Since the start of this decade, we’ve seen a repeat of the story of the Second International, wherein the supposed leaders of the workers struggle betrayed the proletariat so that the ruling class could profit. When the colonizing powers had completed their scramble for new territory, and they became compelled to fight each other for how the exploited lands would be distributed, socialists were confronted with a choice: resist the drive to world war and save millions of lives, or support the war efforts of their respective countries out of momentary self-interest. The Second International, the dominant “socialist” formation at the time, chose the wrong side of history. It was because of the cowardice and corruption of these “Marxists” that this entirely avoidable catastrophe came to be.
Now, the main iterations of “socialism” within the imperialist countries have committed the same kind of crime, this time in relation to how the elites have used the pandemic to attack the working class. From the United States to Germany to Australia, the organized left has responded to the criminal actions of their governments throughout the pandemic by effectively saying: “we may not like the monopoly capitalists, but we’ll refrain from opposing them in this moment because fighting the virus is more important.” Which is a dishonest way of framing it, because fighting the virus and its effects on public health hasn’t been dependent on supporting the lockdowns and mandates. If anything, the organized left’s backing these policies has left our society more vulnerable to being damaged by Covid and other viruses. Because it’s reinforced the control of our capitalist ruling class, which sabotages public health measures out of desire for profit.
Last year, German communist Freie Linke Zukunft concluded in an address to the pro-lockdown left that these “socialists” had given up on the class struggle. That they had surrendered to the class war maneuvers of the highest-level capitalists, under the rationale that they could still somehow win proletarian victory while taking such a stance:
From the very beginning, we warned that even if one thought in ideal circumstances — e.g., a socialist government over which the population exerted real, strong democratic control — a ZeroCovid approach would have been optimal and viable, such an approach was manifestly incompatible with the entire structure and organization of imperialist capitalist economies. And we pleaded with you to consider the practical consequences of how the utopian call for ZeroCovid would actually be used in our concrete political circumstances. With the dust somewhat settled, and the heady days of the seemingly never-ending stay-at-home snow day over, have you soberly reflected on what you could’ve possibly been hoping for with such calls in the real, class-riven world in which we live? We are forced to suspect that the apocalyptic ecstasy of the corona spectacle tapped into a dangerous tendency already well-established in the imperialist core left: the abandonment of a class-struggle based analysis in favor of a millenarian faith that some force external to capitalism will somehow save us. This structure of thought had been made pervasive in the mainstream climate movement, and only needed minor tweaks for reapplication to the health emergency.
It’s a way of thinking that requires pretending like the pandemic may as well be irrelevant to the class struggle. That acts like the destructive effects of the lockdowns on working-class quality of life; like the harm that will inevitably come from mandating vaccines for workers with all levels of immune system strength; like the massive consolidation of wealth and power which the monopolists were able to gain under cover of the pandemic response; all didn’t truly matter. At least among the lockdown left’s true believers, who’ve sincerely thought their decisions are best for the class struggle, the presumption has been that they’ll nevertheless be able to defeat the ruling class eventually. Which implies that the Covid policies of the elites have either been a necessary cost within the effort to reach that victory, or have effectively been irrelevant to the class conflict.
While the World Economic Forum and its agents work to intensify their bio-medical assaults upon the people, as indicated by their “Disease X” psyop, communists must internalize the lesson that we can’t separate these policies from the class struggle. To try to do so is as absurd as trying to separate imperialist wars from the class struggle, like the Second International did. When a socialist backs the efforts of the capitalist ruling class to advance its power, that “socialist” has negated their own potential for contributing to the proletariat’s victory. The only way they can become a positive force in the struggle is by renouncing their opportunist stance.
Some within 2020’s lockdown left have since engaged in the self-reevaluation that Zukunft implores them to do, and come to recognize the reactionary nature of their past decisions. We can’t expect all or most of the other left opportunists to change, though, which means communism’s only hope for victory is by expanding beyond the established “left.”
The reason why these monopoly capital-aligned “socialist” formations exist is that in the 20th century, communism got thoroughly defeated throughout the imperialist countries. In Russia, communists have been gaining great new influence, despite their system having been destroyed. They’ve been successfully pressuring their bourgeois government to take action against the fascist U.S. coup regime in Ukraine, which has menaced the Russian speakers to the east. Yet in the Euro-American countries, communists have been stuck in the self-defeating mindset which its crushing experiences imposed onto it. That’s at least true for the western Marxists who are ideologically guided by the west’s predominant socialist orgs, which are thoroughly compromised by liberalism.
They’re operating within the mindset that the bulk of the people in their societies are fundamentally reactionary, and that therefore they supposedly have no choice but to pander to the liberal minority. Because even though any semi-advanced Marxist knows liberals are pro-imperialists, these demoralized socialists reason that at least liberals are socially progressive, and therefore aren’t “fascists” like they consider essentially all conservative-leaning people to be.
This is why the members of the lockdown left orgs have been willing to accept their leadership’s selling them out to the highest levels of capital: they’ve been made to have such little confidence in communism’s ability to gain influence on its own, they feel like communism can only succeed by investing itself in liberals. By signaling that it backs the destructive bio-medical measures which comfortable Democrat voters most enthusiastically support, in the hope that these liberals and their adjacent NGOs will give communists access to liberal spaces. The assumption is again that such sacrifices of one’s integrity will prove to be worthwhile; that it doesn’t matter how these “Marxists” have betrayed the proletariat by supporting anti-worker policies, because this is all necessary for getting Marxists the power to win.
That’s not how the class struggle works. When you side with the reaction in the name of pragmatism, you’re not making yourself in place to defeat the state. You’re taking on a role as a tool for the state. We need to build an iteration of the communist movement that advances a consistently revolutionary agenda, whether on lockdowns and mandates, on anti-imperialism, or on the question of how to view the masses. The latter of which is what determines how socialists side on the other most pivotal questions within the struggle.
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