By defending China to Tucker Carlson’s audience, Putin showed hope that Americans can unite against U.S. imperialism

Because Tucker Carlson is part of a network of right-wing political and media players whose goal is to promote rhetoric which vilifies China, when he interviewed Putin this month he naturally inserted an anti-China psyop into the conversation. He asked Putin a push question, spinning a narrative about China being an aspiring colonial power and then trying to get Putin to say Russia should break from China’s supposedly malign influence. It was a shameful tactic, but I don’t intend to center this essay around countering Carlson, because my audience already knows his anti-China narratives are incorrect. I instead intend to provide a counter—or rather a necessary piece of omitted context—to the way that Ben Norton and his ideological camp have responded to Carlson’s Putin interview. Context that pertains to something these kinds of leftists don’t want us to focus on: Putin believes the USA’s conservative base is compatible with the pro-China stance.

First, this is the response that Putin made to Carlson’s anti-China statements, and that Norton highlighted in his commentary on the interview:

We’ve heard that bogeyman story before, it’s a bogeyman story. We are neighbors with China. You cannot choose neighbors, just as you cannot choose close relatives. We share a border of a thousand kilometers with them, that is number one. Second, we have a centuries-long history of coexistence. We’re used to it. Third, China’s foreign policy philosophy is not aggressive. Its idea is to always look for compromise, and we can see that. The next point is as follows: we’re always told the same bogeyman story, and here it goes again. Through a euphemistic form, but always the same story. The cooperation with China keeps increasing. China’s cooperation with Europe is growing. It’s higher than the rate of growth of Chinese-Russian cooperation. Ask Europeans: aren’t they afraid? They might be, I don’t know. But they are still trying to access China’s market at all costs, especially now that they are facing economic problems. Chinese businesses are also exploring the European market. Do Chinese businesses have a small presence in the United States? Yes, the political decisions are such that they are trying to limit cooperation with China. It is to your own detriment, Mr. Carlson, that you are limiting cooperation with China.

Norton’s analysis of this little moment of confrontation between Carlson and Putin was that Carlson, and the pro-Trump influence circle he’s part of, don’t truly represent an antiwar agenda. That this circle’s members have only been against the anti-Russian warmongering because they want to drive a wedge between Russia and China. This is a true assessment in itself. The issue is that Norton’s camp within the socialist movement acts like because these right-wing elites aren’t truly antiwar, we shouldn’t expand the anti-imperialist movement beyond left-liberal circles. That because the MAGA base and the libertarians are being targeted with this “anti-woke” psyop which seeks to redirect their growing anti-imperialist sentiments, communists shouldn’t try to bring them in a revolutionary direction.

I don’t emphasize the revolutionary potential among rural, religious, and non-leftist Americans because I believe these Americans are the only ones who will be part of the revolution. I emphasize it because if the communist movement remains confined to left-liberal circles, it will be able to rally neither the proto anti-imperialist element that’s emerged among conservatives; nor the even larger apolitical demographic. The anti-imperialist cause won’t be able to triumph within the United States until the country’s antiwar movement becomes no longer dominated by liberal tailism. Until it stops being kept inert by the polarized partisan culture that the elites have manufactured, and acts to rally all Americans who share an interest in the empire’s defeat. By going on Carlson’s show and defending China to his audience, Putin indicated he has hope that this can be done.

If we want to defeat the pro-war Republican psyops that Norton talks about, we’ll need to build an authentic antiwar coalition. One that includes every group which shares the goal of ending U.S. hegemony, and therefore can reach the broad masses rather than merely a political niche. What Norton’s camp does is act like there are no groups outside the left-liberal niche which are compatible in this way; like all antiwar forces beyond that zone are synonymous with Carlson, Trump, or Marjorie Taylor Greene. 

The Libertarian Party hasn’t been promoting war propaganda against China. To the outrage of the obstinately anti-Chinese discourse actors, prominent voices from the party have recognized that Taiwan is part of the Chinese civilization. The party has also taken an anti-Israel stance, disappointing those same right-wing pro-imperialists. There’s a base of Americans who, even though they aren’t leftists, reject the neocon agenda. And because they lack the liberal-aligned mentality which dominates today’s “left,” they’ve been able to alarm the neocon establishment in a way which leftists have failed to do.

A crucial task of communists at this stage is to help grow the amount of libertarian or conservative-leaning individuals who’ve learned to reject Zionism, anti-Iran narratives, and Sinophobia. It’s so important to do this because during the post-October 7 era, the biggest demographic which the pro-war psyops have come to target is the element of Americans who reject wokeism. The Zionists can’t afford to lose the support of the MAGA base. If the MAGA base were to become conscious in the way that the libertarian base has in great part become, the narrative manipulation machine would be crippled. 

That’s why since “Israel” started the latest escalation in its genocide of Palestine, the ruling class has shifted towards a controlled anti-woke backlash as its primary narrative tool. It needs to convince the types of people who may go down the antiwar libertarian path—and who therefore might even come to Marxism—that the solution isn’t to resist monopoly finance capital. According to the story the anti-woke psyop tells, the solution is to enact school censorship measures that ban esteemed literature about the Holocaust because it goes against puritanical new standards on unrelated topics. Or to pass laws designed to make gay people receive attention from dangerously hostile people in their communities. Or to orchestrate anti-trans outrage campaigns that lead to children’s hospitals getting bomb threats.

These are the destructive and unjust acts that come about from the social scapegoating which the ruling elites seek to advance. They want the anti-woke psyop’s targets to direct their discontent not towards the elites responsible for the country’s decline, but towards fellow community members who are probably in their own economic class.

We can defeat this reactionary effort not by retreating to a “left” bubble, and thereby surrendering the class struggle towards the forces of reaction. We can defeat it by nurturing the revolutionary impulse that’s been growing among Americans across the whole ideological spectrum. The material interests of the majority of this country’s people, including most libertarians or conservatives, are not in the imperialist war campaigns. Nor in the domestic culture war that the right-wing of the ruling class is using to advance these campaigns. Their interests also aren’t in the continuation of the organizing monopoly which the “left” wing of the ruling class holds. Both sides in this culture war are synthetic inventions of monopoly capital, two color revolutions that are made to fight each other so a real revolution gets held back. 

The woke side in this culture war often tries to discredit anti-imperialist perspectives by pointing to the Russian government’s anti-LGBT stance. Whether its policies on that are correct isn’t relevant, though, to whether Russia’s geopolitical actions and stances are progressive. This is why the communists in my camp have gone further than Norton on the question of Russia, and emphasized that we support Russia’s special operation in Ukraine. We won’t be drawn away from a principled anti-imperialist stance within the new cold war; nor from supporting an authentic anti-imperialist coalition; by the attempts from bad-faith actors to weaponize the struggles of LGBT people in America.

The left side of the culture war wants us to look at the actions of right-wing elites, and of people who the anti-woke psyop has convinced to commit hate crimes, and conclude that the only ones we can trust are those within left-liberal circles. This is a self-defeating “solution.” The people in our society are not fundamentally reactionary. They have the potential to unite behind an agenda for progress, both domestically and globally. By implicitly asking Carlson’s audience to reject the lies their ruling class tells them about China, Putin recognized that such a transformation is possible.

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Planned China false flags depend on keeping pro-Russian MAGA voters from coming to support China too

We know that at this moment, the U.S. empire wants to carry out false flags against at least two targets. These are mainly Palestine and China, though many more places could become the focus of these kinds of psyops as Washington keeps reacting to the rise of multipolarity. In the month after October 7 last year, the FBI started warning about a supposed danger of terrorist attacks on U.S. soil that are connected to the Palestinian resistance. And more recently, the security state has been engineering media alarm about China planning to destroy the U.S. electrical grid through hacking. Which anybody who knows about the history of American false flags can see is a sign of our government trying to prime us for a new deception.

Just because the empire wants to carry out these maneuvers, though, doesn’t mean it can. Aside from the growing impracticality of committing to huge conflicts when Washington’s opponents are gaining so much strength, there’s the big obstacle the war architects have within the USA itself: a public which can’t be relied on to respond to false flags in the way the government wants them to.

In 2013, the empire had the bitter experience of carrying out a false flag, and then needing to halt its war plans because the psyops weren’t effective enough. Obama admitted the lack of mass support for striking Syria, which he encountered even though Washington’s destabilization operatives had carried out a false flag chemical attack. It wasn’t until 2017 that the Syria psyop became strong enough for the U.S. to feel comfortable with executing a Syria strike only a fraction as large as the one Obama had planned. And even though the 2017 Syria strike was able to gain the support of the majority of Americans, the narratives behind the war on Syria were soon able to be undermined. 

The majority of Trump’s own supporters weren’t supportive of more serious U.S. involvement in Syria, with the bulk of antiwar sentiment on Syria ironically coming from MAGA types. And when WikiLeaks exposed the coverup of the evidence disproving U.S. accounts of the 2018 Douma incident, the Syria narrative managers had to go on the defense, with dubious effectiveness. The preexisting skepticism towards the Syria narratives among the MAGA base crippled the psyop, forcing the liberal technocrats to invest their cognitive warfare efforts in the Democrat base while intensifying the deep state’s war against MAGA.

This history shows that combating the U.S. empire’s narrative dominance can have the effect of frustrating Washington’s foreign policy designs. As well as that opposition towards these designs can come from elements across the ideological spectrum, not just the left. Around half the U.S. public has come to believe that the U.S./Israeli military effort in Gaza has “gone too far,” representing a downward trend in support for Israel. We’re already nearly at the point where backing Israel has become something which goes against the views of the majority of the public. In order to make this consciousness shift have an actual effect on the conflict; as well as make the USA’s pro-Palestine public shift translate into a pro-China shift; we must expand the anti-imperialist movement beyond liberal circles. We must work to build an alliance against the empire throughout all social elements that are revolution-compatible, which includes the elements of the MAGA base that are hostile towards neoconservatism.

The problem with cultivating an antiwar movement which exclusively seeks to appeal to liberals is that this will necessarily lead to that movement becoming captured by liberal NGOs. Which will lead the parts of the Democrat base that are compatible with antiwar goals to assisting these NGOs in their pinkwashed imperialist efforts. The bulk of support for Palestine comes from Democrat voters, yet this support gets wasted when you simply lead these voters into efforts at tailing the Democratic Party. The pro-Palestine movement—and by extension the effort to prevent the coming China false flags from starting World War III—can only become effective when it’s no longer defined by our hyper-partisan culture. When it’s no longer being monopolized by orgs that refuse to expand their reach beyond left-liberal circles, and blankedly view the MAGA base as enemies.

What must we do when we have two major bourgeois parties that both have large amounts of people who oppose imperialist wars, but oppose different wars depending on which camp they’re in? It’s apparent that the problem is polarization, created by the psyops which our ruling class has used to prevent successful revolutionary efforts throughout capitalism’s decline. This is why most Trump supporters at present don’t want U.S. involvement in Syria, yet are susceptible to the propaganda against China and Iran. As well as why most Democrats support Palestine, yet are susceptible to the propaganda against Russia and Syria. 

Those left groups that have been holding back the struggle believe the solution is to fully invest ourselves in appealing towards the liberal camp. But all that does is make us inclined to disavow Russia, while perpetuating the partisan discourse psyops. This is true even if we within the communist movement have been able to come to the correct stance on China and multipolarity. As long as we’re acting to assist the Democratic Party in its vilification of all who vote against it, whatever we say we stand for is meaningless. All that matters is the effects our choices have.

If we choose to build an iteration of the anti-imperialist movement that’s not constrained by liberal tailism, and instead exists on the basis of reaching all elements with revolutionary potential, then the war machine’s next psyops are going to be rendered ineffective. Look at what’s happened to the Ukraine psyop due to the pro-Russian consciousness shift among conservatives. If not for this political reorientation, the empire would at least be in a relatively more comfortable place amid Russia’s economic victory over the U.S. bloc, and the ongoing decline in Ukraine’s fight capabilities. Because the base of the former party of Bush has proven to be unreliable, the imperial state is now at a much greater risk of losing domestic control. 

Should communists respond to this political reorientation properly, the state will become unable to pursue its repressive goals without provoking unmanageable mass backlash. The illiberal elements will be able to unite against this repression; we already know this because the biggest commentator who’s spoken against the Uhuru indictments is Tucker Carlson. A crucial factor that’s put the liberation forces in such a good strategic situation is the turn by illiberal Americans against the new cold war. We have to take advantage of this development, not ignore it in favor of copying Democrat elitism.

The next thing we must do is bring as many of the pro-Russian conservatives as we can towards also being pro-China. That we can’t get all of them to this point shouldn’t discourage us in the least; the important thing is that we cease to act like our knowledge about China’s positive historical role should be shared exclusively within left-liberal circles. We must spread awareness of how the PRC is a crucial strategic partner of Russia. How Russia’s efforts to weaken international monopoly capital—which illiberal Americans increasingly recognize as their enemy—are connected to the actions of China’s ruling communist party. More U.S. Americans are coming to realize that their interests are in the defeat of the liberal order. It’s on this basis that they can come to unite with China, and thereby render the liberal order more vulnerable than ever.

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The anti-woke psyop’s goals: steer conservatives away from anti-imperialism, keep Marxists isolated to a “leftist” bubble

The anti-woke psyop, in which “dissident” right-wing figures like Musk, Milei, and Alex Jones sell pro-imperialist politics using a brand of combating wokeness, is a total diversion from reality. It’s designed to misdirect not just the conservatives, who it aims to make become obsessed with being anti-woke; but also the leftists and communists, who it wants to react to this right-wing trend by insulating themselves from society outside the left-liberal circles. In this way, this controlled anti-woke backlash is even more of a threat towards revolutionary politics than wokeism is on its own. It reinforces wokeism’s hold over socialist spaces, ensuring that the culture war continues to impede the class struggle. And it’s capable of influencing not just the left, but also the libertarian-leaning types and the MAGA supporters. 

The recent pivot of the ruling class towards mainly utilizing the anti-woke psyop shows how big of a potential threat those conservative elements have become towards imperialist ideology. Targeting these elements in this way wouldn’t be necessary if there weren’t a risk of them producing an effective challenge towards imperialism. The anti-woke “dissidents” are here to divert a growing element of conservatives who’ve come to have a proto anti-imperialist consciousness, getting them to fixate on the culture war instead of uniting with communists on fighting the war machine.

The escalation of the Gaza genocide in October of last year was the factor that ensured this pivot would happen. For fifteen years up to that point, an aesthetic kind of “progressivism” had been the main ideological tool of the ruling class. Conservatism had been the primary tool during the Bush era. Then Bush became one of the most hated presidents in history, and Obama showed how effective it would be to shift towards portraying neoliberal imperialism as “progressive.” The ruling elites stayed with this strategy for a long time, and they’re still using woke rhetoric to undermine the socialist movement (something that they’ve been doing since the start of the New Left). At the present stage, though, wokeness is no longer the best tool for influencing the broader discourse; the discourse that occurs outside of leftist and communist circles. The elites have needed to return to chiefly utilizing conservative ideology, except in a way that’s updated for the conditions of the post-Trump era.

With the start of Zionism’s latest mass murder campaign, the discourse has become unable to work in the way that it did prior to October 7. The liberals who promote Zionist lies are no longer able to reconcile their social justice posturing with their support for colonial mass slaughter, driving them to increasingly abandon wokeness (aside from when they use Israel’s LGBT inclusion to argue for genocide being “progressive”). And the narrative managers have had to redirect their attention towards keeping conservatives under ideological control, because many conservatives have recently gained a proto-revolutionary consciousness. One which Gaza has potential to deepen. 

Our ruling elites have seen how much mass backlash their Ukraine proxy war has provoked, especially from the MAGA and libertarian types. And in the last year or so, these types have begun to enter into antiwar coalitions with progressives and communists, threatening the decades-old dynamic where communism is relegated to the “left” niche. So those whose job is to defend Zionism have needed to direct a psyop at the right.

This psyop has involved taking the anti-woke backlash that’s already been occurring for years, and injecting it with a particular foreign policy agenda. Prior to October 7, rightist demagogues like Candace Owens and Matt Walsh had already been poisoning the discourse with toxic culture war division. And they’ve been useful for injecting the religious right with false consciousness, but not so much for neutralizing the broader elements which this new psyop aims to target. Those being the conservatives outside the radical Christian niche, which have more potential to adopt anti-imperialist or Marxist positions. Owens and Walsh have taken an American isolationist position on Israel, making them only minimally useful to the ruling class. And while their counterpart Ben Shapiro is aggressively pro-Israel, he lacks the “dissident” image that’s capable of diverting conservatives who have substantial revolutionary potential.

The right-wing figures that the deep state has most been promoting since October 7 are ones who, unlike those Daily Wire hosts, can appeal towards conservatives who seek an alternative to the political mainstream. The Daily Wire and PragerU are only focused on promoting the agenda of the Republican Party. Musk, Alex Jones, and the more outwardly extreme actors within this intelligence-backed “dissident” rightist sphere put forth a type of anti-woke politics that can attract people who are alienated from both major parties. 

Musk’s brand is based around him being a rebel against the political establishment who’s capable of leading humanity to greatness. Which distracts from the true role he’s taken on: an intelligence tool who facilitates censorship of pro-Palestine voices, and who redirects anti-Zionist sentiments by promoting ethnic bigotry against Jews. Jones is repeating Netanyahu’s lies about Palestine and Iran under the guise of providing inside information from intelligence agents, when really these agents have sought to give him propaganda talking points. Milei is promoting Zionism and fanatical anti-communism to libertarians, while getting portrayed by anti-woke commentators as a counter-hegemonic leader. There’s one anti-woke figure, though, who’s bringing the dissident right in a more dangerous direction than any of these others are. And whose ties to Israeli intelligence are the most direct.

I’ve talked about how Bronze Age Pervert, the influencer who’s been bringing conservatives to a radically pro-hierarchical “bronze age mindset,” has been in direct contact with an Israeli asset. And how this asset sought BAP out because he viewed the ideas BAP puts forth as particularly useful. More recently, BAP has given us a clearer idea of which foreign policy angle he and his handlers intend to use. Following Tucker Carlson’s interview this month with Putin, BAP did something seemingly counterintuitive: he voiced support for Russia. BAP had already been positioning himself as pro-Russia for a while throughout the Special Military Operation, and there are indications that he decided to do so in response to shifts in conservatism’s relationship towards geopolitics. Shifts which began years earlier than when Carlson’s interview made them more apparent than ever.

In July of last year, BAP said in his argument for rightists to support Russia: “This message is intended…to East Euros and also to American conservative nationalists, who are actually both in similar positions, where they believe they can live on unmolested by the cabal in charge of Washington and the European capitals; and also continue as if this was 1935 and they were mobilizing in the name of national honor against Russian imperialism. You don’t realize how weak and powerless you are.” BAP is taking the isolationist arguments of the Walsh/Owens camp further, saying that the best interests of rightists are in not just opposing foreign military aid but also in supporting the defeat of U.S. hegemony. This is the same thing pro-Russian Marxists like myself want to get conservatives to believe. Except whereas we seek to bring these conservatives towards socialism, or at least towards entering into coalitions with communists, BAP is trying to make them incompatible with any such coalition.

This is apparent right within his ostensibly pro-Russian argument. He makes sure to emphasize how the Soviet Union supposedly carried out brutal subjugation, and he reaffirms the narrative of the Ukrainian Banderite Nazi collaborators about how those who resisted the USSR were only acting to defend their “national honor.” This is a “pro-Russian” polemic that’s designed to sabotage any sort of effective alliance against imperialism by getting right-leaning individuals to view communists as untouchable. 

The liberals and radical liberals who opposed the formation of the Rage Against the War Machine coalition have claimed the presence of the Mises Caucus makes RAWM unacceptable for communists to associate with. How do we know this argument is misleading? Because it aids the goal of BAP: to divide the “left” and “right” elements of the opposition towards NATO. If the Mises Caucus were as far to the right as the liberals portray it, it would be doing what BAP does: act so obsessed with attacking communism that one becomes unable to act as any kind of effective counter towards monopoly capital. 

The Mises Caucus represents an element of libertarianism that’s compatible with the anti-imperialist goals of communists, because this element cares enough about resisting monopoly capital that it’s willing to assist communism. BAP represents a type of politics that’s so absurdly reactionary, it’s willing to strengthen the monopoly capitalist forces which it claims to oppose, all for the sake of upholding a “trad” kind of purity politics. The main priority of BAP’s camp is not to do what’s practically needed for ending the liberal order, but to achieve “bronze age” goals like a total ban on immigration and a return to extremely traditional “western” gender roles. The bronze age mindset is about getting conservatives to reject the revolutionary path which the anti-imperialist coalition offers them, and believe the solution is to bring society back to an idealized past. A past that can’t even realistically be resurrected, because its social relations were dependent on a mode of production which was made extinct by the progression towards capitalism.

The only way to help defeat the monopolists is by either becoming a communist, or aligning with the communists. Separating oneself from this emerging anti-monopoly coalition, whether on a left-wing or right-wing basis, can only have the effect of strengthening liberalism. The liberals and liberal-aligned “Marxists” seek to discredit this coalition by implying that its conservative-leaning members are like BAP. But if they were like BAP, they wouldn’t be working with communists in the first place. The anti-woke psyop’s purpose is to make it look like these distinctions don’t matter; like there’s no way those from different parts of the ideological spectrum can unite on an anti-imperialist basis. It seeks to perpetuate the polarization that the ruling class depends on, and that the anti-monopoly coalition increasingly threatens.

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The USA’s hinterlands, capitalist collapse, & rural America’s growing revolutionary potential

Above: from the West Virginia mine wars, one of the many rural labor developments in the country’s past

This analysis that I’m putting forth about the conditions of my own region—the Pacific Northwest—applies to every other rural area throughout the country. During my investigations into what will happen to my home during the region’s coming great earthquake, I’ve learned lessons about the character of rural America. Lessons which U.S. Marxists must apply to their practice, or else end up surrendering this land’s future to monopoly finance capital. 

Finance capital’s liberal agents have sought to propagate the idea that the country’s rural areas are so backwards, so deplorable, that there isn’t hope for them to contribute towards progress. This is the prejudice that the Democratic Party has embraced, and even many leftists who try to distance themselves from the Democrats have followed them in dismissing the rural masses. It comes not from a true investigation of our conditions, but from an effort at rationalizing opportunism; the modern left’s geographically limited practice will never be effective at challenging our social system, so the upholders of this practice need to create a narrative about why it’s supposedly necessary. This is the narrative that those beyond the liberal bubble are fundamentally reactionary, which forsakes a serious analysis of our conditions. 

As the communist Phil A. Neel writes in Hinterland: America’s New Landscape of Class and Conflict, the accurate image of rural America

…is not the one favored by the metropolitan think piece, which sees racial resentment as the natural outcome of such “economic anxiety.” Instead, traditional methods of transforming class antagonism into racial difference are beginning to reach a sort of saturation point, as unemployment, mortality, and morbidity rates all start to overspill their historically racial boundaries. The effects of this are extremely unpredictable, and political support will tend to follow whomever can offer the greatest semblance of strength and stability. But the left is neither strong nor stable. Liberals ignore these areas because low-output, low-population regions very simply do not matter much when it comes to administering the economy—and that is, in the end, what liberalism is about. The far left, on the other hand, has long been in a state of widespread degeneration. It has retreated from historic strongholds in the hinterland (such as West Virginia, once a hotbed for wildcat strikes and communist organizing) to cluster around the urban cores of major coastal cities and a spattering of college towns.

The need to grow beyond such nationally divisive thinking, where “socialists” deny the revolutionary potential of tens of millions of people, is illustrated by the economic collapse of the rural communities. A collapse which will be greatly sped up by the region’s mega-quake, depending on whether it comes prior to when the workers have gained power.

As I’ve researched the Cascadia subduction zone, the fault line that will create a rupture of the same scale as the 2011 East Japan earthquake, a question that’s inevitably come up has been: what effect is it going to have on history? Things aren’t going to simply go back to the way they were. Of course, the Cascadia quake doesn’t need to happen for the region to be in crisis. California is already experiencing a drug epidemic, extreme inflation, and other symptoms of capitalist collapse. Global warming is bringing enough fires, heat waves, and floods for internal migration and infrastructure breakdowns to be underway right now. If the quake does come within the next few decades, though, it will show just how inadequate our social systems are. The country will be in a more advanced phase of its breakdown than it is now, multiplying the risks from Cascadia and all other potential disasters. 

Even though the authorities are trying to make improvements in preparedness for the event itself, the broader socioeconomic situation is worsening as capitalism contracts, and as our ruling elites force more people to the economy’s peripheries. This heightened danger brought by growing class inequality is present throughout the entire West Coast, whose southern half is set to experience its own extreme quake when San Andreas ruptures. Because of how widespread these geological catastrophes are going to be, that exclusionary liberal attitude towards the rural will be challenged by these events if they come before the revolution. And even if they don’t come that early, we’re already seeing our government incrementally abandon this region, along with all the country’s other rural sections.

My Northern California community is one of these places which the ones with the most power consider to be expendable. And because the highest levels of capital view places like it as such, fascists have been able to gain a growing amount of influence within its surrounding locales. My town is part of the “empty coast” between San Francisco and Portland, an area that’s surrounded by mountain ranges which have made it difficult to build the infrastructure needed for large-scale migration. Because of how small this region’s population is—with its biggest city, Eugene, being inhabited by less than one-fifth of a million—a contradiction has arisen between it and the vast metropolitan centers which surround it. Over the decades, many residents of this region have felt that the Oregon and California state governments neglect their interests. Which has led to periodically re-emerging efforts at creating a new state between the two that it’s stuck between.

White supremacists have worked to exploit these grievances, injecting the movement for a hypothetical “State of Jefferson” with a West Coast neo-Confederate ideology. (Truthfully it was always compatible with those kinds of ideas, since the State of Jefferson is named after the president behind the Indian Removal policy.) And there’s evidence that the organized far right sees the Cascadia quake as an opportunity to gain power. It’s already presenting itself to the communities threatened by this event as something they can turn to for help. Neel describes how “Patriot” militias have

…offered preparation workshops for the earthquake predicted to hit the Pacific Northwest and “also volunteered for community service, painting houses, building a handicap playground and constructing wheelchair ramps for elderly or infirm residents.” While often winning the hearts and minds of local residents, these new power structures are by no means services necessarily structured to benefit those most at risk. The Patriot Movement surge in the county followed a widely publicized campaign to “defend” a local mining claim against the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) after the mine proprietors were found to be out of compliance with BLM standards. This sort of vigilante protection of small businesses, local extractive industries, and property holders (in particular ranchers) is often at the heart of Patriot activity.

Today’s left has responded to developments like these by concluding that the rural masses are inherently reactionary, and that socialists are therefore better off ignoring them—even if they experience a 9.0 earthquake. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. The ones in charge of the workers movement have ceded the countryside to the reactionaries, and then interpreted the outcome (success for the right) as confirmation that they’ve been correct to abandon these places. Racism and settler-colonial extractivism have been strengthened throughout the rural areas partly due to the arrogance of the main political actors who claim to oppose these things.

The economic and social breakdown of rural America is a test for where communists want to take their operations. Will they simply let these places continue to decline? Or will they embrace the communities which liberals have forsaken, and thereby gain a great new advantage in the class war?

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These right-wing militias, and the ideological elements which share their view of the world, are operating under the assumption that we in the rural areas can only expect to see our connections to the rest of the globe continue disappearing. They share monopoly capital’s hatred of China (something that’s especially reprehensible in my county, where the settlers committed ethnic cleansing against the local Chinese population). And because they’re anti-China, they see a closed-off future. They can’t envision a scenario where our civilization ends its own imperialist parasitism, and collaborates with China to advance infrastructural and technological progress. This pessimistic view of humanity’s future, where supposedly we’ll remain divided along geopolitical barriers forever, reinforces their sense that the solution is to regress. To make our region more resemble what it was like in the 19th century, when whites used paramilitary violence to extract wealth from indigenous lands.

This effort by the lower levels of rural capital to increase primitive accumulation, where capitalists gain wealth by directly taking natural resources, can only continue if capital’s higher levels continue to dominate. The monopolists have engineered rural America’s slow-motion collapse, and have thereby made it inevitable that capital’s smaller elements would deploy their fighting wings to enable greater extractivism. There’s no future in this societal model. It’s a civilization eating itself, with an emerging neo-feudal class coming to dominate the ruins of a long-deindustrialized continent. 

We can only rebuild, and progress to a new stage, by ending the imperialist system. Which entails both rectifying the colonial contradiction within U.S. borders, and building connections with the civilizations which our imperialist government wants us to hate. The ending of corporate exploitation of indigenous lands goes along with the effort to end the new cold war, and to bring China’s Belt and Road Initiative to this continent. The BRI can let us construct great new infrastructure, like it’s already done for so many other places around the globe. It can help generate wealth for the communities, whether indigenous, black, or white, that have been driven into poverty by monopoly capitalist rule. 

Many of the metropolitan-focused Marxists understand this on an intellectual level. The problem is that they view the bulk of the rural population as inherent enemies of the tribal communities, and as incompatible with the broader communist movement.

Cascadia could show more clearly than ever why holding this view is counterproductive. We already have more than enough evidence to refute it, though. Simply look at the material reasons behind why the white working class has come to “vote against its own interests,” as the liberals accuse it of doing. According to the community organizer Kirk Noden, white workers don’t truly do this, because the Democratic Party has proven itself to hold no value to them. Wrote Noden in 2016:

The impact of this betrayal on white working-class people was a universal distrust and dislike for institutions—none of which were able to defend their livelihoods or their futures. The unions didn’t stay around to organize a new strategy for revitalizing Youngstown. They moved to another line of defense elsewhere, as they grew increasingly insular and focused on protecting their shrinking base…Deindustrialization was a traumatic experience for white working-class people. Yet we act surprised when this constituency exhibits post-traumatic-stress disorder. And it is we who perpetrate the myth that they are voting “against their interests,” despite all the facts on the ground indicating that for them it makes no difference which party is in power. They have lived through 40 years of decline. De-industrialization was a traumatic experience for white working class people. Yet we’re surprised when this constituency exhibits PTSD.

This tells us that a large and growing number of white rural Americans are compatible with an effort to end colonial relations. Because capitalism and colonialism are inseparable, and capitalism is what’s behind these people’s suffering. There are enough of these kinds of whites that when our revolutionary crisis reaches its most intense phase, we rural communists will be capable of beating back the right-wing militias. It depends on whether we’re willing to give up the inward-focused practices which define what “leftism” has become, and expand our efforts into every part of the population that has revolutionary potential. 

We know that such an effort to defeat the rural white supremacists can work for two reasons. Firstly, these supremacists aren’t seen by the ruling class as the optimal types of counterrevolutionary fighting forces. At this stage, the state is instead seeking to cultivate anti-communist paramilitary activity among radical liberals, in the form of militant left anti-communist groups like “Antifa.” The state recognizes that these “anti-fascist” groups are better able to be sold to the public as heroes, because using the right for its paramilitary violence would simply discredit the state. This makes the small town right-wing militias, which have already been getting increasingly hostile towards the federal government since the 1970s, less likely to receive backing from the highest levels of capital. We can take advantage of this infighting between these two wings of the colonial apparatus.

Secondly, there’s a long history of white workers joining with anti-racist efforts once they’re shown why class solidarity is in their material interests. Hy Thurman, a veteran of the Black Panther-allied Young Patriots organization, has described how his circle was able to overcome racist indoctrination: “we [the Young Patriots] made the statement, ‘Go and organize your own.’ You know, we don’t need you in Berkeley and other places trying to organize us. We’ll do it ourselves. So you go in your own neighborhood because that’s where the racism exists—and you have to understand that we were racist. I mean, we were raised in racism. It was indoctrinated in us. We were raised racist, but we were becoming antiracist because we began to see what was happening during the Civil Rights Movement. And we began to learn about stuff like Blair Mountain and about the Highlander Center in Tennessee and Miles Horton and the Bradens and those folks.”

This is how the workers struggle can rescue itself from the stagnation which the insular left has brought to it: build a mass base independent from the exclusionary academic and metropolitan spaces that the struggle’s gatekeepers inhabit. These liberal-aligned recent iterations of the socialist movement have succeeded at impeding the cause throughout the era of neoliberalism, and that’s led to a self-reinforcing cycle of hopelessness. But we can end this cycle by reconnecting the movement to the revolution-compatible parts of the masses which exist outside that activist bubble. These overlooked elements are increasing in their number, and in their willingness to fight monopoly capital.

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As Neel concludes, the ways in which the rural elements have been reacting to the U.S. empire’s internal collapse are unpredictable. And that’s what the communist movement needs to understand in order to restore its ties to these areas: it’s absolutely not a guarantee that they’ll all fall to the right-wing militias. To what extent they do depends on whether we’re willing not to abandon these communities during the most chaotic phases of the empire’s breakdown. This will be a crucial thing which determines the failure or success of the workers revolution on the North American continent. Because if we allow the liberals to divide the urban and rural revolutionary masses, both parts of the masses will lose to the ruling class.

Refusing to abandon rural America means two things: 1) devoting a proportional amount of energy and resources towards organizing in the countryside compared to in the cities, and 2) giving up the modern conventional leftist practice of seeking only to appeal to Democrats. When a communist signals that they’re only interested in recruiting liberals, they’re showing they don’t want to solve the problem of communism being isolated to the big cities and college towns.

To become effective, we must recognize that investing ourselves in the areas which today’s conventional leftism has forsaken is an essential part of realizing all the goals of our social movements. One subset of the far left that Neel ridicules is the “decolonial” left, not because liberating the First Nations isn’t important but because this ideological element has ironically made itself an impediment to that goal. However noble its cause is, it’s taken on an insular form that makes it unable to gain support beyond the radical liberal niche. By helping ensure the continued confinement of the communist movement to the liberal hubs, and underestimating the potential of the urban masses, this strain works to strategically weaken the same colonized rural communities which it aims to free. 

Without an alliance between all revolution-compatible parts of the masses, the indigenous tribes are going to be left more vulnerable to the right-wing militias. The working class movement throughout the rural areas will be unequipped to defend from these militias, because the left’s neglect for the rural masses will have left the movement essentially nonexistent throughout these places. So the reactionaries will fill the power vacuum, leaving those they threaten with no choice but to flee. The irony is that this won’t be because the bulk of rural whites are going to join with the reactionaries. As Neel assesses, most of these whites aren’t even especially receptive to the far right. It will be because the “left” has refused to do its job. Observes Neel about how marginal the far right’s successes at winning poor whites have truly been:

If white ruralites were as inherently conservative as the average leftist would have us believe, they should be flooding into far-right organizations in unprecedented numbers, demanding a platform for their racial resentment. But the reality is that, whether left wing or right wing, political activity is something that is built, not something that emerges naturally from the experience of oppression—this experience only places the success of political organization along a probabilistic curve and colors the character of its result. The far right has only been capable of attracting newcomers in rural areas in a spare few locations. Much of their apparent support base comes either from historical strongholds—such as the KKK counties of the South and those areas of Idaho, Montana, and Washington where white supremacists relocated in the 1990s—or from whitening exurbs…in order to attract new recruits, the far right has had to tone down its explicit racism and foreground economics. But even this has been met mostly with apathy and wariness. The white population of the far hinterland still seems to find more promise in opiates than politics.

It is possible to prevent that outcome where the workers lose the class war while right-wing paramilitaries take over a collapsed rural America. But it will require breaking from the activist circles which are hostile towards the ruralities, and adopting a synthesis that’s truly reflective of our conditions. That brings us to a balance on how much we prioritize the urban and the rural. I emphasize the revolutionary potential of the rural masses not because they’re the biggest part of the people who have such potential, but because we must combat the idea that they don’t matter to the workers' struggle. 

The left-liberal activism industrial complex has used the vilifying narratives about the rural poor both to divide the masses, and as an excuse for the stagnation of these activist groups. The elements of the left which Neel talks about aren’t just disinterested in engaging with or understanding the communities outside the liberal zones. They also don’t seek to build an effective working-class force within the urban areas themselves, as shown by how they’ve pursued adventuristic tactics and worked to sabotage anti-imperialist coalitions. The goal of the American socialist movement’s default leadership is to maintain a monopoly over a particular political niche. Which will inevitably make the communist movement—and all of its related causes, like the pro-Palestine efforts—fail to have a substantial impact.

If this model hasn’t worked, then we must embrace a new one. We must bring back the mass-centered practices that defined both the Panthers in the cities, and the Young Patriots in the small towns. And we don’t have to wait for a massive earthquake or further climate disasters to do this, the people are being subjected to something unbearable as is. It’s our shared catastrophe, the catastrophe of capitalism. We can end it by acting like it’s a collective problem, instead of only focusing on certain victims at the expense of others.

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