Winning the class war requires disrupting our liberal cultural hegemony. That means defying the conventional “left” practices.

Our cultural hegemony, or rather a particular aspect of it, is designed to dissuade Marxists from doing the most impactful thing they can do at this stage in the class struggle: bring anti-imperialist ideas to the people by any means necessary. This is the part of the cultural hegemony that exists specifically within the modern USA’s “left” spaces, and that’s been cultivated to prevent those in these spaces from nurturing the anti-imperialist impulses of the workers. Which is an essential ingredient to building a relationship with the people, and to rallying the people towards asserting their material interests. 

The indispensable nature of that task seems obvious, but there are a series of stigmas and taboos within today’s conventional activist spaces which make anyone who seriously pursues it become labeled as a traitor to leftism. Or rather to the concept of “leftism” which the prevailing culture has normalized.

In a broad sense, the cultural hegemony we live under has the character of dogmatically pro-capitalist ideology; the default beliefs somebody in our society is conditioned to adopt are ones that tell them to see the present socioeconomic order as the best possible system, and to embrace this system’s competitive mentality. When somebody becomes alienated from this society and its prevailing ideology, though, it’s rare that the alternative ideas and practices they seek out lead them towards becoming effective agents within the class struggle.

This is because ever since the incredibly popular and influential 20th century American communist movement was destroyed by McCarthyism, the FBI’s war on the Panthers, and the destructive effects of the USSR’s fall, it’s gotten replaced by a new version of the “left” that’s fundamentally ineffectual. A “left” that’s defined by an anti-popular mindset where appealing to a majority of the people, even when it’s on something as objectively revolutionary as anti-imperialism, is seen as “reactionary.” 

That’s the logical conclusion of the stance, shared by our primary “left” groups, that we can’t work with anyone who isn’t as ideologically advanced as they are. (Something these groups judge with a hubristic bias, as they frequently embrace anti-materialist liberal academic theories). When one is operating according to this anti-popular way of thinking, the “solution” they’re led to is an idealistic one; a practice where they assume they can achieve socialism, while bypassing the work required for educating and mobilizing the people.

The tragic situation of so many who’ve become alienated from capitalism in 21st century America is that this false solution is the only type of “socialism” they ever encounter. And the elements which represent an authentic threat towards our ruling institutions get ubiquitously slandered by the compatible left, which too often dissuades the compatible left’s naive members from joining with those truly revolutionary elements.

Anyone who saw the efforts by PSL and ANSWER to censure and isolate the multi-tendency anti-NATO coalition which emerged this year knows what I’m talking about. It was the communists within that coalition who had the superior model of practice (building an antiwar movement that’s capable of connecting with people outside the left activist niche), while it was PSL that had the ineffectual model (trying to appeal to liberals by taking imperialism-compatible positions, like denouncing Russia’s military operation). Additionally, it was the anti-NATO coalition that was actively bringing the antiwar movement forward, whereas PSL and ANSWER engage in worship of spontaneity by only holding actions in response to preexisting momentum. Yet those who were beholden to PSL, or were simply invested in ultra-leftist ideas, accepted the dishonest arguments which the compatible leftists made against the anti-NATO coalition.

The scandal-mongering around this coalition, and about all individuals and orgs adjacent to it, has successfully fooled those within all tendencies of the compatible left: anarchists, Maoists, social democrats, the sectarian types of Trotskyists. As well as the actors who call themselves Marxist-Leninists, but don’t truly practice the dialectical science of Marxism-Leninism. 

I used to be part of the latter group; if I had heard of the Rage Against the War Machine coalition prior to February of 2022, I would have been persuaded by the “leftist” arguments condemning the coalition. But when I came to recognize that Russia’s act of defiance against U.S. hegemony was absolutely justified, and was an overall positive development for the anti-imperialist cause, this began to make it possible for me to break from our “left” cultural hegemony. Because if Russia was right for taking action in Ukraine, why have all of our main “left” orgs condemned Russia for doing this? If this is how bad their judgment is, should we uncritically believe them when they say a diverse anti-imperialist coalition is bad?

The dominant cultural narrative in modern American leftism asserts that whenever any political position conflicts with the goal of gaining influence within the insular “left” spaces, that position should be rejected. Because Russiagate solidified an anti-Russia orthodoxy among liberals, and many “leftists” are simply liberals in a more “radical” form, orgs like PSL have sought to distance themselves from Russia’s action. And because the Democratic Party’s narrative managers are easily able to convince the bulk of leftists that it’s never okay to work with any non-leftists on anti-imperialism, even plenty of Marxist-Leninists who should know better have denounced the anti-NATO coalition. 

These beliefs are further strengthened by the rationales that they come with; rationales which can convince someone their own thinking has been guided not by liberal tailism, but by objective reality. For instance, a Marxist who’s anti-Russia can believe their stance is justified by Russia being a capitalist state; or a Marxist who opposes the anti-NATO coalition can believe the coalition’s communists are simply empowering the right. These beliefs are self-reinforcing, as they all come from the same mentality which can cause a leftist to act insular and narrow-minded; that mentality being ultra-leftism. The consequence of letting oneself be guided by this thinking is to discard essential parts of Marxist theory (like primary vs secondary contradictions), or essential lessons from communist history (like how the Bolsheviks won because they were willing to work in reactionary trade unions).

The essential character flaw of these types of Marxists (aside from the ones motivated by actual corruption) is susceptibility towards social pressure. When one honestly investigates what kinds of people who are leading the anti-NATO coalition, they find that the things they’ve been told about these people are misleading. But our social spaces, particularly the online ones, don’t incentivize serious investigation; they incentivize conformity, conformity to a predetermined standard for what it means to be a “leftist.” 

Because of how common it is for the individuals who most passionately claim to support social and racial justice to be among anti-imperialism’s most vitriolic opponents, I’ve had to conclude that revolution won’t come from the left. It will come from whoever is willing to do what’s necessary for disrupting our liberal cultural hegemony, which is an indispensable prerequisite for proletarian victory. 

Marxists may need to discard the “left” label itself, like they discarded the “social democrat” label in the early 20th century after social democracy came to primarily be defined by pro-imperialist opportunism. That the left opportunists are correct about certain things involving social and racial issues doesn’t erase their opportunism, it only makes it more insidious. A vanguard for our workers revolution can include those who are socially progressive; but only if they first come to the synthesis between this social progressivism, and the serious anti-imperialism which our movement’s success requires. The cultural hegemony our left spaces have cultivated makes it appear impossible to be principled on Black and Native rights, or on trans rights, while being an effective anti-imperialist. When one is exposed to perspectives outside this limited range of thinking, they can see how absurd that notion is.

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NATO’s censors attack Strategic Culture and The Grayzone as rise of BRICS causes the imperialists to panic

How to tell whether someone represents a genuine threat to our ruling institutions? See how far they’re able to get within the platforms these institutions control, or how much organizing work they can do until getting targeted by state repression. These individuals and organizations naturally aren’t able to gain great resources or reach, but this sacrifice of their short-term influence is ironically the cost of their defining history in the long term.

It’s only when you refuse to compromise your stances and practice that the centers of power act like you’re an existential threat towards them. And when you unite with the others who’ve committed to fighting U.S. hegemony, as the members of the Rage Against the War Machine coalition have done this year, you ultimately can gain a kind of platform which the imperialism-compatible actors don’t even want to attain: a platform that lets you appeal to a majority of the people, and nurture their anti-imperialist impulses.

That’s the context which can provide us with hope as we see NATO’s censors intensify their assaults upon journalists and journalism. This month, the online imperialist censorship campaign reached a potentially unprecedented degree when it shut down an entire website: Strategic Culture, the platform for anti-NATO commentary run by the Strategic Culture Foundation. One day this site, which had given me and others so many important resources on geopolitics, simply ceased to be accessible. And according to the Foundation’s statement about this, censorship was absolutely to blame. 

I got this statement from someone who sent it to me on Facebook, which appropriately made the site’s name have to itself be censored due to being blocked from U.S. social media:

Today, our website, ***ic-***e.org has been denied access to the .org domain, run by the U.S.-based Public Interest Registry. This comes in the wake of numerous cyberattacks aimed at the website’s infrastructure. There is no doubt that this act of cyber warfare is an attempt to silence another independent media critical of the American empire. Currently, all our materials are accessible on Telegram and we will resume the operation of our website soon. Stay tuned! Sincerely, Strategic Culture Foundation.”

What had the site done to provoke these cyberattacks? This kind of thing doesn’t simply happen to sites at random; these attacks have everything to do with how Strategic Culture is countering NATO’s narratives on the conflict in Ukraine, at a moment when Ukraine is an extremely sensitive topic for our ruling institutions. Far more sensitive than they want anyone to be aware of, because they seek to maintain the perception that the war is still seen by the pro-Kiev side as winnable.

The reality is that Ukraine’s summer counter-offensive was a failure, and this has had catastrophic consequences for Washington’s strategic interests. Not necessarily because of Ukraine’s military defeat itself, but because this defeat has made it more difficult for Washington to hide the larger economic defeat which it’s been experiencing for around a year now. Last fall, when the sanctions started visibly failing to bring the outcomes that the experts said they would, the only way the empire could keep the Ukraine psyop going was by maintaining a story about Ukraine being perpetually close to driving out Russia. The longer things have carried on, the more it’s become a problem that Ukraine no longer has armed forces capable of being effective without outside help. And as the war has accelerated the rise in inflation while sustaining an energy crisis, the mass support the imperialists depend on for their war has shrunk.

That Strategic Culture has been bringing attention to the empire’s failures makes it a danger to the war machine’s stability, so it had to be crushed, and the censors will start trying to crush it again after it comes back. The same level of danger comes from The Grayzone, as we’ve seen from how the NATO agents have targeted it this week. GoFundMe, one of the payment companies that’s been working to advance the Russia sanctions by cutting services off from anti-NATO voices, has made The Grayzone unable to get its recent donations. Max Blumenthal has explained why it’s totally reasonable to connect this with the campaign against anti-imperialists:

The FBI’s effort to ban Twitter accounts at the behest of Ukrainian intelligence offers a clue into the identify of those responsible for raising the “external concerns” with Gofundme. Since 2014, when a US-backed coup installed a nationalist government in Kiev, our contributors have been at the forefront of exposing the role of Washington in pushing Ukraine toward all-out war with Russia. The Grayzone has also provided extensive documentation of the overwhelming influence of neo-Nazi forces over Kiev, triggering angry tirades from Ukrainian diplomats while landing our staff members on Myrotvorets, a semi-official SBU assassination target list…while we have no concrete information on the identity of the “external forces” that have successfully lobbied Gofundme to freeze our donations, we have strong reason to suspect interference by the Ukrainian government and its sponsors in Washington is at the root of the sabotage.

These two developments are further indications that another, much larger attack against the anti-imperialist movement is coming. The raiding and indictments of Uhuru’s members in retaliation for their combating the Ukraine psyop have been attempts to suppress anti-imperialist organizational efforts, particularly ones which bring in the Black working class, at a time when these efforts have posed a serious threat to the empire’s most important psyop. As this psyop becomes further untenable; and the empire is forced to create narrative pretexts for more desperate measures, like a hybrid war on BRICS or an effort to destroy Africa; the state will try to manufacture consent for even greater repression. Potentially by carrying out a false flag, one which involves implicating anti-imperialist journalists and groups in supposed foreign election interference.

The hegemon has growing logistical limits to how much damage it can do abroad. It can’t start destabilization campaigns against all the countries that are embracing multipolarity, that would destroy the USA itself in the process. It needs to choose its next targets with care and caution, making the wishes of certain pro-NATO agents for balkanizing places like Brazil too absurd to take seriously. This last werk Günther Fehlinger, president of NATO’s European Development Committee, called for breaking Brazil into many different countries, using the rationale that Lula is partnering with the supposed “genocide” perpetrator Putin. Whether or not we should believe the Twitter fact check feature’s statement that Fehlinger’s opinion doesn’t represent the view of NATO itself, there’s no way the hegemon can actually do this. If the USA tried to destroy Brazil, it would only succeed at fully demolishing its own economy.

The imperialists still have some tools for hindering the rise of BRICS, and these tools can only be taken away via a new wave of workers revolutions. When France convinced India’s fascist regime to block Algerian entry into BRICS this month, it showed the anti-revolutionary effectiveness of the Indian deep state’s maneuver to install the BJP into power. Ultimately, the fight against imperialism can only be won when the worldwide proletarian struggle is. The hegemon has still overall been declining, though; the latest series of BRICS decisions succeeded at adding numerous new members to the grouping, and Venezuela is seeking to join it at the next opportunity.

Because the hegemon is experiencing such immense losses simply due to the unavoidable processes of history, the agents of international monopoly capital have more reason to be more concerned than ever. They’re trying to prolong the Ukraine proxy war as much as they can, even taking advantage of the crises their own socioeconomic order has created to attempt to gain leverage. Biden has inserted his failing latest Ukraine aid proposal into the bill for Maui fire relief, showing that the imperialists will blackmail the people if that’s what they need to do to keep up their war operations.

Should we succeed at mobilizing the people against the war machine and the capitalist order behind it, these wars will become truly impossible for our rulers to wage. We have to survive the growing attacks against our movement, and become the winners in the class conflict.

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Combat the anti-popular mindset, which discourages appealing to a majority of the workers on anti-imperialism

What the Ukraine war has done is expose a rift between the types of Marxists who seek to bring back the successes of the 20th century American communist movement; and the types of Marxists who have faith in the insular leftist activism practice which replaced that movement. Prior to February of 2022, these two elements were better able to coexist, as many of them share a pro-China stance. But when everyone in the movement got confronted with the questions of whether we should support Russia in its fight against fascism and U.S. hegemony; and of whether we should build an anti-NATO coalition which extends beyond the “left” circles; a fundamental difference in priorities was revealed.

The mindset behind the insular element’s choosing to break from the pro-Russia stance shared by so much of the global anti-imperialist movement; and to reject all realistic opportunities for reaching those outside the left activist niche; is one of a purity fetish. Of letting secondary contradictions prevent one from working to rectify primary contradictions, which naturally makes one inclined to be convinced by scandal-mongering and see additional “contradictions” which don’t even exist. 

This is the framework of understanding that’s caused elements of the U.S. left to believe the “Uyghur genocide” psyop, and it’s what Carlos Garrido combats in his book from this year The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism. In the months since that work was published, we’ve seen a series of developments that have proven its observations right. It’s not until we saw the U.S. left’s reactions to the emergence of a non-insular antiwar coalition that we discovered exactly how the purity fetish hurts efforts towards building a relationship with the people.

In the short term, the purity fetish mindset—also called petty bourgeois radicalism—discourages attempts at appealing to the workers on the basis of their shared interest in ending the U.S. empire. The types of radicals who’ve embraced this way of thinking see how support for aid to Ukraine has been declining, and view this as essentially meaningless; as not good enough of a reason to stop viewing the people as fundamentally reactionary. The only way a petty bourgeois radical would give up this perception of the people is if a majority of the people were to become as ideologically advanced as themself; an attitude which, in addition to hubristically presuming all of their own present ideas are correct, is simply not realistic. 

We can’t expect most people within a country to undergo a full progression in their social views prior to when a revolution has happened, and when we’ve gained the means to educate everyone within society. Moreover, such a cultural revolution shouldn’t be viewed as a prerequisite for carrying out a workers revolution; that the workers are in need of economic liberation is enough of a reason to work towards their liberation. 

Whether or not the petty-bourgeois radicals are aware of it, they’re operating according to a mode of practice that can only allow them to build a relationship with most people after a full cultural revolution has taken place. What else can we conclude after seeing every major left org come out against the project to unite all the ideological elements of the antiwar movement? As petty-bourgeois radicals always have, they may tell themselves that it’s possible to build an ideologically exclusive movement and still expect to win. But that goal is not deliverable; Lenin clarified this a century ago in his polemic about why socialists should work in reactionary trade unions. 

The practical reality is that we need to navigate our conditions as they are, not expect our conditions to conform to ideals which would make a “pure” movement possible. This is what Gus Hall was alluding to in his polemic against petty-bourgeois radicalism, where he observed something portentous to our present situation: as soon as the workers start mobilizing for their own class interests in a way which the petty-bourgeois radicals can’t control, the petty-bourgeois radicals come to feel threatened; as their influence depends on them being able to monopolize organizing spaces. 

In order to justify holding this monopoly, wrote Hall, they present the class struggle as a task which doesn’t have to involve navigating our conditions as they are; as something that can be won simply by building a movement and nothing more. As a consequence, Hall’s analysis implies, they never think seriously about how to get out of the movement and into the masses:

They believe they can avoid the necessary and unavoidable consistent and sustained work, the work of organizing, educating, mobilizing and leading people in mass, of leading people on the level of their understanding, of their own self-interest, and in this sense reflecting the objective processes leading to a revolutionary struggle against capitalism. For this they seek to substitute radical rhetoric with general slogans, or advanced actions that have no relationship to struggles to which the masses do respond…Petty-bourgeois radicalism as a concept is now in a serious crisis. Masses have moved to new levels of political consciousness and to higher forms of strugle[sic]. Generally, petty-bourgeois radical concepts go into a crisis when working-class concepts of struggle are on the ascendancy.

In the longer term, the anti-popular mindset threatens not just the effort to bring a majority of the people into the class struggle, but the effort to improve the people’s conditions. After we’ve overthrown the state, the upholders of the anti-popular mindset will be opposing the policies that we’ll have to implement in order to solve our living standards crisis; those policies being the initiatives to re-industrialize our society in an environmentally compatible, socialist fashion. 

The only way we can heal the wounds capitalism has created within our working class communities is by utilizing industry to undo the destruction which monopoly capital has brought to these communities. The shipping out of jobs and the lowering of wages; the neglect of the infrastructure; the obliteration of entire neighborhoods due to climatic disasters the government refuses to adequately respond to; industry is the tool required for rectifying these crimes against the people. We need to bring economic vitality back to our neighborhoods; we need to become more domestically self-reliant on agriculture and on factory-made goods; we need to build an American version of the high-speed rails the Asian socialist countries have created; we need to replicate China’s successes on safe and up-to-date nuclear energy, which is an essential part of bringing down emissions without sacrificing mass human wellbeing. 

These things are commonsense, and they’re ultimately compatible with the long-term communist goal of reducing the need for human labor by letting the people share in the wealth produced by automated technology. Yet they’re contentious on the left; because today’s conventional U.S. left is fundamentally guided not by materialist, practical thinking, but by a radical version of liberal dogma.

Hostility towards the PRC—a country that would be a valuable partner in building our new socialist infrastructure—is a big part of this dogma. What even more on the left share, though, is a belief in the “degrowth” dogma. And this is where the conventional left’s ultimate allegiance to finance capital; to the Democratic Party; to the liberal internationalist institutions which seek to implement global climate austerity; becomes apparent. The essential connection between these ruling entities and our conventional “left” forces is in their shared idea about growth being an intrinsically bad thing. 

Whether somebody is advocating for degrowth because they want to preserve capitalism in contracted form, or because they genuinely believe degrowth is necessary for saving the planet, they’re advancing the same destructive idea: that the people must be combated. That everyone outside the elitist circles—whether these circles are the DC beltway, or the supposedly enlightened left activist spaces—represents a malign force which needs to be countered. This is the logical conclusion of the anti-popular stance that we’ve seen the left primarily take in relation to the anti-imperialist movement, in which any element of the workers who assert their class interests outside the approved parameters is viewed as an enemy. 

If the anti-popular mindset wins, our future can only look like further victories for capital and a descent into barbarism. If we don’t let it define the class struggle, the class struggle will be able to bring capital’s defeat.

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If you appreciate my work, I hope you become a one-time or regular donor to my Patreon account. Like most of us, I’m feeling the economic pressures amid 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. 

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A drive for war on Mexico is coming. U.S. workers must unite against it, like they’re uniting against the Ukraine war.

The war-makers are mobilizing to bring their campaign of destruction and suffering, which has already traumatized an entire generation in Europe with the Ukraine conflict, to the North American continent. They’re aiming to invade Mexico, as is evident in how such a war effort has even stronger bipartisan support than the Ukraine proxy war does; the same Republican politicians who’ve been articulating skepticism of aid to Ukraine are glad to demonize and antagonize Mexico. War is the logical conclusion of their rhetoric about how we need to “focus on protecting our border.” And this rhetoric is being put forth with the same kinds of omissions of crucial context that have been used to justify sending weapons to Ukraine. 

That context being the USA’s own covert role, through its intelligence agencies and police departments, in providing narcotics for the same Mexican drug cartels that these politicians claim to want to defeat. The anti-Mexico psyop is one big false flag; a crisis the empire has manufactured to create a pretext for violating its neighbor’s sovereignty, in the same way the empire claims Russia has violated Ukraine’s sovereignty.

As grave as this threat of a nearby new war is, the threat only exists because the imperial hegemon has come to be in desperate enough of a situation for invading Mexico to now be seen as a rational idea. The wars wouldn’t be coming so close to the empire’s core if the empire weren’t being forced to retreat; if its attempt to use Ukraine as a weapon for destabilizing Russia and China hadn’t failed, then ironically brought about an acceleration of decline in U.S. influence. If Washington hadn’t both economically and militarily lost in Ukraine, Taiwan would now be the place it’s maneuvering to bring conflict to, not Mexico. The empire also wouldn’t be starting on a hybrid warfare campaign against BRICS; and it wouldn’t be seeking to attack Africa, or to suppress the USA’s domestic anti-imperialist movement, with so much ferocity. 

Given that the anti-Mexico psyop is an indication of our enemy’s growing weakness, we who seek an end to U.S. hegemony have reason to believe our resistance towards this psyop can be successful. If our effort doesn’t succeed at stopping the invasion itself, then it can succeed at making the war bring about the empire’s demise, like how the Russian tsarist state’s war effort in World War I led to its defeat by the revolutionaries.

Aside from that longer term hope for ending the war state itself, our rhetoric and our organizing efforts should absolutely be focused either on pressuring the government not to carry out the invasion; or on ending the war should the U.S. still invade Mexico. The U.S. working class, being the majority of the people in the imperial center, is the social base the empire depends on to continue its war operations. If we educate and mobilize a majority of the workers to vocally oppose war on Mexico, the war effort will be made untenable. And we can do this not by trying to convince liberals (who represent a minority of the population that’s mainly within the imperialist-invested labor aristocracy), but rather by nurturing anti-imperialist impulses among the workers. Impulses that, as the Ukraine war has shown, already exist among these workers, and lately have been growing more pronounced.

It’s in this task of rallying the popular majority against imperialism where it becomes essential to give up the insular practice of conventional U.S. “left” spaces. According to the thinking that prevails within these spaces, even though a slight majority of Americans have recently been found to oppose further aid to Ukraine, we shouldn’t try to build a relationship with those among them who aren’t on the left. Given the last decade’s rise in pro-war sentiment among liberals, and rise in anti-war sentiment among conservatives, this means discarding a vast amount of the individuals who are against the proxy war. 

Flippantly dismissing any number of those in this demographic is foolish. They encompass not just the most conscious element of the workers, but the majority of the people within our conditions. They’re who we absolutely need to build a relationship with in order to win. We can’t expect to prevent further imperialist violence, or to defeat the state, by exclusively appealing to the liberals and lib-“lefts” within the niche activist spaces. To effectively combat the upcoming pro-war psyops, we must build an anti-imperialist coalition with the majority who’ve already come to be able to resist the Ukraine psyop. 

Such a consciousness shift against an imperialist psyop is capable of frustrating the empire’s plans; this is being shown by how the recent rise in public opposition to Ukraine aid has been causing Biden to encounter obstacles to his latest aid package. The proxy war is getting increasingly difficult to maintain, and the empire’s strategists want to pivot to new warfare fronts. We need to do all we can to block this pivot, and make the wars end as soon as possible.

Forcing the wars to halt—whether through public pressure on the state, or through our ultimate goal of overthrowing the state—is going to require further constructing the multi-tendency anti-imperialist coalition that the Ukraine war has produced. This coalition is not confined to the “left,” and the communists who’ve joined it are okay with this; that’s because they understand they don’t need the support of the “left” to win the class war. They simply need the support of a majority of the people. And if large parts of that majority include people who aren’t on the left, that’s a practical reality we need to recognize. 

The insular types of leftists would argue that there’s no hope for turning the MAGA base against the anti-Mexico psyop, claiming the only reason those in this element oppose the Ukraine war is because a Democrat is leading it. Is this true, though, when the anti-interventionist shift among the country’s conservatives was happening while Trump was still president? Trump’s own base had been shown to oppose the same wars which Trump himself was continuing, and that represented the prelude to their present opposition towards the Ukraine proxy war. If we can spread awareness of the U.S. government’s efforts to assist the Mexican drug trade, we can turn the MAGA base against the anti-Mexico psyop. Which would be pivotal to our cause’s success, as the MAGA base is the element the empire depends on to gain majority public support for invading Mexico.

What Marxists need to understand is that the individuals who’ve been voting Republican are not synonymous with the Republican politicians; plenty of these voters don’t share the material interests of the politicians they’ve gravitated towards, meaning many of them can be brought towards anti-imperialism and communism. The liberals and “red libs” claim all of these voters are nothing more than fascists, but that’s undialectical. In 2016, the activist Kirk Noden clarified that the working class parts of the right have come to where they are due to how much the pro-corporate liberals have alienated them from the left, or from what’s conventionally presented as the “left”:

Why do white working-class people vote against their interests? They don’t. Corporate Democrats have never advanced their interests—and at least Republicans offer a basic, if misleading, story about why they are getting screwed. When I first started organizing in Youngstown, Ohio, many people told me I must read Sean Safford’s Why the Garden Club Couldn’t Save Youngstown, which argues that Youngstown collapsed as a result of a lack of social networks. It is an absurd explanation for what happened to the city—but embraced by many thoughtful progressive leaders there. In fact, Youngstown has been left hobbled because progressives failed to secure economic power. The first step was the collapse of the industrial heartland. This hit white working-class people incredibly hard—and it remains a phenomenon that is not understood on the East and West Coasts. It is painted as a natural evolution of our economy and as if the onus is on people to adapt to it. This fails to capture how many families and communities were dependent on the industrial economy. Many Ohioans are now staring at a future where they themselves and their kids have less opportunity than their parents.

What happens when these workers are exposed to the perspectives of authentic Marxists, ones who seek not to tail liberals but to connect with the people? What I’ve seen with the former Trump supporters who’ve become Marxists is that plenty of them are receptive to Marxism; they’ve stopped obsessing over the culture war, if they ever did in the first place, and united with the same Black activists who they may have become hostile towards at an earlier point in their development. This is what we’ve witnessed with the partnership between Caleb Maupin’s Center for Political Innovation—which has many conservative-leaning people who’ve come to adopt Marxist ideas—and the African People’s Socialist Party. APSP doesn’t share CPI’s patriotic socialist stance, yet it’s united with it on an anti-imperialist basis.

As the propaganda drive for war against Mexico intensifies, the insular left orgs will of course denounce the calls for war. But they’ll refuse to unite with the broad anti-imperialist coalition that’s actually capable of rallying a majority against the invasion. It’s this coalition which has the strategy that can get everyone who’s compatible with the anti-imperialist cause to participate in that cause. There’s a growing popular mandate for ending the war state; not just because most Americans want to end the Ukraine proxy war, but because even more Americans want to end the horrific drug crisis which the war state is causing within U.S. borders. It’s our job to mobilize those who share these sentiments towards resisting the war machine, and the capitalist oligarchy that runs it.

The empire’s effort to nurture the Mexican drug trade relates to the efforts by our government, and by the pharmaceutical companies which control it, to proliferate drugs like fentanyl throughout the USA’s own population. And the fentanyl crisis is the next stage in the war that our government has been waging against the working class; a traumatic phenomenon of mass suffering that’s being felt by people of all colors and partisan affiliations. If we spread awareness that this crisis has to do with a scheme to fuel the continental drug trade; a scheme whose end goal is to bring about war; then we’ll be able to incite mass outrage against the war state.

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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 pressures amid 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. 

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The suppression of anti-imperialists depends on discouraging solidarity with Uhuru & the state’s other targets

To understand the nature of pro-imperialist psyops in the era from after the Ukraine war’s start, we need to understand what these psyops are about defending: monopoly capital. The context behind every attack against an anti-imperialist country; attempt to discredit a person or org that’s helping the anti-imperialist cause; or act of state persecution towards these voices of dissent; is a situation where the economic basis for the power of our ruling class is being perpetually weakened. The Ukraine proxy war was supposed to give monopoly capital new strength by destroying the Eurasian powers that threaten it, but this backfired. So now those tasked with advancing the psyops need to try to maintain NATO’s control over the narrative, even as NATO and the capital it protects grow ever more unstable.

Trying to prevent revolutionary solidarity as the need for revolution grows ever greater

The society that these psyops are directed at is embroiled in a series of ever-worsening crises. The disappearance of economic opportunities; the rise in rent prices, evictions, and homelessness; public health catastrophes; the proliferation of increasingly deadly drugs; the growing frequency of mass shootings and other public acts of violence; an intensifying climate crisis that the government neglects responding to in favor of funding wars; it’s not a tolerable way for us to live. And things have been made this way as a consequence of the capitalist ruling class having been able to hold on to power for this long. 

The job of the psyop agents is to destroy any efforts at building a force that can genuinely threaten the ruling class, and they’ll employ any idea that’s useful towards achieving this sabotage of our social movements. With the recent rise in socially progressive thinking, the primary ideas they use for this anti-revolutionary project now come not from the right, but from the left; and as the class conflict escalates, this translates to fascism taking on a liberal form. A form where the forces of serious opposition towards capital get persecuted by a state which claims to represent progress and inclusion. 

That’s why we see the Biden White House put up LGBT flags, even though it absolutely won’t end the prejudicial economic system and discriminatory carceral state that keep trans folks as second class citizens: the liberal class wants progressive-minded people to feel dependent on it, and therefore able to be manipulated into voting blue or promoting Democrat psyops. Cultivating this sense of dependency can be as easy as displaying symbols of “support” for justice, however shallow these displays are.

This kind of manipulation is also possible under a Republican administration, where liberals aren’t in control of the executive wing; as we saw during Trump’s term, the “left” wing of the ruling class can get liberals to support governmental wings like the intelligence agencies by using these agencies against the Republican president. The essential ingredient was the “Russiagate” psyop, which we’re seeing the narrative managers prepare to bring back for the 2024 election.

Essential for this war against the genuine sources of opposition is creating ideas and orgs that represent a fake opposition; that give developing radicals something to join which exists in alternative to truly counter-hegemonic ideas and organizing outlets. The biggest sources of this controlled opposition are BreadTube, with its superficially “socialist” aesthetics and innate hostility towards anti-imperialism; the types of “socialist” groups that are allowed to thrive on state-controlled online platforms like Reddit, which only accommodate “left” communities when they do things like denounce Russia’s special operation; and “left” orgs like DSA and CPUSA, which are only able to be so widely visible because they work to funnel leftists into the Democratic Party. 

If you want to not be targeted by the liberal fascist state, or by the toxic “left” communities it cultivates, you need to either concede to key parts of Democrat foreign policy orthodoxy; or spend more time attacking anti-imperialists than combating imperialist psyops. Monopoly capital will be grateful for your service to it, and will make sure you see some form of reward. This is the incentive that the imperialism-compatible parts of the left have for helping the empire.

When large amounts of leftists can be directed towards these faux-socialist online communities, these individuals can be turned into weapons against the anti-imperialist cause on a mass scale. The mob mentality that a big online circle creates is enough to give a BreadTuber like Keffals—the streamer who renounced Marxism a few years ago for opportunistic monetary reasons—the ability to do things like attack Black revolutionaries while keeping their audience on their side. When Keffals recently responded to Caleb Maupin’s talking about the FBI raid on Uhuru by calling Uhuru a “cult,” Keffals didn’t need to make any more of an effort than that to convince her audience not to be in solidarity with the org. 

The types who consume Keffals streams already have an ideological and social incentive not to seriously investigate the rumors about Uhuru being a cult, and many of them are already deep enough into pro-imperialist ideology that they prejudicially hold that view of all orgs like it. They have no reason to care that Uhuru is being persecuted by the state in retaliation for its resisting the Ukraine psyop; the only thing they have a reason to care about in this instance is lambasting Maupin, which means objecting to everything he says even when it’s undeniably correct.

This recent moment, where a “leftist” streamer sided with the FBI’s efforts to destroy a Black communist org on the basis of its anti-imperialist practice, represented a broader mentality which the psyop agents are trying to propagate. They want to dissuade as many people as possible from acting in solidarity with liberal fascism’s targets, promoting whatever smears and innuendos they can think of in order to marginalize revolutionary actors. For this reason, it’s best for a radical who’s still trying to figure out their political practice to stay away from social media.

The psyop agents have created entire rabbit holes designed to convince impressionable individuals to oppose anti-imperialists, with social media being the gateway to these rabbit holes. Social media is the main tool these actors use to try to manage the discourse; to turn individuals who could otherwise become authentic threats, into themselves becoming agents for this narrative campaign against anti-imperialists. Because when somebody has been successfully fooled by these anti-solidarity psyops, they’re going to emulate the rhetorical habits of the psyop agents at every opportunity. This is why we’ve seen entire “left” communities uniformly denounce Rage Against the War Machine, and all the groups or individuals that are so much as adjacent to RAWM’s organizing coalition.

Pro-imperialist “left” streamers like Keffals and Vaush are useful tools for normalizing such anti-solidarity sentiments, but they’re not capable of preventing the emergence of a vanguard. They can’t police the discourse within the Marxist spaces themselves, they can only get large numbers of people to become hostile towards Marxism. Keffals has a widespread reputation as a fascist who, despite being trans and therefore part of a disadvantaged group, attacks nonwhites and people with disabilities in order to lift themselves up within the social hierarchy. And Vaush has similarly bad optics, being correctly seen as an intellectually dishonest debate bro who takes pro-pedophilia stances. No serious person who considers themself a Marxist takes guidance from them. 

There are plenty of Marxists, however, who are susceptible to the types of anti-solidarity, infantile, and otherwise imperialism-compatible arguments that get specifically directed towards the minority of leftists who call themselves Marxists. It’s these types who have the most immediate potential to become part of a vanguard, and who are therefore worthwhile psyop targets despite their being small compared to the broader “left” communities.

Anti-solidarity psyops under a “Marxist” guise

The psyops designed to prevent anti-imperialist solidarity among serious Marxists are more sophisticated than streamer drama; instead, these psyops looks like sectarian polemics against the “bad” kinds of anti-imperialists. They looks like polemics that are made to resemble sound theory, employing common Marxist words like “opportunist” and “chauvinist,” while weaponizing these words against all attempts at building a diverse anti-imperialist coalition. An example of this is when the Communist Workers Platform USA—an ultra-left splinter group which broke off from the Party of Communists USA—wrote a denunciation of PCUSA and CPI based on the idea that these orgs are “opportunist” for supporting Russia’s “imperialist” military operation.

For Marxists who’ve been ideologically trained to resist these anti-solidarity psyops, this denunciation is immediately recognizable as lacking in validity. That the CWP opposes Russia’s action in Ukraine is enough to make it clear that those behind the polemic are speaking in bad faith. Because when someone has traveled in Marxist circles long enough to have already learned vital pieces of context about the conflict—like that Ukraine is a fascist state which is committing a genocide against Russian speakers—they can only oppose Russia’s intervention for opportunistic reasons. 

When someone is aware that the threat of Ukrainian Banderite fascism exists; and that therefore Russia’s action was the only practical way to save the Donbass communities the Banderites sought to destroy; they have no excuse for still opposing Russia’s action. They’re being driven by something more sinister than ignorance, or even willful ignorance: knowing complicity in injustice, where they oppose any effective efforts to combat the deadly policies that their government is advancing. In this case, these deadly policies have been Washington’s projects to install a fascist coup regime in Kiev, then try to use that regime to ethnically cleanse the Russian people within the Donbass. 

Given this undeniable mandate for Russian intervention in Ukraine, and the rigorous education that PCUSA provides its members on topics like the Donbass, the splitters can’t have adopted the “Russia is imperialist” narrative simply out of doing their own research. Someone who’s received PCUSA’s level of education would easily be able to reject such an obviously anti-materialist notion about modern Russia’s global role. The splitters came to this conclusion at least partly out of a desire to get a reward for doing so, whether that reward is financial or social. Only somebody morally bankrupt enough to do these things would decide to become a volunteer for liberal fascism’s war against anti-imperialists. 

It’s a similar story to that of Keffals. Keffals was an active communist for long enough to have been able to learn why state persecution of revolutionaries is always bad; yet she’s still choosing not to be in solidarity with Uhuru. I know Keffals understands Marxist ideas better than she pretends to, because back when she was a member of Canada’s communist party, she was working directly in proximity to me. She was talking with me and helping me with my work for a time, meaning she had internalized the same information that had led me to become pro-China. If someone has been this deep into Marxist-Leninist theory, then abandoned that theory, their motives for doing so are highly suspect; one doesn’t simply unlearn dialectics, that’s a type of knowledge which stays with you for life. 

To suddenly no longer be a Marxist-Leninist, you need to make a conscious and active choice to become a traitor to the global class struggle. Somebody who four years ago was showing they had learned to reject things like the “Uyghur genocide” psyop can’t now be accepting things like the “Uhuru is a cult” psyop out of pure naivete; there’s too much of an intelligence gap for this to be plausible. 

When I say the “cult” perception of Uhuru is a psyop, I’m referring to only one small part of a broader, concerted effort to smear all counter-hegemonic groups as cults. There’s a reason why platforms like Netflix have been putting so much focus on cults, and it’s not just about sensationalism: the ruling class wants to make us so paranoid about cults that we’re willing to believe that descriptor applies to any group the propagandists refer to as such. When Keffals was involved in the pro-China communist element, our detractors (most vocally the anarchists) would attack our movement as a cult; when Keffals became successfully persuaded by this pressure to give up on the anti-imperialist cause, it became easy for her to rationalize targeting communists with that same smear.

There are the kinds of wrongdoers who can be put in the “they know not what they do” category, then there are the kinds who know exactly what they’re doing; as they’re the kinds who’ve in the past fought for the right side, and therefore can recognize what a dishonorable action looks like. It’s these kinds of knowing betrayers of the revolutionary cause who are the most direct threat towards the project at building a vanguard. A traitor who’s operated in proximity to revolutionary circles is capable of bringing those within these circles into their destructive project, deceiving well-intentioned people into aiding evil. Trotsky did this when he used his credibility as a former Bolshevik leader to rally many global communists towards sabotaging the Soviet Union, and promoting the bourgeois slanders of Stalin.

Such is the corrupt character of the political actors who are trying to convince us that all of the pro-Russian communist orgs and individuals are enemies of the socialist cause, and need to be shunned. Someone doesn’t necessarily have to be convinced to oppose Russia itself in order to adopt this mentality; they only need to be persuaded to view anyone who substantially advances the pro-Russian stance as somebody they must oppose. 

Those with an interest in defending monopoly capital try do this with individual anti-imperialist commentators, like Maupin and me; they try to do this with pro-Russian orgs, like Uhuru and PCUSA; they try to do this with the kinds of anti-imperialist formations that encompass multiple countries, like when CWP attacked the World Anti-Imperialist Platform in another part of its polemic. It’s because I realized this sinister motive behind the bulk of the “criticisms” we see towards Maupin, and towards his org CPI, that I decided I was wrong for having previously acted hostile towards him. If the agents of monopoly capital are showing themselves to profoundly care about getting us to obsessively hate a certain person, we should be suspicious of much of what we hear about that person.

Choosing to stop contributing to an anti-solidarity psyop doesn’t mean becoming uncritical towards everyone who supports Russia and China; it only means making sure that you don’t say anything about them which objectively helps liberal fascism. Principled criticism assists the revolutionary cause by getting the cause’s contributors to become better; unprincipled criticism only helps the enemy. Before you articulate any criticism of an anti-imperialist, you need to make absolutely sure that it’s backed up by the facts, and that you’ll be saying it in an appropriate setting. The psyop agents don’t want us to care about facts or strategic thinking, all they want us to do is help them undermine counter-hegemonic voices. Which far too many in our spaces are glad to do.

It’s this lack of mindfulness, this disregard for what strategically advances the fight against U.S. hegemony, that infects the types of Marxists who promote anti-solidarity psyops. The way the psyop agents convince Marxists to reject solidarity with Uhuru is by leading these Marxists to view CPI as untouchable; see that Uhuru has collaborated with CPI; and conclude that we shouldn’t prioritize support for Uhuru. The types of Marxists who’ve internalized this idea may not believe the Russiagate psyop, or even vote blue, but they still operate within a framework of understanding that’s fundamentally the same as the one the liberals do. 

They share the liberal perception that nurturing the anti-imperialist impulses of the workers necessarily means empowering reactionary politics; a notion which comes from a reflexive fear of destabilizing our liberal cultural hegemony in any meaningful way. It’s based within the idea that the people are fundamentally reactionary, and that therefore to build an anti-imperialist movement outside the insular “left” circles is automatically a betrayal of oppressed minorities. 

Because CPI and the other communist groups in the RAWM coalition aren’t part of the “left” as these insular leftists define it, they reject all of these groups; they even scorn the ones with explicit socially progressive stances, like PCUSA. The irony is that in their attempt to be principled on social and racial justice, these “left” Marxists have in effect abandoned valuable anti-racist allies like Uhuru. Which isn’t even officially part of RAWM, but has still come to be seen by these leftists as suspect due to its association with CPI.

If the only thing you have to say about Uhuru is “but they work with CPI,” you’re helping the state. Somebody can not share parts of Maupin and CPI’s ideology, even important parts of it, while treating Uhuru with the respect it deserves. The same applies to CPI itself, which like PCUSA is having an objectively progressive role in the class conflict due to its substantial projects at raising class consciousness. 

There’s a reason why anti-imperialists, apart from the less principled “anti-imperialists” who are tied to PSL’s sectarian Democrat tailist project, are increasingly treating CPI as a platform for their ideas: if this org is willing to platform a variety of counter-hegemonic voices; and is sticking to its pro-Russian stance amid growing state intimidation of those who share that stance; it’s worth partnering with. The people in Uhuru have been able to recognize this strategic reality, even though Uhuru is opposed to CPI’s patriotic socialist stance. Despite Uhuru’s being based within an African anti-colonial ideology that’s not compatible with patriotic socialism, it’s nonetheless been glad to collaborate with CPI. 

This is because Uhuru’s members recognize the practical need for a unified front against NATO, unlike the PSL-adjacent actors who use anti-colonialism as a rationale for rejecting this unity. PSL and its ANSWER organizers justified their decision to attack RAWM on the basis of supposed anti-racism, which shows how orgs like PSL mirror the Democratic Party; they use the Democrat tactic of claiming to be the sole authorities on social justice, then smearing anyone who challenges them as a reactionary. 

Whereas CPUSA and PSL use the Democratic Party’s social media psyops to their own advantage, attacking anybody who deviates from their anti-Russia, anti-solidarity stance as a “patsoc,” Uhuru doesn’t base its thinking on what the most vocal “left” voices on social media say. It bases its thinking on what the conditions mandate it to do. It’s a massive red flag when you see an ostensibly “communist” org be dissuaded from working with someone; or from sharing an essential anti-imperialist position like support for Russia; because of pressures from social media left gatekeepers. 

The only reason an org would listen to these gatekeepers is if that org’s goal is not to defeat the state, but to maintain access to an audience within the insular “left” niche. Uhuru isn’t concerned with whether this niche approves of it, because it’s instead interested in winning the broad masses of the people. These psyops directed at Marxist online spaces are, at present, mainly focused on cultivating an environment of polarization, one which makes effective anti-imperialist organizing impossible. The psyop agents want to divide the movement between the “good” people, and the “patsocs.” That Uhuru’s members were able to reject this anti-solidarity psyop, and do so earlier than when I rejected it, shows I need to further take example from them as I continue with my own movement work.

If we don’t give due respect to Uhuru, or to the other anti-imperialists who are being targeted, we’ll in effect be aiding the state. That’s the strategic reality of our situation, and we need to make our practice consistent with this reality. If somebody considers themselves to be a Marxist-Leninist or an anti-imperialist; yet chooses division and unprincipled criticisms over this strategically necessary path; then how, in the end, are they any better than Keffals?

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