti-imperialism & class struggle with a compatible version of “anti-colonialism”

Informing this opportunistic kind of practice is a deeper idea. An idea that the New Left and its Frankfurt School theoreticians created to divert radicals away from becoming truly offensive towards the ruling class. This root concept behind today’s anti-imperialist deficiency within the left is articulated by Laine Sheldon-Houle, who’s coming from a Trotskyist perspective yet is able to diagnose a profound theoretical failure by the representatives of our liberation struggles:

The defeat of revolutionary movements in the 1970s allowed the pendulum to swing to the right and ushered in the era of Reagan and Thatcher. The left was ideologically in a state of retreat. In this period, postcolonialism and intellectuals like Edward Said grew more and more influential. Postcolonialism is an offshoot of postmodernism which places an enormous amount of emphasis on subjectivity, arguing that all knowledge is subjective. Postcolonial intellectuals were heavily influenced by the subjectivity of postmodernism and used those methods to write about the culture and psychology of colonized people as a group, often pitted against the colonizers, settlers or simply white people. For example, Said writes: “For any European during the 19th century {in what he could say about the orient} was consequently a racist and imperialist and almost totally ethnocentric.” Painting an entire continent as “ethnocentric” with one brush! The infiltration of postmodernism into the anti-imperialist struggle detracted from the class struggle, from the disobedience, strikes and revolutions which had won independence and real concessions in the past, and demanded that all effort be placed on a cultural, psychological or even a linguistic struggle against imperialism.

There’s a difference between “post-colonial” thinkers like Said, who are merely on the broad left, and Marxist fighters against colonial thought like Fanon. The latter of whom is nonetheless often cited by the “Marxist” propagators of radical liberalism, despite their own thinking being closer to the post-modernist academic orthodoxy than to what Fanon actually believed. As Palestine advocate Bashir Abu-Manneh has observed, favored academic sources on colonialism like Said have sought to erase the Marxist-Leninist essence of Fanon:

Ignoring Fanon’s socialist commitments is also evident in Edward Said’s reading of him in Culture and Imperialism, which is historically sparked by the First Intifada and Said’s critical disenchantment with Palestinian elite nationalism. If Said is profoundly engaged with Fanon’s politics of decolonization and universalist humanism, he nonetheless fails to even mention the word “socialism” in association with Fanon, let alone read him as part of the long tradition of the socialist critique of imperialism. This dominant postcolonial disavowal of socialist Fanon is also articulated by Robert J. C. Young when he bluntly states that Fanon is not interested in “the ideas of human equality and justice embodied in socialism.” (Young subscribes to Bhabha’s reading of Fanon’s colonized as responding through violence to the psychic drama of an identity split by power. Young calls this “the theoretical problem” for Fanon.)

The petty-bourgeois radicals who claim that Fanon’s theory vindicates their anti-Marxist stances—like that the interests of white workers are fundamentally opposed to the interests of nonwhites, or that America’s proletariat overall represents a labor aristocracy—are merely the radical wing of these distorters of Fanon. There’s a reason why you don’t find emphasis on the supposed revolutionary incompatibility of white proletarians within Fanon’s works, or on the notion that American and European proletarians are all labor aristocrats. It’s because Fanon was interested not merely in posing a critical viewpoint for the sake of it, like the post-modernists are, but in critiquing colonialism and white supremacy for a concrete purpose: to advance the class struggle. 

Since Fanon was serious about class struggle, he didn’t truly provide petty-bourgeois radicals with material that vindicates their anti-revolutionary ideas. Only with sound theoretical material that these radicals use to bolster their own credibility by saying they align with it, while saying many things that Fanon never said. And that have the effect of hindering his goal of furthering the proletarian movement. If Fanon were navigating today’s conditions in America, would he be one of these people who primarily emphasize the racial differences between the workers? Or would he be doing what’s consistent with his Marxist-Leninist principles, and working to unite the proletariat? The latter option is compatible with his anti-colonial ideas. One can hold these ideas, while utilizing the practice that’s best for winning power under our conditions.

By co-opting not just Fanon, but the original builders of socialism like Lenin and Stalin, these actors who fall within Parenti’s “anything but class” designation are gatekeeping the ideas we need to become more effective revolutionaries. The Democratic Party’s grip over the communist movement is weakening, but it can only be fully ended when we’ve embraced a practice which can unite the people behind the class struggle. The backlash to the Ukraine proxy war provides an opportunity for raising revolutionary consciousness, and for mobilizing the people. It’s proving wrong the essential notion of the compatible left, which is that revolution can only be realized by mobilizing those who are already approved members of the “radical” circles. Not only is the theory that one must accept in order to be included within these circles based in post-modern anti-Marxism, but these circles are not the arenas in which society’s fate will be decided. 

The true arena of power is the broad mass of the people. Who we can’t bring towards revolution without applying Lenin’s principle of raising the average worker up to the level of the ideologically trained cadre member. The opportunistic actors whose status depends on these insular “left” circles are not interested in educating the people in this way, and that shows in how their practice overwhelmingly doesn’t consist of fighting imperialism’s psyops. It almost entirely consists of reinforcing the post-modern theories that keep them popular within their fandom spaces, creating an online equivalent of those academic theory industry centers. 

We can’t win power while functioning within a mode of thought that’s so detached from the people’s practical realities. The main thing that’s on the average person’s mind at the moment is the inflation crisis, and we can provide them with answers on that by drawing attention towards U.S. hegemony and its war machine. That’s the type of ideological struggle which can connect us to the working class. It’s the type of practice that can complete the Democratic Party’s downfall, make communism mainstream again, and force the state to finish its transition towards treating us as an urgent threat.

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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.

What Parenti warned against: making the workers’ unity impossible by fixating on their racial differences

When Michael Parenti polemicized against what he called the “anything but class” left, he was describing a pattern of thinking that communists will need to expunge from our movement in order to defeat the state. This is the impulse to emphasize the differences between the workers, more than the things that unite the workers. To focus so much on the distinctions between white workers, black workers, Native workers, “professional managerial class” workers (which some now foolishly include service workers in the definition of), and so on that the rhetoric of these ABC leftists has the effect of making a unified workers movement less attainable.

I say “the effect” and not “the intent” because within radical spaces, the idealistic actors who put forth this rhetoric believe they’re doing the most revolutionary thing possible by emphasizing race or other identitarian distinctions so hard. When confronted on how their practice hinders proletarian unity, I’ve seen them fall back on the idea that they still seek to unite the workers. The problem is that as long as they continue their present model of practice, they won’t be able to actually show the workers why they must unite. They won’t be able to offer a serious labor movement, only a social media feed of condemnations against the moral character of the people.

And I’m talking about not only the white workers, but the ones of all colors and relationships to settler-colonialism. As even though the proletarians from the Native and African diaspora communities are the ones the ABC left seeks to reach out to, that the ABC left treats these demographics like the only ones with revolutionary potential means this left won’t be able to build an effective workers movement. A movement that’s capable of establishing strong ties to the broad category of proletarians, including the proletarians who’ve been victims of colonialism. The ABC left ironically hinders the liberation efforts of the peoples it claims to represent.

This practice is ineffective because it rejects the idea of majoritarianism, and by extension the idea of a popular front. Both of which are crucial for the success of a workers revolution. Unless you’re in a place like Israel, where the predominant population gets massive benefits from colonial theft and inhabits a tiny geographical space, as a communist it’s indispensable for you to be a majoritarian. The conditions of the United States are distinct from Israel’s in that the U.S. is a settler state so massive, its internal population is mostly compatible with revolutionary politics. It for the most part can’t keep nonwhites from existing within its borders, to the effect that whites will soon no longer be in the majority. And its white population has long included a large proportion of impoverished people, people who don’t have an equivalent among Israel’s settlers.

Even if the whites of rural Appalachia and other destitute places can still be called “settlers,” that term is absurdly reductive when applied to them without any additional context. This context is that the USA built an industrial economy so vast, enormous sections of its own citizens needed to be forced to the economy’s margins so profits could be kept up. And plenty of these people the ruling class has discarded are descendants of the same European immigrants who the empire initially used to build itself up. 

That these immigrants had the ability to assimilate into the “white” family, and become immune from racism, is one of the tools the ruling class has used to reinforce its power. The U.S. empire has survived so long by cultivating a social base of labor aristocrats who aren’t subject to the struggles of the actual working class, and this labor aristocracy has naturally been for the most part white. What the ABC left does is assist the ruling class in this tactic of preventing revolution via the elevation of a favored demographic. By emphasizing the ways the material interests of whites differ from those of other demographics, without accounting for the experiences of class exploitation which workers of all colors can relate to, they act like these interests give the white workers a primary material reason for betraying the revolution. When truly it’s the other way around: all proletarians by definition have a primary interest in proletarian revolution, which inextricably involves the decolonization of the United States. And because there are far more proletarians than labor aristocrats in the United States, to act like most Americans are labor aristocrats is to obstruct the revolutionary struggle.

The effect these ideas have on white radicals is ironically one which gives them the mentality of white saviorism. Because these radicals see themselves as the exceptional whites, the ones who’ve figured out special knowledge about the world that the other whites aren’t capable of ever absorbing, they come to view revolution as something that can be achieved through essentially magical means. The route to victory, so claims this ideological strain, doesn’t run through efforts to connect with the people on the systemic injustices that impact them. It involves condemning the majority for not embracing the esoteric theoretical brand from within one’s own insular online discourse circle. The brands I speak of are esoteric not because their ideas are necessarily incorrect, but because the way their arbiters operate keeps them alienated from the majority. We can bring education about tribal sovereignty, New Afrika, and other important pieces of liberation theory to the people, yet only if we do so by connecting with the people on the issues they have an immediate practical incentive to be concerned about. Otherwise there’s going to be a fundamental gap in self-awareness that hinders communication with the uninitiated.

When one’s practice is based in this moralistic mentality, rather than in the analytical mentality that Marxists must have, the impact their practice has is not beneficial to the revolutionary cause. That’s why Parenti warned us about the anything but class mentality: it nurtures an impulse among the workers who’ve absorbed it to find reasons for fighting among themselves, as opposed to building the proletarian movement. The difference between serious Marxist-Leninist theory, and the theory offered by the left deviationists, is that Marxism-Leninism is actually capable of speaking to the people on the issues that are relevant to their lives.

The good news is that there are relatively few workers who actually embrace those anti-revolutionary types of theory. The ones who overwhelmingly absorb it, and who are most vocal about promoting it, are those in the “privileged minority” that Lenin identified as the opportunistic element within the left. This is the same element that Lenin named as the “defenders of the fatherland,” the political actors who will ally with their imperialist government when it comes to the wars this government wages. We see the equivalent pattern within the element of the modern American left that’s more interested in finding reasons to condemn the USA’s people than in doing what’s necessary for the revolution.

What’s necessary for the revolution can be found within a serious analysis of our conditions amid this proxy war. The war, along with the Fed, have exacerbated inflation to the point where almost two-thirds of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. In response, the most advanced segment of the workers, the ones with an anti-imperialist consciousness, have been building an anti-NATO movement. That this movement hasn’t exclusively been on the left is seen as offensive by the ABC leftists. But having a multi-tendency antiwar coalition is a healthy thing. It represents the expansion of the class struggle—which is intertwined with the anti-imperialist struggle—beyond the spaces where people are already involved in activism and discourse. Because it’s these spaces that the left’s opportunists depend on to maintain their status, for the anti-NATO movement to disrupt their ability to gatekeep these spaces makes this movement a threat towards this status.

Naturally, these elements are attacking the anti-NATO movement, as seen in the “socialist” or “progressive” publications that have been defending NATO, its expansion, and the fascist Ukraine coup which Washington carried out in conjunction with that expansion. With these pro-imperialist arguments have come bad-faith attacks against Rage Against the War Machine and the coalition it’s produced, attacks based in a desire to defend the pro-NATO stance. Their goal is to make those who identify as on the left loyal towards an idea set that’s in effect supportive of U.S. hegemony. Which is the key thing to pay attention to: the impacts of the things they do, as opposed to what they say they want to do. 

If pressed, these actors would no doubt deny being pro-imperialist. Yet when somebody consistently puts forth ideas that hinder revolutionary progress, attacks the most advanced elements among the workers for their revolutionary stances, seeks to discredit the most radical projects for resisting imperialism, and doesn’t change their way of operating when confronted, what can we conclude about them other than that they’re on the side of the empire?

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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.

How liberals built a fascist system for suppressing the anti-imperialist movement, & how we can beat this system

It was December of 2016, and the leaders of U.S. imperialism’s technocratic wing were frantic. They desperately needed to defend an idea, the idea that America’s bourgeois republic is worth preserving. This all-important idea, the one that holds the imperial project together, had just come under unexpected threat. The dysfunction and decay of the system, shown by how the people still hadn’t truly recovered from the 2008 crisis, produced shocking consequences in the form of Donald Trump’s election. This event confirmed to the ruling class that their social and political order was in a process of decline. That the U.S. empire was following in Rome’s path of letting corruption and excess slowly corrode it, until it got destroyed by one of the unhinged leaders the collapse produced.

Within military intelligence circles, sentiments to this effect were being passed around. Shortly prior to Trump’s inauguration, the Pentagon put out a report which said that America’s global influence was fast disappearing, following this with recommendations to prepare civic society for some coming era of instability. The report’s statements about a need for greater militarization and surveillance were predicated on the fear that the state would lose the propaganda war. It warned how there’s come to be a “hyper-connectivity and weaponization of information, disinformation, and dis­affection,” meaning that “In the end, senior defense leaders should assume that all defense-related activity from minor tactical movements to major military operations would occur completely in the open from this point forward.” 

This was an extension of a broader fear of losing control over popular consciousness which had overcome the ruling class. The consensus was that without a way to respond to how social media had made it possible to expose facts which discredit the all-important idea, the imperial project would become untenable. The FBI’s report on the output from RT made it clear that the concern was not only about the exposure of what the state considers “misinformation.” It was also about things that are patently true or impossible to seriously argue against, yet the state prefers not to be talked about. Things like the control that big money has over our electoral system, human rights abuses by police, and economic inequality. It’s this type of information that the Department of Homeland Security considers “mal-information,” where factual material gets presented in ways the state claims is for malicious purposes.

The liberal apparatus’s initial response to this new threat of the public becoming over-informed was to create the Global Engagement Center, formed by Obama’s signing of the Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act in December of 2016. The government wouldn’t have been able to pass this bill without the concoction of Russiagate, the central narrative used to justify liberalism’s war against democratic freedoms during recent years. Russiagate’s foundations had begun to be constructed in July of 2016, when the DNC leaks proved that a counter-narrative would be necessary for fighting ideas that endanger imperialism’s cultural hegemony. By showing how DNC officials had worked to help ensure the billionaire-funded neocon candidate won the primary, WikiLeaks sent liberalism into crisis mode, even more than it had already done. 

To maintain the illusion of a system that represents the people, the oligarchy and its intelligence strategists needed an argument to defend the system, even if that argument didn’t refute anything WikiLeaks and the other anti-imperialist sources were reporting. The argument they came up with was that all facts which reveal the system’s evils are by definition mal-information, because these facts are being shown to the American people by foreign propagandists. Propagandists who seek to destroy what the ruling class narrative managers would keep referring to as “our democratic institutions,” even though the notion of America being a genuine democracy had just been effectively disproven.

When Trump got into office, and the empire entered into a crisis that the liberal class had come to believe was unprecedented, it was this argument that the liberals could use to ensure the empire’s survival. By continuously assailing Trump with the accusation that his campaign had colluded with Putin to give WikiLeaks the DNC emails, they made their forensically dubious story about a “Russian hack” into a means for leveraging the unpredictable new administration to continue the new cold war. They successfully pressured Trump into being an even more antagonistic president towards Russia than Obama had been, bombing Syria, expanding the sanctions on Russia, facilitating NATO expansion, and ending the agreements which had held back a new U.S.-Russia nuclear arms race. The war machine was maintained during the years the liberals were waiting to get back into the White House. And to keep the war machine functional, the liberals acted to strengthen their information policing system.

The goal was to prevent the myth of “humanitarian interventionism” which had successfully placated the antiwar movement during the Obama years from getting shattered. During the first months of the Trump administration, this goal felt within reach. The Democrats, and the neocons they’d come to solidly align with, adopted the practice of implicitly praising Trump whenever he advanced their foreign policy goals. MSNBC’s Brian Williams reacted to Trump’s April 2017 Syria strike by saying the bombs were “beautiful pictures of fearsome armaments.” But when this brazen endorsement of war got MSNBC backlash—which was by extension backlash against the Democratic Party, since MSNBC is one of the party’s propaganda wings—the available narrative management tactics became more limited. 

The liberal pro-imperialists, and their social democratic wing in orgs like the DSA, found the best way to defend imperialism’s narratives was to attack those who exposed pro-war psyops. Anybody who pointed out the inconsistencies in the account supposedly showing Assad had committed a chemical attack got targeted by the imperialism-compatible left, whose job is to police what it means to be on the “left” and is therefore a useful ally to the neocons.

The narrative managers had found the basis for the rhetoric they’d employ during this new era of political uncertainty. Their protocol was to attack anti-imperialists as Russian bots or assets, and to act like support for Russia in today’s geopolitical conflict is necessarily a right-wing phenomenon. Within the Democratic Party and left anti-communist circles, these tactics were effective at stopping minds from getting won over to the anti-imperialist stance. But the reality they would have to confront was that outside these insular spaces, there continued to be growing potential for anti-imperialist consciousness to rise.

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2017 was seen by Bill Maher as a retread of 2016, where the Democratic Party’s neoliberal leadership went through the same conflict with left insurgents that it had experienced the previous year. Yet a new development was emerging within the left’s own ideological conflict: those who cared about anti-imperialism were noticing that Bernie Sanders wasn’t challenging the new cold war’s narratives. He was reinforcing all of them, and using their supposed correctness as the basis for his argument that his supporters needed to unify behind the DNC. He was getting deradicalized, to the extent that he was ever a radical in the first place, and the Sanders voters who remained loyal to his brand were regressing along with him. But the element of his movement that had revolutionary potential, the one which had gravitated toward the Free Assange movement, were learning that Sanders had never truly represented their goals.

The Hillary Clinton psyop had worked, insofar as it had kept the left flank of the American electorate from mostly becoming disillusioned with the myth that our political system is fundamentally worth preserving. Sanders was the main one responsible for this psyop’s success. He had corralled many of his supporters into his opportunistic reformist project through the notion that our bourgeois “democracy” simply needs to be fixed, rather than overthrown. The areas where the psyop didn’t succeed could be found within the country’s rising anti-imperialist struggle, which includes the Free Assange movement. For Maher’s purposes, this continued growth of anti-imperialist consciousness was unacceptable. So he and the political forces he represents escalated their attacks against anti-imperialism.

The only reason Maher was willing to support Sanders was because Sanders, as an individual, would never seriously challenge the Democratic Party. Maher showed this when he pointedly declared after the California primary that Clinton had won “fair and square,” despite the evidence of vast electoral corruption. Sanders wasn’t going to refuse to endorse Clinton or dispute the lies behind Democrat foreign policy, therefore actors like Maher never saw him as a threat. The threat only existed within the element of the Sanders movement that had revolutionary potential, which was substantial enough for the Democratic Party to have an incentive for targeting it with fury.

After these partisan actors denounced this element of the movement as “spoilers” who were to blame for Trump’s election, they shifted towards attacking this element for its anti-imperialist stance. Beyond the direct denunciations of what they called “Assad apologists” and “Putin apologists,” this offensive consisted of increasingly severe censorship against anti-imperialist sources, combined with aggressive affirmations of the pro-war psyops. As the intelligence community pressured social media companies into enacting unprecedented online censorship, actors such as the disgraced anchor Keith Olberman said things like “we were invaded” in reference to Russia’s supposed interference. Maher at one point essentially summarized the narrative purpose behind Russiagate by saying: “It all adds up…Watergate was follow the money, this case is roll the video tape. And it all points to a Russian plot to degrade our faith in democracy, install a puppet state and fuck over an old enemy.” The idea these actors sought to convince us of was that the left’s primary enemy should be the Russians, and that implicitly the left needs to help defend the imperial republic from Russia’s alleged subversion.

The reasons why these efforts to solidify the public’s allegiance towards neoconservatism failed are that much of the left isn’t compatible with the neocon stance; and that there are many who aren’t on the left, yet are still compatible with the anti-imperialist movement. These enemies of neoconservatism were there to counter the next big psyop, which was that Assad had carried out a chemical attack in Douma. Beyond the initially obvious flaws in the official story, over time more evidence debunking the narrative came out, and these anti-imperialists were ready to amplify the publication of this evidence. The definitive event was when WikiLeaks revealed in late 2019 that the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons had suppressed forensic accounts which went against the preferred narrative. 

Despite how advanced the censorship paradigm had become by then, WikiLeaks was able to turn this into a serious problem for the Syria psyop, enough that the narrative managers had to try to refute it. This was because WikiLeaks had gained a big enough platform prior to the censorship campaign for WikiLeaks to still have that kind of impact. (Take note of this detail for later!)

Another development that disrupted the psyops was the publication of the Mueller report in spring of 2019. This report exposed the discrepancy between what liberals had come to believe, and what reality was. They’d genuinely convinced themselves that Russiagate was real, so when their own intelligence asset couldn’t find collusion, they were unprepared. The damage was so bad that the narrative managers had to change which ideological strain to primarily target. They decided to temporarily shift towards China as the main country they vilified, starting with the glorification of that year’s CIA-backed Hong Kong protests. This meant that the ideologically broad category of anti-DNC leftists were no longer the biggest domestic targets of imperialist propaganda’s McCarthyist component. Now the main targets were the pro-China Marxists, and the actors like Max Blumenthal who aren’t necessarily Marxists but who still fight the Xinjiang psyop.

In this new landscape, the main arbiters of the attacks against anti-imperialists were no longer Russiagate demagogues like Maher, but rather online influencers. These actors work within the same propaganda mediums where modern Marxists operate, namely the blogosphere, social media, and streaming. The idea they put forth is that the left’s primary goal should be to combat the Marxists who support existing socialism. Which, because those Marxists tend to also support Russia in its efforts at weakening U.S. hegemony, has since developed into what the campaign against anti-imperialists now is.

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So far during the social media age, direct repression and censorship haven’t been the primary tools for fighting anti-imperialists. The main tool has been discourse, where imperialism’s agents work to discredit those who hold the revolutionary stance in the eyes of the average social media user. Their goal is to gatekeep who’s viewed as worthy of respect within the left, canceling anybody who challenges the beliefs the three-letter agencies seek to propagate.

As the elites try to keep control over the discourse going into the 2024 election—which they clearly overall hope the Democrats win, given that Trump just got indicted—they’re intensifying this discourse element of their information warfare. They’ve introduced a domestic version of NAFO, in the form of a project for shaping social media rhetoric throughout the presidential campaign (and no doubt beyond then). The problem they’ve encountered is that class conflict is still escalating. Which gives them cause to fully utilize the system for political repression that they expanded after Covid and January 6th. Online discourse manipulation, and its real-life counterpart COINTELPRO, are failing to stop the rise in worker mobilization or the emergence of an anti-NATO movement. The conditions are reaching a point where it becomes necessary to make repression the primary counterinsurgency tool.

Amid both January 6th and Covid, the liberals continued the practice established by Russiagate of using ruling class infighting to build their tools for suppressing imperialism’s enemies. When the pandemic started, it provided an opportunity to expand the information control mechanisms, an action that the three-letter agencies were already trying to create a narrative pretext for. As the 2020 election cycle started, we again began hearing about a threat of foreign interference, this time not just from the Russians but from the Chinese and the Iranians as well. The pandemic was what compelled the Trump administration to assist the intelligence agencies in strengthening their coordination with the tech companies, with the goal being to police what these agencies considered Covid disinformation. 

This was an important part of the project to construct a narrative policing apparatus, because the measures that had initially been undertaken throughout the project were (and still are) not working well enough. Last year the Global Engagement Center was given a failing grade on its effectiveness by a State Department watchdog. It was shown to be unable to gain the authority or tactical nimbleness required for sufficiently suppressing the anti-imperialist movement. That hasty experiment from the last weeks of Obama’s term has failed. Over the years that have made up this project, the narrative managers have needed to innovate, intermittently creating new information war task force teams and then replacing those teams with tweaked versions.

During the 2020 election, when the Democrat/neocon alliance was trying to return things to the more competent imperialism of the Obama era, these operatives were tasked with something important: suppressing knowledge of the Biden family’s corrupt connections within Ukraine. And they succeeded at this, enough for the scandal not to be fatal to the Biden campaign. The Intercept has described how the mechanisms for information policing which were used in this task had been expanded by that year’s government campaign to guide social media narratives on Covid:

In an appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast in August, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed that Facebook had limited sharing of the New York Post’s reporting after a conversation with the FBI. “The background here is that the FBI came to us — some folks on our team — and was like, ‘Hey, just so you know, you should be on high alert that there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election,’” Zuckerberg told Rogan. The FBI told them, Zuckerberg said, that “‘We have it on notice that basically there’s about to be some kind of dump.’” When the Post’s story came out in October 2020, Facebook thought it “fit that pattern” the FBI had told them to look out for…Documents filed in federal court as part of a lawsuit by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana add a layer of new detail to Zuckerberg’s anecdote, revealing that officials leading the push to expand the government’s reach into disinformation also played a quiet role in shaping the decisions of social media giants around the New York Post story.

With January 6th, these mechanisms were used to suppress content of a more clearly anti-imperialist character, content that had nothing to do with the ideological tendency behind the attack. Palestinians were subjected to a great increase in social media censorship following the riot, a development that wasn’t even prompted by pressure from the intelligence agencies but was simply part of the initial reaction these companies had to the crisis. It showed that bias against marginalized groups and the victims of imperialist violence is fundamentally built into our online structures, priming these companies to obey whatever censorship suggestions the DHS would give them following the attack. The wing of the DHS created by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Act (signed in 2018) has claimed its activities don't violate the First Amendment. It argues that even though it directly tells these companies about offending material, these companies can decide on their own what they censor. This is nothing but a technicality, as big tech follows the exact same ideology that the three-letter agencies do.

A year ago, when Biden created the Disinformation Governance Board, the goal was to expand this arrangement of mass cognitive policing, finally compensating for the Global Engagement Center’s failures. That the Board was soon defunded after widespread backlash hasn’t stopped the DHS (and the companies that share the ideology of the DHS) from carrying out the Board’s plans. The DHS has been collaborating with operatives responsible for innovations in narrative policing abroad, like UK troll farms that have conducted influence projects within the Ukraine conflict. Last year, PayPal and other transaction services cut off individuals and media outlets that they saw as perpetrators of Russian interference. Biden’s domestic NAFO is potentially the final stage in this discourse-policing aspect of the counterinsurgency, the part where the empire maximizes its online influence operations after it’s reached the constitutional limits of censorship.

What comes next can be found in the RESTRICT Act, whose unprecedented measures for attacking anti-imperialists will no doubt be implemented even if the Act itself doesn’t pass. These measures are about codifying the legal logic the DOJ has used to indict the leaders of the African People’s Socialist Party, who’ve been accused of involvement in a Russian interference plot. To carry out this next step in the counterinsurgency, where the main tactic goes from policing the discourse to repressing anti-imperialists directly, the state will need to successfully create a narrative pretext for these actions. To either revive Russiagate, or replace it with a new McCarthyist psyop, so that American liberalism’s essential myth can be maintained. So that our centers of discourse continue to be dominated by the idea that our ruling institutions are worth saving, even as those institutions are attacking the people’s right to resist war and militarism.

Like was the case during Russiagate, this psyop can only be successful within the parts of our mass psychological space where anti-imperialists haven’t managed to establish their own influence. The anti-imperialists are capable of expanding their range of narrative control, they showed that this year when they gained a countrywide platform with Rage Against the War Machine. With the intensification of class antagonisms that’s come from this war’s economic harm, many more people are becoming ready to come to anti-imperialist consciousness. We must work to give them access to the education required for this. If we’re successful enough in this task, we’ll be able to keep escalating the class conflict, even through this new era of heightened repression.

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Anti-opportunism today looks like siding with Russia, China, & U.S. imperialism’s other enemies

There is an idea within the USA’s communist movement whose flawed reasoning is apparent when you look at our conditions from a dialectical standpoint, but which is getting promoted more as our revolutionary crisis intensifies. This is the idea that to succeed, communists must win over as many liberals as they can, even if this means adopting practices that we wouldn’t otherwise embrace. Practices such as minimizing the importance of class, minimizing the importance of fighting U.S. hegemony, and disavowing Russia’s war against Ukrainian fascism (which naturally doesn’t get defined as such within the framework of liberal appeasement). 

Those three types of anti-Marxist activities are intertwined, they stem from the same core notion that gaining favor with the left gatekeepers of our organizing and discourse spaces is of utmost importance. So naturally when somebody engages in one of these habits, they’re inclined to engage in the others. They’re what’s necessary for gaining and maintaining access to the circles which define what’s considered “the left” in this country.

With the promotion of this notion comes the rejection of another notion, the one that Lenin came to after learning how a communist can win the people:

Engels draws a distinction between the “bourgeois labour party” of the old trade unions—the privileged minority—and the “lowest mass”, the real majority, and appeals to the latter, who are not infected by “bourgeois respectability”. This is the essence of Marxist tactics! Neither we nor anyone else can calculate precisely what portion of the proletariat is following and will follow the social-chauvinists and opportunists. This will be revealed only by the struggle, it will be definitely decided only by the socialist revolution. But we know for certain that the “defenders of the fatherland” in the imperialist war represent only a minority. And it is therefore our duty, if we wish to remain socialists to go down lower and deeper, to the real masses; this is the whole meaning and the whole purport of the struggle against opportunism. By exposing the fact that the opportunists and social-chauvinists are in reality betraying and selling the interests of the masses, that they are defending the temporary privileges of a minority of the workers, that they are the vehicles of bourgeois ideas and influences, that they are really allies and agents of the bourgeoisie, we teach the masses to appreciate their true political interests, to fight for socialism and for the revolution through all the long and painful vicissitudes of imperialist wars and imperialist armistices. The only Marxist line in the world labour movement is to explain to the masses the inevitability and necessity of breaking with opportunism, to educate them for revolution by waging a relentless struggle against opportunism, to utilise the experience of the war to expose, not conceal, the utter vileness of national-liberal labour politics.

With these statements, Lenin was implicitly warning us against the error which modern America’s “anything but class” leftists, anti-anti-imperialists, and “neither NATO nor Russia” Marxists are engaging in. This is the error of assuming that the privileged minority of the people, the facilitators of the “left” political spheres which are compatible with the bourgeois social order, represent the most important demographic for communists to win over. The foolishness of this conclusion is obvious, because how can you expect to win the class war when you’re trying to get the bourgeoisie’s controlled opposition on your side? The only version of communism these opportunists will ever accept is a “communism” that’s been robbed of what makes communism actually effective. Which has been rendered unable to bring the overthrow of the capitalist state.

I realize the ideological tendencies I referred to in the last paragraph are obscure to those who haven’t shared my unenviable experience of getting to know all the major strains of left opportunism. And my primary goal at this stage is to inform revolutionary organizers about the malign ideological actors who can manipulate them due to their good intentions, so I’ll elaborate on who these opportunists I’m talking about are. First there’s the anything but class leftists, a phrase that Parenti introduced. Parenti describes the foundations of the ABC left’s arguments as one of distracting from the factors which unite the working class, by dividing this class with endless labels:

Both orthodox social scientists and "left" ABC theorists treat the diverse social factions within the non-capitalist class as classes unto themselves; so they speak of a "blue-collar class," a "professional class," and the like. In doing so, they claim to be moving beyond a "reductionist," Marxist dualistic model of classes. But what is more reductionist than to ignore the underlying dynamics of economic power and the conflict between capital and labor? What is more misleading than to treat occupational groups as autonomous classes, giving attention to every social group in capitalist society except the capitalist class itself, to every social conflict except class conflict? Both conventional and "left" ABC theorists have difficulty understanding that the creation of a managerial or technocratic social for­mation constitutes no basic change in the property relations of capitalism, no creation of new classes. Professionals and managers are not an autonomous class as such. Rather they are mental workers who live much better than most other employees but who still serve the accumulation process on behalf of corporate owners.

These opportunists can use any other variety of classifications to advance their mission of dividing the proletariat, of making it look like the proletariat can’t unify because different proletarians have irreconcilable interests. At the moment, race and ethnicity are the main points within this attempt at splintering the workers. This is shown by texts like Decolonization is not a metaphor, which asserts that Occupy was wrong for wanting to raise general working class living standards because supposedly the only way to empower nonwhites is by driving down the living standards of whites (including the ones exploited by the bourgeoisie). The same logic is applied on an international scale by dogmatists like the Maoist Third Worldists, who claim the U.S. working class is all or mostly a labor aristocracy and is therefore in antagonism with the interests of the workers of the neo-colonies.

Then there are the “anti-anti-imperialists,” as I feel is appropriate to call the types of commentators who only or mostly bring up U.S. imperialism when trying to discredit those who actually counter the empire’s narratives. The primary grievances of these actors has shifted over the years as the empire’s main propaganda target has switched between different countries. In 2018, they were attacking anti-imperialists for exposing the Syria gas attack hoaxes. Over the next several years, they began to moreso attack anti-imperialists for exposing the Xinjiang genocide hoax. Since Russia’s special operation began last year, they’ve been mainly going after those who challenge the idea that Russia was unprovoked. 

It’s not even the neocons who’ve been at the center of these attack efforts. They’ve barely said anything about these anti-imperialist outlets and journalists, they don’t need to. Overwhelmingly the effort to represent anti-imperialists as genocide deniers, and to confront them with strawman arguments like “anti-Americanism is not an ideology,” has come from those who orient themselves as on “the left.” Every major “left-wing” source, from the Daily Beast to the Anarchist Library, has featured content intended to disrupt the efforts at fighting U.S. hegemony.

Yet as the class and geopolitical conflicts have escalated, it’s been revealed that the nature of this divide isn’t as simple as anti-NATO vs pro-NATO. There’s emerged an element among Marxists who take the stance of “neither NATO nor Russia,” claiming to oppose U.S. hegemony while showing that in practice, they’ll oppose some of the essential steps towards ending that hegemony. Steps like Russia’s war, which has accelerated the transition to multipolarity. That Z has let NATO expand into more countries hasn’t outweighed the larger shift in the global power balance that’s occurred throughout the last year or so. Z has prompted the Global South to side against Washington, while creating the conditions for the BRI’s advancement to be sped up. The war’s “benefits” for the empire have been internal, externally the empire’s influence has shrunk.

Within the context of this proxy war, and of the wider cold war that it’s part of, anti-Z Marxists are the ones who view the “defenders of the fatherland” as the foremost types to prioritize winning over. As they’ve adopted a stance that tries to reconcile the anti-imperialist position with the pro-imperialist position, which is the only way they’ll be able to please as many liberals as they want to. 

They’ll succeed at getting a following among liberals, and may even get these liberals to read theory. But because this educational program won’t involve learning how to be a serious anti-imperialist, the organizing structure that comes from this won’t be what overthrows the state. Because if you try to tell a crowd of liberals that they need to back Russia, China, and imperialism’s other foils, you’ll inevitably have at least some of them turn against you. And within the analytical framework that certain types of U.S. communists are basing their practice off of, the worst possible thing would be to not maximize one’s liberal outreach.

What is this analytical framework? It’s the framework that says the further to the “left” somebody is, whatever that means, the more valuable they necessarily are to the revolution. Within this concept of what constitutes revolutionary potential, the liberals by default appear to be the ones who should be prioritized above all else. But the logic behind this concept ignores how much Russiagate has been able to turn the country’s left towards the neocon stance on foreign policy. When the left started getting told by the media that support for Russia is synonymous with being right-wing, the opportunists within the left—which there are many—solidified their alignment with the neocons when it came to Russia. 

As the new cold war develops, this antagonism will increasingly extend to China as well, since China has already shown it in practice backs Russia against the United States. Another anti-imperialist power that these unreliable types of leftists find themselves in ideological opposition towards (whether or not they’re ready to admit it) is the DPRK, which has voiced explicit support for Operation Z. This is ironic, since the DPRK is viewed by these same types of American left opportunists as something useful to support. The issue is that whereas serious Marxists support China and the DPRK because they’re anti-imperialist countries, the less serious ones claim to “support” them because this can be viewed as trendy within some left spaces. As soon as these spaces turn against these countries, which gets more likely as people are forced to pick sides in the new cold war, this “support” will end.

To find the real masses, the types who join a movement not for aesthetics but out of desire to win the struggle, look for which types of people have gravitated towards the anti-NATO movement. Liberals have not been the most inclined to join this movement, especially not the most serious element of it which backs Z. Right-leaning types have been more reliable supporters of this struggle, by which I mean not the culture-war obsessed rightists or the fascists, but rather the libertarian-leaning element. The others who’ve been most receptive to anti-imperialist ideas are those who were previously apolitical, but have been gaining more of a consciousness due to hearing about this despicable proxy war. Those ones have only begun to be tapped into, and they constitute a bigger demographic than Democrats or Republicans. 

The left opportunists rationalize excluding these individuals, even though they’re proving themselves compatible with the anti-imperialist struggle, because the left opportunists don’t view this struggle as the foremost priority. They usually view “anti-colonialism,” or rather their own anti-Leninist version of anti-colonialism, as the primary thing to focus on. Which shows how unserious they are. As when you think in terms of how a revolution develops, you see that colonialism, class, and our other domestic contradictions won’t be resolved until we’ve sufficiently beaten U.S. imperialism. U.S. imperialism is the primary global contradiction, the main obstacle we need to overcome during this stage if we want to defeat the American state. Any communist program that doesn’t put fighting imperialism at the height of its priorities is not a program we can use to win. It can only keep us trapped in the endless cycle of opportunism, chasing after liberals who don’t even care about the class struggle.

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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.