The united front is an essential strategy for communists. In today’s USA, that front needs to center the anti-NATO struggle.

Image from United World International

Lenin and the Panthers taught us the same lesson: that forming a united front, where the communists who are most correct in their analysis join with other ideological elements on the basis of shared desire to advance a key issue in the class struggle, is a crucial part of winning proletarian power. For the Bolsheviks, as illustrated by Lenin’s Should revolutionaries work in reactionary trade unions, this key issue which communists needed to make alliances over was evidently trade unionism. For the Panthers, as illustrated by their forming ties to certain reactionary whites via the Rainbow Coalition, the key issue was labor organizing in a broader sense. 

As Young Patriots member Hy Thurman has recalled about how his org’s involvement in the alliance both advanced the class struggle, and got him and his circle to overcome their racist ideas:

In the Young Patriots our goal was to organize white people, that’s the role we had sort of taken and been given in the Rainbow Coalition. And back then we made the statement, “Go and organize your own.” You know, we don’t need you in Berkeley and other places trying to organize us. We’ll do it ourselves. So you go in your own neighborhood because that’s where the racism exists—and you have to understand that we were racist. I mean, we were raised in racism. It was indoctrinated in us. We were raised racist, but we were becoming antiracist because we began to see what was happening during the Civil Rights Movement. And we began to learn about stuff like Blair Mountain and about the Highlander Center in Tennessee and Miles Horton and the Bradens and those folks. And these were things we were curious about. But yet we still had that identity of a southern person. A hillbilly. You know? We didn’t use it in a condescending way. The term hillbilly was derogatory for some, but it was a part of our identity. We challenged those people who tried to use it in a bad way.

For those of us in the modern USA to be able to get the workers movement back to that point it was at decades agp, where labor power represented a serious threat to the ruling class, we have to build a united front around our moment’s most pivotal issue: the fight against U.S. hegemony. To make communism mainstream again, and turn our extreme class contradictions into an opportunity for defeating the capitalist state, we’ll first need to sufficiently combat NATO’s psyops. Which means unifying the forces that share the goal of building an antiwar movement that’s genuinely and totally independent from the Democratic Party.

Because of the longtime absence of an antiwar or labor movement that’s not been captured by the Democrats, serious class struggle hasn’t existed in this country for a long time either. Class struggle has only been spontaneous mobilizations of workers who are pushed to strike, without a vanguard party being there to make this activity organized and infused with revolutionary mass education. And the small communist parties that do exist in this country, and that have been trying to take advantage of the recent spontaneous worker outrages by growing their numbers, represent a kind of faux-vanguard industrial complex that exists to tail the Democrats. 

The way these opportunist groups have been able to divert and diffuse radical sentiments is through the continued normalization of pro-imperialist narratives within radical spaces. Through a culture that makes it seem acceptable for “radicals” to repeat the State Department’s psyops about China, Russia, and other U.S. target countries.

When somebody’s priority is to draw recruits and online followers from these imperialism-compatible radicals, they naturally adopt an apathetic attitude towards the international struggle. They feel that those within “left” spaces are necessarily the most advanced element of the people and the most compatible with Marxism, so they’re dis-incentivized from challenging this circle’s NATO-accommodating belief systems. There is an option other than this cowardly appeasement of bad actors who fundamentally don’t care about the class struggle. This option is to build the anti-NATO united front.

This front doesn’t just give those within it who presently have reactionary sentiments an opportunity to get exposed to better ideas. It also enables us to build a relationship with the people. And it’s not only one option for doing this out of many; the united front is our sole way to reach the people. Think about it strategically: what other way can we realistically bring the anti-imperialist perspective to the majority of society, than by utilizing the platforms that the other elements of the anti-NATO movement have? If you want to promote anti-imperialism while cutting yourself off from everybody within the anti-NATO movement who doesn’t presently share your views on domestic issues, I know you won’t succeed at reaching any more minds outside of a niche. Because I went by this strategy for years, and it wasn’t until I gave up my ingrained phobias about joining with other kinds of anti-imperialists that I could truly come to represent a threat to our ruling institutions. So will be the case in your experiences as a political actor.

When Lenin talked about the folly of the “left” revolutionaries who believed they could defeat the state while isolating themselves from all the other sections of trade unionism, he was illustrating the same lesson today’s equivalents of those purity fetishists need to learn. Just like how the purist socialists of Lenin’s time couldn’t build an ideologically “pure” version of the labor movement while gaining a following that existed beyond a niche, our purist socialists willingly handicap themselves by only building ties with those deemed “acceptable” within left online circles. These “acceptable” individuals and groups lack the platforms, as well as the independence from the Democratic Party, to be able to genuinely threaten NATO. Why is Rage Against the War Machine the project that got attacked by the corporate media, as opposed to PSL’s ANSWER rally which could operate without such institutional opposition?

It’s because our ruling institutions view an antiwar coalition which functions independently from liberal reformism as infinitely more threatening than one that’s invested in tailing liberals. As well as more threatening than one whose organizers seek to operate entirely on their own, and to build a whole new movement out of nothing. 

A liberal tailist antiwar project by definition is not truly “antiwar,” because its priority is not to destroy the liberal cultural hegemony that maintains U.S. imperialism. Its priority is to bring in enough liberals to be able to build something that passes for a serious “socialist” org, with no intention of challenging the anti-Russian views that these liberals hold. If these liberal tailist orgs oppose NATO’s psyops in such a serious way, their ability to draw from the left wing of the labor aristocracy will be jeopardized. 

That’s the mentality which guides the entities on the left that are seeking to discredit the idea of an anti-NATO united front: an opportunistic fear of alienating a minority of comfortable people who aren’t compatible with revolutionary politics. The united front is guided by the mentality that we need to build a relationship not with the privileged minority, but with the economically struggling majority. Which requires allying with the political forces that don’t act to reinforce the Democratic Party’s dominance. This will come at the cost of alienating the political forces which do have that role. Yet after one has seen the examples of revolutionaries who’ve had to disregard the opinions of the liberal tailists in order to reach the people, it becomes apparent that alienating these tailists is a good thing. We don’t need them on our side, we need the people on our side.

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“Marxists” who vilify the people for having contradictions will never win the people

I recently found out that a statistic I’ve been using to support my arguments about how much the American people’s conditions have deteriorated—this being that over 60% of Americans now live paycheck to paycheck—is in need of more context. You’d think this means essentially all of those within this category are economically struggling. Yet a sizable minority of them are not working class but upper income, and only live paycheck to paycheck because of how expensive their consuming habits are. 

The majority of the country’s people are still effectively living in poverty, and this is apparent from looking at how there are also many Americans who don’t technically fall within that “paycheck to paycheck” category yet are quite economically dispossessed. There are the 22% of Americans who fall within what the Ludwig Institute for Economic Prosperity calls the “real unemployment” category, which encapsulates anyone within the U.S. labor force who “does not have a full-time job (35+ hours a week) but wants one, has no job, or does not earn a living wage, conservatively pegged at $20,000 annually before taxes.” This includes people who can’t live paycheck to paycheck, since they aren’t exactly “living,” only existing. Existing in a paycheck-free situation where they lack access to sufficient food, the financial resources to be able to keep up with their bills, or even housing. 

By the time the pandemic began, 43% of American households couldn’t afford a budget that includes housing, food, transportation, healthcare, and a cellphone. With the damage that our government’s mismanagement of the pandemic has since done to the working class, as well as the effects of the inflation crisis on those who aren’t upper income, this living standard crisis has absolutely come to be felt by a bigger proportion of the people. Much of the former workforce has been shoved into early retirement, and not even all of those affected by this shift are older people; many of them are long Covid victims who’ve been made disabled. Then there’s the further disappearance of opportunities for those who are physically able, or who aren’t having to take care of disabled relatives (as many others are). As U.S. News & World Report observed last year, prior to when the Ukraine proxy war had had its full effects on the inflation crisis:

Although there have been some signs in the past two months of strong hiring that the labor market is loosening somewhat, the overall picture of a tight job market is here for a while. The retired baby boomers, especially those in the 65-74 age range, have also cut into the labor supply. “These were people with degrees, probably successful,” says Ron Hetrick, a labor economist at Emsi Burning Glass. “They’re not coming back.” Restrictive immigration policies that have shaped national politics throughout the past several years show no signs of easing and are another drag on the labor market, reducing supply by around 1 million or more workers. And COVID-19, whether through death, illness or long-term disability, has further reduced the available supply of labor.

These pieces of evidence that the U.S. population has now mostly been pushed to the economy’s margins vindicate the decades-old predictions that at some point, the U.S. empire would force a majority of its own people into poverty. Which makes the attitude among our insular “Marxist” radical liberals that most Americans are labor aristocrats, and should be morally judged by the same standards one would judge labor aristocrats, more absurd than ever. At the same time that the people within our conditions are being subjected to a process of engineered social collapse, which merely represents an acceleration of the one that began with neoliberalism, it’s totally anti-materialist to blankedly condemn the people as synonymous with their government or their ruling class. 

What I’ve realized from reading Parenti, who stopped making commentary years before the pandemic or the Ukraine war, is that America’s living standard crisis didn’t even have to get this widespread for U.S. workers to deserve such respect. All the way back in 1989, Parenti wrote:

Americans are victimized by economic imperialism not only as workers but as taxpayers and consumers. The billions of tax dollars that corporations escape paying because of their overseas shelters must be made up by the rest of us. Additional billions of our tax dollars go into foreign-aid programs to governments that maintain the cheap labor markets that lure away American jobs---$13.6 billion in 1986, of which two-thirds was military aid. Our tax money also serves as hidden subsidies to the big companies when used as foreign aid to finance the kind of infrastructure (roads, plants, ports) needed to support extractive industries in the Third World. Nor do the benefits of this empire trickle down to the American consumer in any appreciable way. Generally the big companies sell the goods made abroad at as high a price as possible on American markets. Corporations move to Asia and Africa to increase their profits, not to produce lower-priced goods that will save money for American consumers. They pay as little as they can in wages abroad but still charge as much as they can when they sell the goods at home.

This harm that maintaining an imperialist military does to the imperial center’s people was present prior to the War on Terror and the cold war on China, which have only worsened U.S. austerity by multiplying the military budget. Then there are the environmental damages Americans suffer as a consequence of living under an imperial state, which under our conditions is by definition a capitalist state:

Other injustices inflicted by the empire upon poorer nations come home to take a toll upon ordinary AMericans. For years now the poisonous pesticides and hazardous pharmaceuticals that were banned in this country have been sold by their producers to Third World nations where regulations are weaker or nonexistent…The absence of environmental protections throughout most of the Third World affects the health and welfare of Americans in other ways (along with the well-being of other peoples and the earth's entire ecology). The chemical toxins and other industrial effusions poured into the world's rivers, oceans, and atmosphere by fast-profit, unrestricted multinational corporations operating in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and the devastation of Third World lands by mining and timber companies and by agribusiness, are seriously affecting the quality of the air we all breathe, the water we all drink and the food we all eat…

The dumping of industrial effusions and radioactive wastes also may be killing our oceans. If the oceans die, so do we, since they produce most of the earth's oxygen. Over half the world's forests are gone compared to earlier centuries. The forests are nature's main means of removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Today, the carbon dioxide buildup is transforming the chemical composition of the earth's atmosphere, accelerating the "greenhouse effect" by melting the earth's polar ice caps and causing a variety of other climatic destabilizations. While the imperialists are free to roam the world and plunder it at will, we are left to suffer the immediate and long-term consequences.

That all of these evils have worsened since 1989, as well as been joined by additional evils like police militarization, techno-dystopian censorship of dissent, and destructive banking concentration, makes Parenti’s argument more correct than ever. And as I said, even if the American people were still living in the comparative “good times” of the pre-2008 crisis world, all those things he pointed out would still be true.

The idea Parenti was aiming to get across is that to simplify the American people to being “bad” because they’re complicit in the imperial order would be anti-materialist. There’s no way to describe such a perspective other than as infantile. We all know Americans are complicit in imperialism, the question is what should we do with this information. Should we, the minority of Americans who’ve so far gained class consciousness, smugly cast judgment on everyone else around us for not yet having come to our perspective? Should we hate and perpetually punish ourselves for having been born in a certain place? Should we all move away? By the insular American left’s reasoning, there’s nothing constructive we in the core are capable of doing. And therefore no reason to take responsibility for our circumstances, and do the work necessary for winning workers victory where we are.

In pre-revolutionary Russia, the people absolutely had contradictions. Many of them held beliefs that were backwards, and by czarist Russia’s imperialist nature, many of them held allegiance to the imperial order. Did this stop the Bolsheviks from building a relationship with them? Did it cause the Bolsheviks to overstate the proportion of Russians who were invested in imperialism? Lenin assessed that it was a “privileged minority” of the people who were labor aristocrats with an obstinate desire to maintain imperial extraction. The same is true for the people under our conditions. The obstinate liberals, who make up the primary element of the people that are solidly invested in the neocon ideology, are not most Americans. Most of the people only believe imperialism’s psyops at present because they haven’t yet been exposed to the anti-imperialist accounts of events surrounding Ukraine, Taiwan, Serbia, Ethiopia, and so on.

When confronted with these realities about our conditions, the “Americans are bad” leftists will claim that they’re aware of such realities, even though it doesn’t seem like they are from looking at their rhetoric. These leftists will say that even though they feel the character of the people is reducible to such a simplistic and villifying label, they intend to bring the people to a revolutionary consciousness. Yet just by making these blanket statements, these leftists have already proven that they themselves lack a genuinely revolutionary outlook. Nobody who knows how to win workers victory would be going around denouncing the people. And how can somebody who fundamentally lacks the knowledge necessary to be the people’s teacher take on that role?

To those within the “left” online circles and organizing spaces, it can look like these insular types of leftists have that kind of capability. But they don’t, because getting a lot of likes on social media doesn’t equate to winning the people. A niche minority of the people are familiar with these spaces. That’s the extent of the following somebody can gain while operating under the radical liberal ideology, which is conducive to vilifying the people. We know this because at no point in history have revolutionary movements won when their leaders have viewed the same people they’re trying to liberate with scorn. “Revolutionary” leaders who think like that always end up detaching themselves from the people, therefore rendering their own victory impossible. 

We’re seeing this now in the ways the USA’s established “left” orgs are refusing to become active agents in the anti-imperialist movement, the front of the struggle that we need to advance in order to make all other fronts winnable. Instead of helping build a sustainable and principled anti-NATO movement, like the country’s pro-Russian communist orgs are, the orgs that exclusively seek to appeal to those within the “left” niche are acting apathetic about the international struggle. 

They’re acting apathetic about anti-imperialism for the same reason they view the people as inherently reactionary: because the idea set they base their practice in is not materialist, but idealist. It’s based in a mentality that blames the people for the failure of the revolutionary movement, as if radicals are already doing everything right and have no reasons to reexamine their beliefs. If these beliefs include an apathetic view of geopolitics, then in their minds that view isn’t worth giving up. The insular left believes it’s the people, not those who aspire to lead the people, who need to correct themselves.

The hubris of this mindset is obvious. For decades, it’s held back the rebuilding of the communist movement in the United States. It lets developing radicals rationalize not taking responsibility for any pro-imperialist or otherwise liberal beliefs they hold, blaming the people for their own inability to build a connection with the people. If we want to win, we have to gain a love for the people. A love that motivates us to correct anything wrong with our own views and practices, for the sake of bringing our society to socialism.

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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. To keep this platform effective amid the censorship against dissenting voices, join my Telegram channel.

We can’t trust the liberal tailist “left” groups to lead a revolution. We have to build a workers movement outside the Democratic Party.

The class struggle in this country—which encapsulates not just the labor movement but the Native sovereignty movement, the Black liberation movement, the LGBT movement, etc—is experiencing a crisis of leadership at the time when it needs leadership most. The opportunism of the “left” organizations has put the communities most vulnerable to fascist terror in danger of being unable to defend themselves when our class conflict escalates, and when the reactionaries try to carry out a purge. The big cities, despite having the largest numbers of revolutionary-compatible people, are to remain at risk of such a violent campaign. Or at least they’ll remain at risk for as long as the left opportunist groups are allowed to keep their monopoly over organizing spaces within the urban areas.

The big cities are naturally where the spontaneous revolts are the biggest and most concentrated. Simply due to the size of their populations, the U.S. military has effectively said that it fears having to fight off domestic rebels within America’s megacities. The Pentagon’s strategists know just 1% of a big city’s people would represent massive numbers on the rebellion’s side. Yet if we put our faith in the country’s most prominent “socialist” orgs, this scenario where the people can exploit the U.S. army’s counterinsurgency weaknesses within megacities will never come. Because those in the impoverished majority of the country’s urban centers can’t become part of a seriously threatening rebellion effort until a vanguard has emerged to organize and educate them. And the major orgs that claim to be able to take on such a leadership role are not serious about doing so.

I’m talking about not just the DSA, which any educated Marxist-Leninist knows is blatantly pro-reformist, but about CPUSA, FRSO, PSL, and smaller Democrat tailist orgs like Socialist Party of America. It’s not a coincidence that those first four orgs have been repeatedly referenced by imperialism-compatible leftists as either functioning within a coalition, or capable of becoming a coalition. They’re theoretically compatible in this way because they all share an important trait: willingness to let the sentiments of liberals influence their practice. 

Each of them have denounced Russia’s military action against Ukrainian fascism and U.S. hegemony, because even though they claim to oppose imperialism, they’ll never break from the view that defeating U.S. hegemony is secondary to stopping supposed “imperialism” or “aggression” from countries like Russia. This view is motivated, at least in part, by a desire to exclusively appeal to liberals. As liberals are the only element of the people who are ideologically committed to opposing Russia. Who can never be brought to a consistently anti-imperialist position, due to their investment in bourgeois politics.

From this belief that liberals have the most revolutionary potential, so much that all other demographics should effectively not be treated like priorities in our outreach, comes a practice that renders these orgs incapable of leading the people to victory. There’s a reason why a new equivalent of the Black Panther Party, which successfully brought great numbers of people from U.S. imperialism’s internal colonies into a principled communist org, still hasn’t emerged. It’s because the liberal tailist parties could become that new BPP any time they like, yet choose at every opportunity to continue doing what will let them keep favor within the “left” spaces. Spaces which incentivize their members not to do what a serious dialectical analysis would tell them to do, but to do what’s needed for fitting in.

What strategic change would transform these orgs from a coalition of liberal tailists, to a coalition that helps cultivate the vanguard? That change would be to start collaborating with the parts of the anti-NATO movement which aren’t on the “left,” and which are therefore both non-insular and more principled on anti-imperialism. This is what pro-Russian communist orgs like PCUSA have done, and it’s the equivalent of when the Panthers collaborated with white proletarian groups via the Rainbow Coalition. When communists embrace the united front strategy, and refuse to be insular in which types of people they reach out to, they both become able to build a relationship with the people and become free to act more principled. Tailing liberals incentivizes one to act unprincipled.

An org that acts totally unaccountable to the liberal activists (and pseudo-activists) who seek to gatekeep the class struggle, and adopts the mindset that it must appeal to the people as a whole, will feel comfortable with being consistent in its anti-imperialism. As well as in its opposition to the Democratic Party, in its commitment to physically equipping its cadres, and in every other area where one can be tempted to compromise when trying to appease liberals.

The left opportunist orgs would sooner denounce the pro-Russian orgs than join with the united anti-NATO front. And increasingly, that’s what they’re doing. PSL is the one that’s most notably targeted the Rage Against the War Machine coalition, revealing its willingness to participate in the types of sectarian attacks that members of these other orgs habitually direct towards groups like PCUSA. And if they’re willing to hurt the anti-imperialist movement for the sake of opportunism, it’s clear they lack the integrity required to lead the people. 

The problem isn’t even necessarily that the established “left” orgs in this country are too moderate, or too ambivalent on geopolitics; I would be glad to work with them if they were to enter into the anti-NATO united front. The Green Party has entered into this front despite the party’s non-Marxist character, and that’s fine, because a united front by definition doesn’t have to be ideologically pure. The biggest problem is that these other left groups have shown they prefer to direct unprincipled criticisms towards pro-Russian communists, and to try to discredit the notion of a united front.

Orgs that do this will never win the people, because they’ve shown they’re not interested in winning the people. That would require them giving up their sectarianism and left opportunism, so that they no longer contribute to the needless divisions which COINTELPRO seeks to perpetuate. Divisions that have kept the workers movement from successfully building a relationship with the people for half a century. These divisions have been so destructive for revolutionary progress both because of the effects they’ve had (keeping different elements of the struggle from collaborating), and because of the liberal mentalities within our organizing spaces that they’ve been symptomatic of. 

A “socialist” org that views its task as a competition for who can gain the most donations and email subscribers will only reach so far into the masses, because it will be satisfied as soon as it becomes well-established enough. We’ve seen this with the PSL, which consistently tries to interfere in the affairs of its adjacent groups such as the Peace and Freedom Party. I’ve personally seen the ways in which PSL treats PFP branches as synonymous with its own branches, despite PFP’s constitution not saying anything that indicates this is how it should be run. And I’ve seen the kinds of prescriptions PSL gives those under its domineering control, those being to act apathetic about mass work and to become insular. Under its non-consensual leadership, our branch for a while became relegated to holding screenings, neglecting all work that would have given us the slightest bit of true power.

I know that my former PFP branch’s experience with PSL was not an isolated example, and that these kinds of self-imposed limitations are normal for it, simply from looking at the ways it and other orgs like it act on a national scale. Even when it doesn’t look as bad as it did in my case, they don’t seek to become active agents in history, especially when it comes to leading the anti-NATO movement. They only hold rallies in response to preexisting spontaneous mass activity, like during last year’s abortion protests, and then cease such activities until they again become opportune. 

The only reason PSL and its adjacent orgs held this year’s March antiwar rally was because they didn’t want to look bad in comparison to RAWM, which had proven itself to be genuinely counter-hegemonic by receiving concerted attacks from the empire’s narrative managers. PSL did not try to sustain this January’s Tyre Nichols protests, it simply let them run out of energy after collecting as many benefits from them as it could. When it comes to taking risks; to investing energy and resources into projects that could make them into serious targets, and will benefit the class struggle rather than their short-term self-interests; these kinds of orgs don’t show up.

The alternative to the left opportunists that RAWM’s communist flank is building has much progress to make before it can become a vanguard. Orgs like PCUSA will need to expand their union presence, to the point where a significant proportion of the workers in the big cities are involved. This won’t have to mean them growing their membership to the millions. The Bolsheviks were a small org which won power by building enough of a relationship with the existing labor institutions, and training their own members well enough, that they could maneuver towards taking control of the state after the revolution came. 

This had necessitated them forming a united front with the other ideological elements which shared their interests, whether in the long-term or momentarily. They couldn’t afford to close themselves off from the reactionary trade unions, or to preemptively alienate the majority of the Russian people by publicly ranting about how reactionary the people were. That they were surrounded by contradictions didn’t compel them to act foolishly, and lash out against anybody who wasn’t presently within their circle. That’s how modern American leftists tend to act.

The Bolsheviks had to be hard-headed, only doing what the conditions mandated them to do. So is not the case for the left opportunists, who build followings within niche circles, denounce the people as a great amorphous bad, and then use the many likes they gain from saying this as evidence that they don’t need to change their thinking. The “popularity” that you can gain from being a left influencer or org is limited to a minority of society. A minority that’s detached from the majority, enough for those within these circles to often have the view that most Americans are labor aristocrats. These are the types of unserious individuals who our “left” orgs are trying to attract, with the intent of leaving their anti-materialist views about the people and about geopolitics unchallenged. 

Because Marxists can’t simply generate a new Black Panther Party out of pure will, we’ll have to build what we can with what we have. Building a substantial relationship between Marxists and the unions will no doubt be a big part of this. Because the factor that gives the people the ability to make their spontaneous outrage coherent, that lets them defeat the state rather than carry out riots which go nowhere, will be the construction of a mass organizing presence. One that can mobilize them to fulfill the roles in the state’s overthrow that the people have traditionally taken on, such as mass strikes. Only with such participation from a great number of the people can we, the minority within the cadres, effectively fulfill our own roles in the state’s demise.

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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.

Why Russia’s victory against Ukraine was always guaranteed: its people have a good reason for wanting to crush fascism

Since the great low point for revolutionary politics in 1992, Russia’s historical trajectory has been following a cyclical pattern: the capitalist state fails to fulfill the people’s desires, the state changes its policies to better accommodate the popular will, this provokes retaliation from the U.S. empire, then the state is forced to choose between appeasing the empire and doing what will further satisfy the people. Because this has been happening at the same time American hegemony has been declining, and because Russians are mostly a people with an unshakeable anti-imperialist consciousness, the state has in almost all cases been choosing the relatively progressive policy route.

After Yeltsin destroyed Russia’s economy by fully acting as a facilitator of the U.S. empire’s looting operations, and he got replaced with Putin, it became apparent that the new government would have to improve upon the last one. Putin, even though he was initially within Yeltsin’s camp on economic policies and wanted Russia to join NATO, then left behind these stances. He needed to make Russia more independent in order to prevent a political crisis which would threaten him. Due to this shift, Russia’s wages have vastly gone up during his presidency. It’s not a revolutionary development, merely a compromise between the capitalist state and the people. A compromise which has shown the rulers know if they don’t keep a balance between protecting their interests and the people’s interests, they’ll be overthrown like the czar was.

By the end of the 2000s, Putin had obviously abandoned his idea that joining NATO would be in his own best interests. As Washington had shown it would never be willing to compromise with Russia, only to try to dominate it. And even a leader who’s simply ambivalent towards Washington, like Putin was, would respond to such disrespect by growing more assertive. So he became unconcerned about being labeled as an aggressor and an autocrat by Washington’s narrative agents, or about being charged with crimes by Washington’s sham international legal authorities. He would take military action wherever and whenever he needed in order to stop the USA from encroaching upon Russia’s interests.

Because triangulation is his core impulse, he’s still tried to reconcile this policy with attempts to minimize the backlash from the imperialists. He waited eight years to start the demilitarization effort in Ukraine, even as Kiev shelled the Donbass throughout that time. His statement that “With Ukraine, our Western partners have crossed the line” in response to Washington’s Kiev coup felt like him seeking to keep reconciliation a possibility. Yet the more lines Washington has crossed, the less able he’s been to act like it’s a partner.

This is why Operation Z is not Putin’s war, but the Russian people’s war. The collective project by the people to defeat fascism and U.S. hegemony that he had to be pressured into starting. Due to his decisions being based in a sense of bourgeois pragmatism, rather than in the principled anti-imperialism of the communists who helped convince him to start the operation, he’s been criticized for conducting the war with too much hesitancy. “Putin has misread the West and if he doesn’t wake up soon, Armageddon is upon us,” said the commentator Paul Craig Roberts in December of last year. “by his inaction Putin has convinced Washington and its European puppet states that he doesn’t mean what he says and will endlessly accept ever worsening provocations, which have gone from sanctions to Western financial help to Ukraine, weapons supply, training and targeting information, provision of missiles capable of attacking internal Russia, attack on the Crimea bridge, destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines, torture of Russian POWs, attacks on Russian parts of Ukraine reincorporated into the Russian Federation, and attacks on internal Russia. At some point there will be a provocation that is too much. That’s when the SHTF.”

In an incredible irony, this week’s betrayal of the operation by a private military company leader has potentially made Russia able to avoid that mistake of appeasing the rogue American state. This unintended benefit that the PMC leader’s recklessness and opportunism has provided Z with comes from the class character of his actions; and from the response that these actions will produce. This incident happened as a consequence of Russia’s being a capitalist state, which created the conditions for rogue non-state military elements to emerge. The people, and their class representatives in the pro-Z communist orgs, understand this bourgeois origin of the disruption. They’ll respond to it by either explicitly or implicitly putting more pressure on the bourgeois state to win the war. Which, as Roberts has pointed out, is a task Putin could quite promptly complete if he were to act more forcefully.

“What Putin needed was a quick victory that made it completely clear that Russia had enforceable red lines that Ukraine had violated,” said Roberts. “A show of Russian military force would have stopped all provocations. The decadent West would have learned that it must leave the bear alone. Instead the Kremlin, misreading the West, wasted eight years on the Minsk Agreement that former German Chancellor Merket said was a deception to keep Russia from acting when Russia could have easily succeeded. Putin now agrees with me that it was his mistake not to have intervened in Donbass before the US created a Ukrainian army. My last word to Mike’s question is that Putin has misread the West. He still thinks the West has in its ‘leadership’ reasonable people, who no doubt act the role for Putin’s benefit, with whom he can have negotiations. Putin should go read the Wolfowitz Doctrine. If Putin doesn’t soon wake up, Armageddon is upon us, unless Russia surrenders.”

For the insipid infighting within Russia’s capitalist ruling class to cause this disruption to the war effort is an outrage. An offense towards the majority of Russians, who essentially agree Putin should have started the operation sooner. There’s a gargantuan social base behind Z. A base whose political representatives will hold the bourgeois state accountable if it falters in its assignment of defeating Ukrainian fascism. This is why while responding to the crisis, the government hasn’t come to have any doubts that it will have to continue the operation. For Putin to grow weak in his commitment to the war would be political suicide. 

The Russian people are so determined to have a government which wins this war because of their collective memory of Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa. The Nazis took 27 million of the lives of both the Russian people, and the people within the other Soviet republics. That crime needs to be rectified. So Russia has defied the circumstances imposed upon it by the 1990s counterrevolution, and pressured its new bourgeois rulers into taking action against the world’s new great fascist state. The disruptive activities of this PMC leader—which have promptly been halted regardless—are creating better political conditions for the government to be convinced into finally ending the Banderite menace.

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The nature of today’s class struggle: a battle between the liberal cultural hegemony, & the anti-NATO united front

If somebody is serious about advancing the class struggle at this moment in American history, they frame issues and orient their practice around two goals: fighting U.S. hegemony, and taking away the Democratic Party’s dominance over our organizing and discourse spaces. The latter goal is dependent on the former, and the same is true the other way around. We can’t take away the DNC’s ability to hold back the class struggle until we’ve sufficiently worked to combat imperialism’s narratives. Narratives which protect Democrat infiltrators within radical spaces by making it look acceptable for them to promote pro-imperialist ideas, while masquerading as revolutionaries. Therefore, we can’t adequately combat these ideas without exposing the hypocrisies of the “socialist” individuals and organizations which normalize them within our spaces.

The notion that we need to accommodate or appease these “Marxists” who denounce acts of defiance against U.S. hegemony by Washington’s rivals, promote State Department atrocity narratives, and attack entire sections of the anti-NATO movement for being too impure is a primary obstacle to fighting the empire’s psyops. Because as long as socialists are framing the class struggle in terms that make it seem like the left opportunists have some special kind of value, and like we must be careful not to alienate them, our pro-imperialist cultural hegemony will remain intact. At least to the extent that socialists haven’t genuinely joined in the effort to end this cultural hegemony, and the American global economic/military hegemony which it perpetuates. 

If socialists don’t break from the imperialism-compatible left, the right will continue to be the primary force that opposes the war against Russia. And aside from the kinds of libertarians who’ve come to also oppose the war against China, these conservatives aren’t consistent in their anti-imperialism. They’re also of course not interested in rectifying our domestic systemic injustices. Socialists need to take responsibility, and become explicit and vocal about backing the maneuvers by Russia and China to weaken U.S. hegemony. Which means giving up the Democratic Party-created, radical liberal framing of our liberation struggles, in which every decision socialists make has to be based on asking: “is this the correct thing to think or do from a ‘leftist’ perspective?” The right question is instead: “is this correct from a counter-hegemonic perspective?”

If somebody’s practice is centered around what you’re told a “leftist” should do, they’ll consistently find themselves opposing the actions necessary for defeating U.S. hegemony, and thereby the state. This is because according to the orthodoxy that’s been established by the New Left (the element the three-letter agencies created to replace the genuine labor movement), if you’re principled about opposing imperialism then you’ve joined with the reactionaries. 

The upholders of this orthodoxy say it’s not a “leftist” position to support Russia’s war against Ukrainian fascism and American dominance. If so, then I’m proud not to be a “leftist.” What we call the left in today’s America is simply a social club used to exclude any actors who are serious about building a movement outside the control of the Democratic Party. Orient your practice around trying to keep favor within this club, and you’ll never come to be an active agent within history. You’ll remain tethered to a group that doesn’t care about advancing the class struggle, but about maintaining status within the clique.

This clique keeps developing radicals discouraged from leaving it by maintaining the illusion that there’s no alternative to it, that if you’ve left it then you’re eternally irrelevant. The opposite is true. There is an alternative to what left spaces have to offer. It can be found by looking for which political and ideological forces in our discourse are being consistently attacked by the upholders of imperialism’s cultural hegemony.

The white supremacists and transphobic culture warriors, in their stupidity, think that they represent this dissident force simply because the left doesn’t like them. If this were true, the USA wouldn’t be built off of white supremacy, our systems of state violence wouldn’t be designed to harm trans folks, and the government wouldn’t be backing Nazis in Ukraine. Dissident politics don’t look like Stefan Molyneux or the Proud Boys, they look like the united front that’s emerged against NATO. The ultra-lefts and the reactionaries are two parts of the same body, both there to reinforce the system. What genuinely threatens the existing social order is the type of politics that’s focused on affecting the most important issues in the class conflict. Which at this stage are the domination of reformism and opportunism within radical spaces; and the U.S. government’s ability to fortify its internal control by exacting violence upon the majority of the globe.

These are the central priorities of the members of the anti-NATO united front, by which I mean the Rage Against the War Machine coalition and the groups or individuals that support this coalition. There’s an effort among the feds, the Democratic Party’s narrative managers in the media, and their ultra-left allies to discredit this front. Don’t listen to what these bad actors say. The interests of the class struggle are not what motivates them, maintaining their personal status is. If the people who at present don’t support the RAWM coalition were to talk with its ideological leaders in person, many of them would come to understand just how much sense their ideas make. This project is about building an antiwar movement that’s independent from the Democratic Party, and is therefore authentic in being antiwar. It doesn’t undermine its own cause by denouncing Russia to appeal to liberals, or by investing itself in the critical theories put forth by the New Left’s pseudo-Marxist academics.

Due to this coalition’s counter-hegemonic character, the communist organizations and individuals that have joined it are naturally all the types of Marxists who back Russia’s actions. The anti-Russian Marxists could join it if they wanted to, it tolerates a great range of differing views as long as everyone is willing to foster an environment of unity. Yet the socialists of this type have all shunned it, because their politics simply aren’t compatible with a serious effort to challenge our ruling institutions. They can only either be individualists who aren’t connected to any significant organizational force, or lackeys for one of the opportunist orgs.

Because the imperialism-compatible leftists are unwilling to join with any force in the class struggle that’s effective, the threat they pose is limited. As soon as enough Marxists stop taking their advice and join with the anti-NATO front, they’ll essentially cease being relevant. Because then Marxists will be able to confront the state from a place of greater advantage than we used to have. 

The Democratic Party’s narrative agents represent the first layer in the state’s counterinsurgency. When we’ve overcome this layer by uniting behind the anti-NATO front, the state will try to stop us with more aggressive means, exemplified by the Uhuru indictments and the RESTRICT act. Should we do our jobs well enough, and maintain the communist movement amid intensified repression, we’ll be prepared to guide the country’s regular mass uprisings in a coherent, revolutionary direction. Then the state will confront us with domestic military interventions, which it’s preparing for with police militarization and Cop City. As we fight the Democrat lackeys today, we must equip ourselves with the tools to defeat the anti-revolutionary forces we’ll meet when we defeat our present enemies.

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If Marxists try to appeal to radical liberals, we’ll never win the people’s support

Communism used to be a mainstream force in the United States. The state saw communists as capable of replicating the Russian revolution, so it orchestrated mass raids against them simply for being involved in the movement. Communists were a pivotal force in labor organizing. Communists were able to pose big enough of a threat to American capitalism’s future that FDR got intimidated into implementing the New Deal. 

Then the efforts to force them out of public life scared the movement’s major representatives (too easily) into ceasing their operations. And when the Black liberation struggle and the antiwar movement both underwent a great rise in influence, making a communist revival possible, the state destroyed the Black Panther Party while building a pseudo-radical alternative to Marxism. That alternative being the New Left, the generation of critical theorists who are informed not by the thinkers who’ve actually advanced the class struggle, but by CIA academics like Herbert Marcuse.

This effort to transform “Marxism” from something genuinely threatening, into just another one of the “critical theories” that liberals can take or leave in their analyses, was so successful that it turned the Panther Angela Davis into an agent for it. From the start, Davis was a student of Marcuse’s Frankfurt School, and now adheres to its ideas more than ever. Davis was part of a group of political actors who further deradicalized American communism by disavowing “authoritarian” socialism after the USSR’s fall, and is among the “radical” public figures who promote the Vote Blue stance. 

It’s these kinds of figures who represent the default sources of guidance that developing radicals in modern America turn to, because for generations we haven’t had a mainstream Marxist movement that’s authentic. Aside from Parenti, the only voices in our major discourse who’ve claimed to be communists do not actually practice Marxism. They practice a distorted version of “Marxism” that acts like class struggle is only one among a series of struggles, ignoring how all the different identity struggles are themselves class-based.

It’s this focus these figures put on racial, national, women’s, and LGBT liberation which makes them widely seen as credible. The assumption many developing radicals make is that these critical theorists and their ideas have a value which can’t be overlooked, due to the importance of rectifying the distinct types of injustices that are experienced by different parts of the people. The fallacy in this idea is that we Marxists are obligated to let our ideas and actions be influenced by New Left thinkers, just because these thinkers support social justice. Which extends not just to pseudo-Marxist academics like Davis and Horne, but to the activists and online discourse agents that are informed by this type of revisionist thinking. As Parenti pointed out, in the post-McCarthyism era there’s arisen an “Anything But Class” left, and in the social media age this element has been able to portray itself as being more influential than it actually is. To make it look like Marxists have no choice but to appeal to it.

I talk about these radical liberals like they’re part of an astroturf campaign because that’s essentially what their movement is. They get their perceived credibility by making it look like if you lose favor with them, there’s no way you can succeed. Like they hold the power to make you forever irrelevant. This is the idea that comes through in how they claim to speak for entire marginalized groups, implying that if you don’t appease them, then you’ve by extension alienated yourself from everybody within these groups. This threat of theirs is a bluff, a bluff that’s used to intimidate developing Marxists into abandoning their Marxism.

We’ve seen this in how many American Marxists who’ve been able to unlearn the anti-communist narratives about existing socialism have reacted to the Ukraine war. As well as to the recent intensification of ideological conflicts within the left which relate to the war. These actors praise China and the DPRK. Yet when China has effectively backed Russia in the conflict, while the DPRK has outright stated support for Russia, they’ve taken the “neither NATO nor Russia” stance. Their declining to follow socialist Korea’s example of being in solidarity with the Russian people’s struggle against Nazism has everything to do with a desire to fit in within “left” spaces. Which in a post-Russiagate world means distancing oneself from the pro-Russia stance, since this stance is portrayed by the left as inherently right-wing.

When “but is this what someone on the ‘left’ would think?” is the basis for your ideology, the act of “supporting” existing socialism loses its substance. Loving China, Cuba, or Korea becomes just another part of one’s social media brand. What’s the point of “supporting” the successful revolutions if you’re not willing to adopt the ideas and practices that can make you win proletarian victory within your own country? This is a shallow kind of “support,” especially when coming from a resident of one of the imperialist countries that’s waging war against socialism. 

By declining to fight the information war against NATO, these modern Anything But Class leftists are not just acting chauvinistically towards imperialism’s global victims, but hindering the revolutionary struggle in their own countries. We won’t be able to get revolution in the core until U.S. hegemony has been sufficiently weakened, a cause that we in the core have the ability and the responsibility to contribute to. The more we weaken imperialism’s narrative control, the more untenable its war operations become. To deny this is to avoid fulfilling an essential duty.

How to reconcile this decision not to do the things the revolutionary struggle needs us to do the most at the moment, with the belief these radlibs have in the need for rectifying our systemic injustices? The way they’ve rationalized committing this betrayal is by claiming it can’t be a betrayal, because fighting the narrative war against NATO is according to them not the best way we can weaken the state at this stage. They claim that combating U.S. hegemony is secondary to the fights regarding our domestic social issues. This has come through not just in how I’ve seen radlibs directly say this, but in how CPUSA, PSL, and the other anti-Russian socialist orgs consistently prioritize the culture war over the anti-imperialist movement. 

I say the culture war, and not social justice, because these orgs don’t truly advance social justice. They only tail the Democratic Party by reactively holding events and making statements whenever the Democrats are trying to co-opt a struggle against social injustice, never asserting their own agency within protest movements. Because if they were to do something disruptive, like become principled and aggressive about opposing Democrat foreign policy, this would hinder their ability to appeal to the DNC’s base.

The calculus behind this liberal tailist strategy, where they compromise on anti-imperialist stances to not appear “pro-Putin” or continuously try to distance themselves from anti-NATO groups that liberals have deemed untouchable, is the notion that liberals are the group best able to be brought towards Marxism. This is a fallacy. Even if it were true—which it no longer is, since Russiagate has made many on the “left” into obstinate neocons—we still need to win the parts of the people who aren’t liberals. What about the apoliticals, many of whom don’t vote because their class status has made them alienated from bourgeois politics? What about the types of conservatives who’ve gravitated to libertarianism or MAGA only because these camps have initially looked like the best alternatives to what the Democrats offer, and could be brought to communism? 

A growing number of those in these categories are coming to an anti-imperialist consciousness in reaction to Ukraine. Why should we discard them? Because they have backwards beliefs? Mao said it’s our job to bring those with backwards beliefs to a better place, should we ignore him? 

There are two alternatives to joining the united front that’s emerged against NATO: join with the PSL-aligned camp that’s interested in tailing the Democrats rather than in winning; or denounce every organizational element of the American socialist movement, due to none of these elements being free from real or perceived contradictions. If you do the latter, the only place for you to go is the insular online communities the modern ABC left has formed. Spaces that are built on resentment, rather than on anything constructive or deliverable, as they have no organizational basis and don’t want to adopt the strategies needed for attaining one. To win the people, Marxists have to focus on winning the people, not on appeasing the gatekeepers of these spaces. It’s best for us to build our movement without any fear of what the unserious people will say.

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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.