Finance capital wants a new big war. To get one, it’s going to have to crush all the anti-liberal forces.

It’s long been obvious that the biggest and most powerful wing of capital, that being finance capital, wants a massive new war; a war of proportions that potentially rival World War II. When the embodiment of the modern Democratic Party Hillary Clinton advocated for a no-fly zone over Syria—a policy that would have made direct U.S. confrontation with Russia inevitable—it became apparent how perilous of a situation our ruling elites are creating. The higher levels of capital, represented by their political tools the intelligence agencies, the legacy media, big tech, and the politicians who’ve backed military aid to Ukraine, are again working to escalate global tensions on the biggest possible scale. 

These ultimate purveyors of destruction are needing to confront a growing amount of obstacles towards this goal, though; and their response to these obstacles is bringing the perils from imperialism’s peripheries closer to the core.

Even though the U.S. military buildup against China is still happening, and not just in China’s own hemisphere but in Africa as well, Washington’s defeat in Ukraine has revealed how limited the empire’s strength now is. It’s showed that Taiwan is not a viable location for the next proxy war, and that if the hegemon were to try to use Taiwan as such, it would backfire even worse than Biden’s failed effort at destroying Russia. Taiwan is being relegated to a role as a reserve for the hegemon, while Washington’s strategists are being forced to take on a defensive posture when it comes to their neo-colonies; Africa is becoming a more likely location for the next imperialist psyops and war mobilizations, perhaps of same the nature as the campaign to destabilize Syria. 

Africa’s anti-imperialist forces are accelerating their gains, with France recently having been forced to announce a troop withdrawal in Niger; which means the empire must mobilize soon if it wants to survive. International monopoly capital can only come to a secure point again if it successfully subdues China; which is a reality that the imperialists don’t want to fully confront, but are increasingly doing so out of necessity. 

While the liberal narrative managers try to salvage their situation after Canada and Ukraine honored a World War II Nazi this month, the empire’s military strategists are reviewing ways to make victory over China possible. And the “solutions” they’ve come to so far are extreme; they’re proposing policies that would benefit finance capital in certain areas, while coming at costs which the system potentially couldn’t handle.

When the U.S. Army War College’s academic journal was prompted this month to respond to the combined crises of 1) declining U.S. power that can only be restored by defeating China, 2) a China which has grown strong enough that Washington’s present armed forces soon wouldn’t be able to replenish themselves in a fight with it, and 3) recruiting rates for the U.S. armed forces which have declined to a historic low; they presented the option that at first seems obvious: bring back the draft. “Large-scale combat operations troop requirements may well require a reconceptualization of the 1970s and 1980s volunteer force and a move toward partial conscription,” concludes the journal. The sacrifice such a policy would come with is that the empire would lose the big thing it’s gained due to halting the draft: a young population which lacks the same incentive to resist the war machine that used to have.

A majority of the U.S. population has come to dislike the idea of sending more aid to Ukraine, and young people especially are being impacted by the inflation the war effort has exacerbated; the only reason why we’re not (yet) seeing a repeat of the mass antiwar mobilizations from the Vietnam era is because conscription isn’t here anymore. This shows how compromised of a situation our ruling class is now in; it needs to choose certain disasters over other disasters, hoping to be able to perfectly manage an ultimately unmanageable dilemma. 

That’s the consequence of trying to hold back the progression of history: finding that the system you’ve invested in can’t be sustained, and encountering ever-more complications as time goes on. We’re no longer in the first few years after World War II, when respect for the military and the government were perhaps at their strongest in U.S. history; Vietnam represented the moment when popular faith in our institutions was weakened in an irreparable way. The empire can’t turn back time to when it could fight a total war, while keeping the loyalty of the USA’s people.

Given this limitation on what the empire can do, it’s possible that there will be no new draft and no third world war; the empire could instead choose to invade Mexico. Or to simply continue on the present path, where Washington is shifting towards hybrid warfare against the BRICS countries. Regardless of which way the hegemon next decides to inflict damage abroad, it’s certain that at least one big war is coming: a war against the American people themselves.

Even if World War III doesn’t happen, the fact that reinstating the draft would provoke Vietnam-level mass backlash is an indication of a population that has growing revolutionary potential; which means the state urgently needs to neutralize the population in order to save the liberal order. Whether our near future includes something as extreme as a draft and a total war; or merely consists of further policies to degrow the economy; the state, and its dominant finance capitalist wing, need to do all they can to prevent successful resistance towards their next maneuvers. And that much of this resistance can be found within the less powerful elements of the ruling class itself means finance capital doesn’t just need to neutralize the communist movement; it also needs to make sure that the lower levels of capital are unable to further interfere with the wars.

This is an essential thing for Marxists to understand: we’re not on the side of industrial capital and its right-wing agents, yet we can recognize that small capital and big capital are not fully unified. As our class conflict escalates, the rivalry between these two sides is getting more intense; and that was shown this week, when they had an unprecedentedly huge confrontation over whether to continue aiding Ukraine. As figures like the libertarian-leaning Republican senator Rand Paul have become willing to shut down the government for the sake of ending Ukraine aid, the neocon-aligned politicians have been reacting by pulling ridiculous stunts, like setting off the fire alarm to prevent a vote. Which reveals how much the side of finance capital; with its total control over intimidating forces like the intelligence agencies; has been failing to coordinate a response to the crises it’s encountering. 

Don’t be fooled by any attempts by the government to appear in control over over present tumultuous situations. If the arbiters of the new cold war weren’t scrambling at the moment, none of them would be pulling fire alarms in a panic; our ruling institutions would be actually unified behind what they want to do, and far better coordinated in their efforts.

The ideal outcome for finance capital during the new cold war’s post-Ukraine stage is that all the political forces challenging liberalism get successfully suppressed; that the lawfare against Trump gets used as a precedent which allows for the repression of all the anti-imperialist orgs, a project already underway with the Uhuru indictments. And this could happen, but only if the country’s communist movement fails to sufficiently build a coalition with the broader forces that oppose NATO. 

We don’t need to embrace a right deviation, and start assisting in the rightist parts of what anti-NATO conservatives believe; for that reason, this coalition-building project has tended to be detached from the kinds of conservatives who prioritize the culture war. Where anti-NATO political actors are compatible with one another, we must start working towards our shared goal of ending the war machine’s narrative dominance. As this is how we can obstruct finance capital’s next war plans, and render the national security state unable to crush civil liberties.

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Support for Russia is the most important point of unity for Marxists at this stage in the class struggle

Above: members of the African People’s Socialist Party on the stage of an event held by Caleb Maupin’s Center for Political Innovation

The effects that Washington’s Ukraine proxy war has had on the global class struggle aren’t going away simply because the conflict is now bringing fatigue to the American people, and the empire has to start abandoning its puppet regime on Kiev. This is a development whose impacts on both the global capitalist order, and the worldwide socialist movement, are permanent. The backfiring of Biden’s geopolitical gamble has accelerated the decline of U.S. hegemony, while irreversibly worsening capitalism’s crises. And even if the imperialists had won their latest economic and military battles with Russia, we still would have seen the Ukraine-related events that have recently reshaped the world’s communist forces. Those events being the decision by most communists to side with Russia; and the decision by the imperialist-aligned minority among them to forsake solidarity with Russia’s anti-fascist struggle.

All the socialist parties around the world that are intensely involved in the fight against U.S. hegemony have come to back Russia, and their support has gotten more solid as time has gone on. The leaders of the DPRK, the PRC, socialist-led Nicaragia, and as of this year Cuba have felt compelled to make statements affirming their alignment with Russia in the conflict. Within the Global South movements that aren’t influenced by Washington’s soft power network, support for Russia is seen as the default stance; from an American perspective, it may feel incredible that the participants in the recent anti-colonial revolutions of Africa’s Sehal region have been flying Russian flags. But on their side within the system of global exploitation and imperialist violence, it’s simply logical to align oneself with NATO’s biggest sources of opposition. 

Whatever “leftist” or “Marxist” forces throughout the Global South that disavow Russia (or oppose Russian partners like China) are ones which are based within petty-bourgeois radicalism; that seek to replicate the opportunistic model of the left within the exploiting countries, where unserious “socialist” groups can find support from a niche of students, intelligentsia members, and now social media circles. It’s these places that are often associated with purity-fetishizing, dogmatic currents of leftism, like Trotskyism and Maoism. And with the trend towards military leaders taking power so they can defy the liberal global order, such academic projects for normalizing American-style leftism across the Global South are failing. 

In the exploiting countries, though, the unserious elements that lead socialists towards the anti-Russian stance continue to dominate. Which has created a conflict between them, and the minority of socialists in America and Europe who share the Global South’s predominant view of the new cold war.

In Europe, the divide is often based on country, since historically Soviet-aligned places like Serbia are where the support for Russia is overwhelmingly found; and in these countries, the number of people who are hoping for Russia to win is in the millions. In the USA, though, support for Russia is more marginal, if only because the country’s traditional Marxist movement got replaced by the anti-materialist “New Left” decades ago. America’s pro-Russian communists are in a situation where they have to try to rebuild the old labor movement; that doesn’t mean they aren’t threats to the system, though. 

The imperialism-compatible left is vulnerable to losing its dominance to something more appealing; this is because it represents an innately ineffective type of practice, whereas the pro-Russian orgs are offering something with genuine hope. And the compatible left has already handicapped itself in terms of its ability to gain popular support, desiring solely to appeal to a “left” niche as opposed to the broader working class. So the anti-Russian leftists are having to try to keep their opponents marginalized, hoping that through scandal-mongering, they can prevent the pro-Russian groups from building a relationship with the people.

This scandal-mongering is centered around portraying all who challenge conventional “leftism” as agents of the far right. The sensationalist hoaxes that have been constructed to attack the Party of Communists USA, as well as CPI, are instrumental parts of this; because if the left’s gatekeepers can make these two significant pro-Russian orgs appear bad to the average person, then they can create a divide between the main parts of our popular movements, and the pro-Russian elements of the communist movement. 

This narrative manipulation tactic has succeeded at keeping most leftists alienated from most of the anti-NATO movement, but it hasn’t been able to convince the organizers who are seriously invested in anti-imperialism. The African People’s Socialist Party has allied with CPI, even though the party doesn’t share CPI’s patriotic socialist stance; and there are many other people and groups which share APSP’s non-sectarian attitude. 

In fact, if we were to bring a majority of the people into the anti-imperialist movement, almost none of them would be compelled by the anti-solidarity arguments of the compatible left; the compatible left is designed to fill a particular role, that being the gatekeeper of a niche space. And serious Marxists are capable of building a movement far beyond that space, making the compatible left a tiny political force in comparison. It’s because of this need to connect with a majority of the people that so many non-patriotic socialists have decided to join with patriotic socialists, and with other anti-imperialists to the right of them, in an anti-NATO coalition. That this coalition is where we can find the most conscious elements of the workers (as in the workers who’ve come to the anti-imperialist stance) means unity with this coalition’s members is paramount; and APSP understands this.

The compatible left seeks to perpetuate a divide between orgs like CPI and APSP not just through spurious arguments which “prove” formations like CPI to secretly be far-right; but by getting Marxists to forget Lenin’s lesson about coalition-building. Even if any of the groups within the Rage Against the War Machine coalition can truly be considered “reactionary” (and note that “reactionary” means when someone opposes the most important parts of historical progression, which none of these orgs are are doing due to their acting against NATO), Lenin still concluded that revolutionaries should work in reactionary spaces when this objectively progresses the class struggle. Wrote Lenin:

This ridiculous “theory” that Communists should not work in reactionary trade unions reveals with the utmost clarity the frivolous attitude of the “Left” Communists towards the question of influencing the “masses”, and their misuse of clamour about the “masses”. If you want to help the “masses” and win the sympathy and support of the “masses”, you should not fear difficulties, or pinpricks, chicanery, insults and persecution from the “leaders” (who, being opportunists and social-chauvinists, are in most cases directly or indirectly connected with the bourgeoisie and the police), but must absolutely work wherever the masses are to be found. You must be capable of any sacrifice, of overcoming the greatest obstacles, in order to carry on agitation and propaganda systematically, perseveringly, persistently and patiently in those institutions, societies and associations—even the most reactionary—in which proletarian or semi-proletarian masses are to be found. The trade unions and the workers’ co-operatives (the latter sometimes, at least) are the very organisations in which the masses are to be found.

If the Bolsheviks were able to work in spaces with actors like that, all pro-Russian Marxists in today’s USA should be able to unite with the other kinds of pro-Russian Marxists; as well as with the libertarians or other non-left actors who’ve come to mainly prioritize anti-imperialist organizing. Most of the people I’m talking about don’t even match Lenin’s description of the opportunists and social-chauvinists within the reactionary trade unions, because antiwar spaces tend to be more progressive than unions. 

The members of the RAWM organizing coalition, who I personally know, have in fact needed to forsake an opportunist path to be able to get where they are now. Their goal is not to profit from what they’re doing, but foremost to damage NATO; even if this badly impacts their careers, harms their reputation, or brings state retaliation upon them. And where opportunistic or social-chauvinist actors do attach themselves to anti-imperialist spaces, remember again that Lenin said we shouldn’t let such contradictions keep us from reaching the people. The people are who we’re here to build a relationship with, and they should be the thing we care about; not whether we’re passing a purity test created by bad faith critics.

The essence of the reasoning these critics use to try to discredit the anti-NATO coalition is the idea that we shouldn’t act like U.S. hegemony is the primary global contradiction. That we can expect to defeat the American capitalist state, while wilfully making ourselves insufficiently equipped to fight against the global power structure which does the most to keep this state strong. And this necessity of doing all we can to combat NATO isn’t just about our inherent responsibility as residents of the imperial center to help end our government’s global crimes; it’s also about how keeping pro-imperialist ideas normalized within organizing spaces is the way the Democratic Party maintains its monopoly over these spaces. Uniting the pro-Russian forces is instrumental towards workers victory; don’t be convinced against this by opportunistic actors who don’t truly care about our cause.

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The biggest socialist orgs have made “socialism” mean copying the Democrats, and this is enabling the Uhuru indictments

The primary source of fascism, and the one that will remain the primary source regardless of which party wins next year’s election, is now the Democratic Party; or rather the Democratic Party, and the other institutions which finance capital uses as its main political tools. The Democrats, along with the intelligence agencies, the DOJ, the legacy media, and big tech, are what represent the biggest threat towards revolutionary politics at this stage. That’s because they’re the ones which have come to have the most backing from finance capital, the biggest kind of capital and the type of capital that fascism represents the interests of. 

Finance capital seeks to launch many new wars—both abroad and at home

The perilous error the “left” is making is to act like finance capital represents a trivial kind of threat compared to industrial capital, which during the MAGA era has come to primarily back the Republican Party. For that reason, the threat the Republican Party represents is a different kind; a kind that’s absolutely dangerous, yet frighteningly still isn’t as big as the threat the Democrats now pose. Acting like finance capital represents a trivial threat is one way that many leftists avoid confronting finance capital’s role as the prime purveyor of fascism; otherwise, they act like there’s no distinction between finance and industrial capital, and like this topic is therefore not even worth thinking about. 

The consequence of this error is that finance capital and its institutional agents are being enabled to persecute the Uhuru org—and thereby create a precedent for repressing the rest of the anti-imperialist movement—without sufficient backlash. The media has to be purposefully ignoring the Uhuru case, because this would be too significant for the news not to cover under normal circumstances; the narrative managers are refusing to bring attention to Uhuru for fear that if the entire country knew of it, there would be a national debate. A debate over whether the intelligence agencies, and the pro-NATO liberals who align with them, should be trusted. 

Now that the world has been made outraged by Canada and Ukraine’s honoring of a World War II Nazi fighter, the ability of the narrative managers to win battles over ideas has become even weaker than it was already. Over this summer, we saw Ukraine’s counter-offensive fail, then saw public support for Ukraine shrink too much for the old routine of easily passed Ukraine aid packages remain sustainable. The empire is getting ready to discard Ukraine; which would otherwise be benign, since the empire has always abandoned its disposable allies. Except it isn’t enough for international monopoly capital that this latest war has brought up oil and arms profits; the Ukraine conflict has still represented an overall loss for the empire.

This proxy war with Russia wasn’t mainly about making money, it was mainly about trying to destabilize Russia so that Washington could strategically weaken China. For Washington’s proxy war to have not just failed to do this; but also accelerated the internal capitalist crises of the imperialist countries while furthering the BRI, BRICS, and de-dollarization; means Washington’s geopolitical gamble has backfired in a catastrophic way.

The empire is needing to prepare new wars; ones that can’t realistically bring back unipolar hegemony, so can at best let the ruling elites implement their capitalist survival plan of degrowing the economy. The military buildup around China is still happening, and more recently with central Africa’s anti-imperialist coups, the empire has had to make Africa into a new prime location for regime change psyops. As Washington has again been driving towards a new intervention in Haiti, it’s also been working to bring conflict back to the Balkans, and it’s already succeeding at instigating new conflicts in the Caucasus region. War in Mexico could also be coming, as we’ll likely see the Democrats unite with the Republicans on invading Mexico after Ukraine has to be fully abandoned. 

These wars are going to require an additional war: a war against the American people, waged in its first stage through repression like the Uhuru indictments. And it’s all dependent on finance capital maintaining a certain cultural paradigm; one which keeps war, repression, and austerity possible amid growing popular dissatisfaction with capitalism. This is the cultural paradigm where supporting the Democrats, or at least compromising with them, is seen as essential for protecting the rights of socially disadvantaged groups.

During the era of the Bernie Sanders movement, the liberal elites tried to defend this cultural paradigm by attacking everyone who was planning not to capitulate to the Clinton campaign. In the following years, as these voters refused to give up their stance and brought previously reformost-minded people (like me) towards their stance, the agents of finance capital adopted better strategies for controlling the left. That element of the left which won’t vote for a Democratic presidential candidate under any circumstances is never going away; the best option of the ruling elites is to create controlled opposition groups, ones that can divert this element towards ineffectual types of “radicalism.” 

If the “vote blue no matter who” camp has lost the argument, as it definitely has at least within Marxist spaces, then finance capital must present an “alternative” to the Democrats that’s designed to be unable to win. That way, the war on dissent (and whatever global wars come next) can proceed without successful resistance towards them.

The anti-solidarity practices that benefit finance capital’s schemes

The nature of this key obstacle towards working class victory was demonstrated this last month, when the Party for Socialism and Liberation responded to a liberal pro-Ukraine demonstration by displaying signs next to the rally calling for the U.S. to get out of Africa. Without knowing about everything else the PSL has done (such as disavowing Russia’s anti-fascist action to appease liberals, attacking the Rage Against the War Machine coalition, coming out against multipolarity, and other liberal tailist activities), this looks more defensible; it’s good in itself to protest the U.S. occupation of Africa. When you consider the context in which PSL was doing this, though; as well as the org’s history of fighting against both multipolarity and pro-multipolar political formations; it becomes apparent that this was part of an insidious effort to influence radical politics in a negative way. To further a truncated type of “Marxism” that’s ultimately compatible with the liberal order.

Even if the reasoning of the organizers was as simple as “let’s counter the pro-war statements of the liberals with a statement ridiculing the USA,” that they lacked the ideological training to recognize the importance of defending Russia in that situation is still symptomatic of a profound problem within PSL; as well as within the broader left. How hard is it to counter chauvinistic hatred towards Russia with a statement that the Russian people are actually friends of the American people? And if you want to bring Africa into a conversation like this one, how hard is it to give Russia praise for the ways it’s continued to assist anti-colonial struggles? 

The effect the PSL’s action had was to work towards separating Russia from Africa, at least in the minds of those who get influenced by the org’s statements. The idea PSL has implicitly put forth is that Russia, and its fight against U.S. imperialism, are separable from the struggles of imperialism’s other victims.

That’s a troubling sign, because it means whatever ties PSL has built with anti-imperialist countries, it’s done so with the mentality that these countries don’t need Russia and don’t need to be supporting Russia in turn. If PSL represents this anti-solidarity agenda on a global scale, is it truly a good thing that PSL has established a relationship with Cuba? 

The org’s leader, Brian Becker, has outright stated that he doesn’t want the residents of the imperial center to work towards furthering the transition to multipolarity; and accelerating that transition is the most immediately practical way to end the empire’s ability to place countries like Cuba under inhumanely effective sanctions. There’s a lack of respect for the interests of countries like Cuba on PSL’s part; a lack of respect that creates an inescapable contradiction within the org’s “anti-imperialism.” 

When we recognize that the role of PSL and the other formations like it is to create wedges in the global resistance towards international monopoly capital, it becomes clear that PSL’s practice of running third party candidates doesn’t make it revolutionary. Just because PSL’s leadership doesn’t advocate for voting Democrat in presidential races, like CPUSA’s leadership does, doesn’t mean it hasn’t come to act as a propagator of imperialism-compatible leftism. PSL aims not to consistently combat our ruling institutions, but to present itself as a “socialist” version of the Democratic Party. Like the Democrats, PSL prioritizes identity over class in its rhetoric; it also disavows Russia because being pro-Russia is seen by liberals as a “right-wing” position. Yet supposedly it’s a radical org, since it accompanies these practices with reiterations of Marxist theory.

The Uhuru indictments, and the urgent peril they represent for the future of radical politics in this country, have shown why this soft type of Marxism is not enough to bring us to victory. Because it’s becoming apparent that if we let ourselves be guided by these passive and unprincipled orgs, the state will succeed at prosecuting Uhuru, and at setting the precedents required for a purge against dissent. 

For an example of how this weak practice is helping the state, think of the implications of the reasoning which PSL demonstrates in its effort to separate Russia from Africa. Within this logic, formations and countries which liberals consider untouchable (like RAWM or Russia) don’t deserve solidarity. Therefore, we should also work to separate Uhuru from Russia. We also should work to separate Uhuru from the organizations within the RAWM that Uhuru has allied with, such as Caleb Maupin’s Center for Political Innovation. And if Uhuru can’t be successfully pressured into giving up these alliances; or can’t be presented as separate from Russia and CPI; then we should avoid saying positive things about Uhuru, for risk of damaging our credibility as “leftists.”

That’s the cynical and opportunistic logic these “left” orgs are operating according to. And it’s apparent in how whereas PSL has only ever talked about Uhuru a couple times, in statements that it had to make so as not to look like it totally lacks solidarity with Uhuru, pro-Russian communists like Maupin are defending Uhuru more as time goes on. There’s a lack of incentive for left opportunists to put the appropriate amount of effort into defending Uhuru, because Uhuru’s existence in itself represents a threat to these opportunists. 

Uhuru is an example of an org successfully building a mass base, while not conforming to the liberal tailist practice that the conventional left views as crucial. Its ideas of building relationships with any force around the globe which shares its opposition to the U.S. colonial order; and of accepting help from any domestic groups that are willing to assist it; are dangerous ideas. Dangerous in a way that the ideas put forth by PSL, CPUSA, the Revolutionary Communist Party, and this country’s other established socialist orgs are not. 

Whereas these orgs only proclaim themselves to be Leninist, Uhuru and the communists within RAWM authentically put Leninism into practice. What makes Uhuru in particular dangerous towards the compatible left is that by being a Black nationalist org, it embodies the values of social justice that the compatible left claims to represent, while showing those values aren’t mutually exclusive with seriously combating U.S. hegemony.

The essential concern of the agents of finance capital is not whether you as a left-leaning person will vote blue, because you can refuse to vote blue and still help reinforce the Democratic Party’s organizing monopoly. Their essential concern is whether you choose to reinforce a cowardly type of “leftism” that makes socialism and anti-imperialism subordinate to liberalism; that allows for compromises in one’s anti-imperialist practice, if these compromises help you appeal to more liberals. There are more ways to commit this crime against the revolution than voting for a Democrat.

Like the Democrats, the actors that have invested themselves in this practice claim their political brand is the sole option for socially disadvantaged groups, and that to reject this brand is to betray these groups. Such manipulative arguments can be made ineffectual among Marxists, as easily as we’ve taken power away from the vote blue arguments. We simply need to make it clear that finance capital is where fascism is represented; and that therefore we should consistently combat the Democratic Party’s pro-imperialist ideas, rather than copying the Democrat organizing model.

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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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Nicaragua’s building socialism according to its local conditions contrasts with U.S. Marxism’s fetishization of purity

Dogmatism is the enemy. That’s the lesson we can learn from contrasting the practical way in which Nicaragua’s Sandinista revolution has built socialism, with the uncompromising and out-of-touch way the conventional U.S. left believes it can build socialism. Nicaragua is such a good example to use for showing dogmatism’s incompatibility with any U.S. revolution both because of its geographical proximity to where we are; and because it has a socialist government that takes stances which show just how necessary it can be to act flexibly as a Marxist. Namely the stances that Nicaraguan socialism should be represented by Christianity; and that social conservatism is the policy which socialist Nicaragua should be defined by.

I’m neither a Christian nor against abortion, and it’s highly unlikely that a socialism where we are would embrace any state religion or ban abortion (as Nicaragua has done). It’s ironically because of how significant religion is in U.S. culture that establishing a particular state religion here wouldn’t get the support of the people, and opposition towards abortion in America exclusively comes from a shrinking minority of religious rightists. The point I’m making by drawing attention towards socialist Nicaragua’s religious social conservatism is that when the conditions you’re navigating are conducive to a certain mode of policy, it’s best not to pretend like those conditions are different from how they actually are. 

Maybe this means implementing an educational program to change the existing culture, or maybe it means shaping policies according to that culture; Nicaragua has evidently concluded that its conditions are best for the latter. The important thing is to recognize that regardless of whatever one’s ideals may be, you’re going to need to navigate a reality that’s bigger than you; and that to ignore this reality is to make yourself unable to build socialism.

Does this make Nicaragua’s abortion policy right? If not, it isn’t the business of people in the imperial center like me. Our only responsibility in regards to Nicaragua is to combat our government’s sanctions and destabilization operations, which are inflicting violence upon Nicaraguans and countless other peoples around the globe. Our media seeks to convince us that each contradiction within a socialist government means we should view that government with nothing besides hate, but the reality is that these governments are essential for keeping their people free from imperial domination. To discard a socialist project is to fail to show respect for the work which that project’s contributors are doing to free their people from poverty and scarcity; poverty and scarcity that were engineered by imperialist governments like ours. 

When you investigate Nicaragua’s socialist project, you see how valuable it is, and how important it is to learn the lessons from existing socialism. As the communist Wawen Ewimbi reported last year after traveling to directly witness the work of Nicaragua’s revolutionaries:

The majority of Nicaraguans are engaged in the political realm at a level that makes modern U.S. political discourse laughable. The sense of education and political efficacy was a loud culture shock. Outside the American bubble of red and blue, revolution is not a theoretical concern for essays and the ether but a tangible, hard won necessity to leading a dignified existence on Earth in the face of colonialism’s catastrophic effects. Young and old, they are dedicated to building something better of a world for all of us together with Mother Earth. This means revolutionary militancy starts young and continues from generation to generation. The land is a priority to the people here. Balancing the climate disaster with best practices for ecology and development is an especially difficult task for Global South countries starved of resources and facing the brunt of eco-decline. Despite this, the national government puts major effort towards preservation, flora y fauna maintenance, and disaster mitigation.

The lesson from this which Marxists in the imperial center must internalize is that it’s possible to successfully build socialism, while not having that version of socialism conform to an ideal that you’ve previously imagined. If Nicaragua can achieve these things while enforcing a social conservative policy model, we can do things just as great while not basing our practice off of a purity fetish. The predominant mentality among modern American socialists is that we’ll fail if we don’t embrace this fetish, even though the opposite is true. Being narrow in your thinking and practice is how you fail as a socialist.

The enemies of our cause are trying to keep us in this stubborn way of thinking; they want to get us to incorporate ideas that are specially designed to undermine revolutionary progress. These ideas come from the same strain of thought that’s put forth by our media’s color revolution propaganda about countries like Nicaragua; when U.S. news outlets and NGOs point to things like Nicaragua’s abortion laws as justification for overthrowing the country’s government; while omitting the cultural context behind these laws and the objectively positive deeds of the Sandinistas; they employ the same reasoning that’s behind ultra-leftist strains of “socialism.” Both ideological elements are based within a purity fetish mentality, where undeniably progressive things are seen as discardable because of real or perceived contradictions.

A recent way the ultra-lefts in our spaces have propagated this counterproductive dogmatism is by acting like any perspective outside their own leftist niche represents colonial chauvinism. I believe that the indigenous tribes should be given as much land as they desire to get back after the imperial state is overthrown. I also don’t think it’s a given that the United States is going to continue to exist after workers revolution. This doesn’t mean I accept the dogmas that are far too prevalent among the self-described Marxists who’ve attached themselves to anti-colonialism. 

One of these dogmas is that Marxists should focus on attacking the U.S. flag and the “American” label, which is something I used to do until I gained a better understanding of our practical realities; even if it’s true that the American identity has an inherent contradiction, it’s not essential for indigenous liberation that we make combating this identity a central part of our practice. That in fact harms the cause of national liberation, as it distracts from the type of struggle which represents tangible, materially based gains for the oppressed nations.

This is the struggle that involves an effort by all exploited people, and opponents of international monopoly capital, to build an alliance which can defeat our ruling institutions. Fighting against the centers of socioeconomic power is almost infinitely more meaningful than fighting against a symbol, especially when you don’t have the power to be able to end that symbol’s massive cultural influence; we actually have the ability to to end the influence of the World Economic Forum, the International Monetary Fund, the banks, the monopolies, the landlords, and the other sources of economic violence. Henry Winston explained why an alliance against these forces is crucial; and why in order to build it, we must accept that revolutions unfold uniquely according to their local conditions:

Lenin wrote, “One must understand the changes and growth of every revolution. The revolution proceeds in its own way in every country . . . ” (Collected Works, Vol. 28, Progress Publishers, p. 123.) And on another occasion, Lenin declared that “different nations are advancing in the same historical direction, but by very different zigzags and bypaths . . . “(Collected Works, Vol. 29, p. 195.) For colonial peoples, liberation starts with rejection of the myth that their fate can be determined “jointly” within the framework of the tight controls that link it to the U.S. economy. For the Black people in the US, on the other hand, liberation is realizable only on the basis of overcoming exclusion and inequality through an anti-monopoly movement, in which the Black people and all who are exploited by the common corporate enemy seek to establish joint control of the country’s economy

This correct strategy is contradicted by the dogmatic strategy of the ultra-lefts, who advocate not for joint economic control among all proletarians, but rather an ethnically obsessed project at separating Native workers from white workers. This is the only conclusion we can get from reading the resources that many of these ultras promote, such as “Decolonization is not a metaphor”; Laine Sheldon-Houle of the Swan River Nation articulates a Marxist critique of this manifesto, pointing to the anti-worker ideas which are hidden within its seemingly radical rhetoric:

Wayne Yang published an essay titled “Decolonization is not a metaphor”, in which they argue that decolonization means: “For social justice movements, like Occupy, to truly aspire to decolonization non-metaphorically, they would impoverish, not enrich, the 99%+ settler population of the United States.” This directy pits Indigenous people against “settlers”. The 99 per cent figure the Occupy movement was referring to is the entire population minus the wealthiest top one per cent. This is mostly referring to the working class, although not in a precise way. The cynical conclusion in “Decolonization is not a metaphor” is that the fundamental interests of Indigenous people are opposed to the interests of all non-indigenous people. But in reality this is not the fundamental division in capitalism. In fact, within the Indigenous community there are Indigenous capitalists who benefit from the exploitation of Indigenous and non-Indigenous workers. In response to the explosion of the Indigenous movement, the Canadian Liberal government has been hard at work fostering an Indigenous ruling class to co-opt Indigenous leaders and give off an appearance of change.

Even if someone doesn’t share the polemic’s conclusion that Native liberation would have to mean making the white workers poorer, they’re reinforcing its dogmas as long as they embrace an ultra-left stance on national liberation. We need to come to a synthesis between the domestic and international struggle, a synthesis that these ultras don’t want to adopt; if you let your focus on the fights within U.S. borders dissuade you from supporting Russia against the imperial hegemon; or from defending China and the DPRK; or from building alliances with other parts of the anti-NATO movement; anything correct you say about anti-colonialism is going to get undermined by ultra-left dogmas.

We can’t win against the capitalist state in the core without sufficiently fighting against imperialism across the peripheries; this is both because global imperialism is the strongest part of our capitalist state’s power structure, and because pro-imperialist ideology is what maintains the Democratic Party’s covert influence over the communist movement. When we accomplish the equivalent of what Nicaragua has, we’ll only have done so after rejecting purity fetishism’s dogmas, and building a movement based upon what our conditions require.

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The media’s strategy for selling Uhuru’s persecution: ignore the show trial, reinforce the anti-Russia psyop behind it

The fraudulent charges against the African People’s Socialist Party (Uhuru) are supposed to represent the starting stage in our national security state’s war against dissent during the post-Ukraine war era. The ruling elites have to succeed at suppressing the anti-imperialist movement, and at doing so in a way which doesn’t provoke an uprising; if they don’t succeed at this, then the final option of those seeking to maintain the liberal order becomes no longer viable. The antiwar, labor, and anti-colonial movements will have gained too much strength for the state to be able to easily subdue them, and the class struggle will continue to escalate until workers revolution comes. 

This may be a perilous moment for our movement, but it’s also a perilous moment for our class enemies; if they can’t win the narrative battle over Uhuru, their chances for defeating the broader revolutionary effort will get harmed in an irrecoverable way.

Given how historically pivotal the Uhuru case is, it’s no surprise that the narrative managers have been acting cautious about it. The media hasn’t been talking about it at all—even though the case’s oral arguments are going to happen this week—and that indicates the case will cause grievous narrative damage towards our ruling institutions if it becomes far more widely known. When local media outlets have made substantial efforts to cover the case; and to platform the statements Uhuru’s representatives have made in response to being attacked; this has made hundreds of thousands of people newly aware of an org which speaks to working people’s desire for change. The bigger media outlets can’t cover the case, or else this would provoke a nationwide debate; a debate the ruling elites absolutely do not want to happen. 

Even if the media, the BreadTubers, the intelligence officials, and the neocon politicians were to unite in denouncing Uhuru, this would fail to convince more than a fraction of the public to hate the org, and there would be resistance towards the narrative which the psyop agents can’t handle. Anti-liberal voices from across the political spectrum would speak out in solidarity with Uhuru, and help expose the obviously bogus stories the pro-liberal voices are putting forth. That’s what happened when the narrative managers aggressively promoted the Trump-Russia collusion accusations, and as a consequence they’re still needing to try to convince the public that Russiagate wasn’t a hoax. 

Russiagate has succeeded at unifying liberals and opportunistic “leftists” behind the anti-Russian stance, but it’s also created a political realignment where far more conservatives are now antiwar. Which has gained the communists many unlikely new allies in the antiwar movement, and many potential new converts to Marxism.

Only a minority of the public is truly invested in the anti-Russian narratives, as evidenced by how most Americans have come to dislike the idea of sending more aid to Ukraine. For this reason, it wouldn’t be wise to try to convince the majority of the people that Uhuru has conspired with Russia to interfere in U.S. elections. The pandemic has shown how many Americans have a predisposition towards distrusting our institutions; the backlash to the Covid vaccines—which undeniably is based in at least some truth, since the USA’s corporate vaccine efforts are lacking compared to those of socialist countries—has made more people primed to question what the media tells them. If the media told us all that a group of Black freedom fighters deserves to be prosecuted, a majority of Americans would be able to figure out that something suspicious is happening; and this applies to plenty of conservative Americans, because Tucker Carlson has already defended Uhuru to his massive audience.

When the national security state only has hope for getting a minority of the people to accept the narrative behind its repressive campaign, its best option is to have the media keep quiet about the repression while working on other psyops. Psyops that could let the state complete its scheme to purge the country of anti-imperialists, so long as the Uhuru case itself remains obscure.

One of these psyops is that all the country’s pro-Russian orgs are nothing more than fronts for fascist politics. That’s a narrative which has been pushed by The Daily Beast, the outlet that’s most aggressively acted as a platform for Democratic Party and neocon propaganda throughout the new cold war. It’s significant that The Daily Beast is the only major media source which felt comfortable responding to the Uhuru indictment by actively trying to smear Uhuru; the Beast’s report on the indictment described those who’d been arrested as “alleged U.S. cult members,” a clear attempt to influence their readers towards assuming the charges are true.

That the Beast has a small following compared to outlets like the New York Times, especially when comparing the amount of activity their social media posts get, has let its hit piece content about Uhuru stay within its own niche of liberal neocons. Thereby, whatever debate this content has created is insignificant. But other types of propaganda that the Beast puts forth are safe for the broader media to repeat; the entire liberal media not only promotes psyops against Washington’s target countries, but conflates anti-imperialism with reactionary politics. 

The propagandists have so far mostly been avoiding attacking Uhuru because of how many Americans are sympathetic towards the Black liberation cause, as well as towards the antiwar cause; but people Uhuru associates with, like Caleb Maupin, have been getting widely attacked for a long time. Maupin in particular has been made into the caricature the narrative managers seek to create of what an anti-imperialist is, getting negatively portrayed within propaganda pieces like the Netflix documentary “How to Become a Dictator.” (With the clip they used of him having been one where he shouted in protest against Obama’s criminal actions in Syria, which ironically only makes him look good.) The narrative they’ve constructed about Maupin, and about all who associate with him by extension, is that these political actors represent the left wing in a “red-brown alliance” between communists and fascists. 

Even if popular support for Black liberation prevents the propagandists from effectively assailing Uhuru, they can at least use this “red-brown” narrative about Maupin and Uhuru’s other partners to convince members of the “left” niche not to respect Uhuru. If Maupin and his org CPI are fascists, as the story goes, then Uhuru’s members should supposedly be viewed as the types of Black political actors who reinforce white supremacy. They’re trying to make Uhuru’s leaders look like reactionaries; which is beyond absurd, given how Huey Newton upheld Uhuru as the formation that’s carrying on the legacy of the Panthers. 

Of course, even if they were reactionaries they would still deserve solidarity, as the charges against them are based in logic that blatantly goes against constitutional rights. But the leftists who see such subjective criticisms of Uhuru as sufficient reason for neglecting solidarity with Uhuru are not the types of people whose priority is what’s best for the cause. Their goal is to build influence within a social justice niche; a niche that ironically scorns Black freedom fighters like Uhuru as punishment for allying with the “wrong” people. The average person is not driven by such narrow-minded thinking, so they’re ideologically compatible with the effort to defend Uhuru. And the leftists who may betray Uhuru have limited influence; they only control an insular political fandom space that’s deliberately made itself unable to build a relationship with the majority of the people. We can build a movement outside this space, and render it irrelevant.

Should we spread awareness about this case to enough minds, we’ll be able to bring about a mass mobilization effort against the national security state. An effort that the state can’t ignore, because for all the state’s power, its survival depends on a social contract with the people. When we inform the people that the state has broken this contract by violating their rights, the state will either have to cease its attacks on our liberties; or make its relationship to the people more openly antagonistic. 

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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. 

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