“Land Back” leads Marxists away from anti-imperialism, & from seeing the U.S. people’s revolutionary potential

When I say we should reject “Land Back,” I’m not referring to the concept of indigenous sovereignty in itself. The tribes have a right to self-determination, as the Palestinian people have a right to become free from their “Israeli” settler-colonial occupier. The problem with using the “Land Back” label to represent oneself as a Marxist in today’s discourse is that radical liberals weaponize this phrase against mass-centered, materially based struggles. In practice, “Land Back” is a shorthand to signal that you’re loyal towards pan-leftism; that you’re willing to compromise on Marxism-Leninism’s core practices just for the sake of building connections within the left. Practices like aligning oneself with the broad masses, advancing solidarity with anti-imperialist countries, and speaking to the masses in ways which they can actually relate to. 

Within the ideological orientation that “Land Back” represents, there’s a fundamental lack of belief in the people’s revolutionary potential. An attitude that the bulk of the people are inherently reactionary, due to their not sharing the mindset of the people in these radical liberal circles. Within this anti-popular mindset, there’s a self-reinforcing feedback loop, because the majority of the people are never going to be brought towards the mentality of the groups enamored with Land Back. They’re never going to be receptive towards a message and program that’s based within rejecting patriotic symbols, rather than within advancing their class interests. 

When I was operating in Land Back circles, I thought these two practices could be reconciled, but that was a futile pursuit. For a Marxist-Leninist, the way to become effective is not by trying to fit into these pan-leftist spaces. Instead, it’s embracing an anti-imperialist practice that can actually connect with the masses. Part of this is not using the language of these insular circles.

The issues with the “Land Back” phrase, and with the political practice it represents, go beyond how “Land Back” has been co-opted by corporate NGOs. There are plenty promoting the phrase who seek to distance themselves from these NGOs, but they’ve made a mistake just by basing their practice within those terms. The reality of modern activism and left discourse is that if you seek to align yourself with the ideological forces which center Land Back, you’re going to end up on the same side as the radical liberals. This is true even if you call yourself a Marxist-Leninist.

The radlibs aren’t going to accept into their circles anyone who genuinely advances scientific socialism. They don’t want you to build anti-imperialist alliances with anyone who’s outside of leftism, and they don’t want you to seek out any solutions beyond the dogmatic theories they espouse. You go against Gerald Horne’s ahistorical argument about 1776 being a “counter-revolution,” and you’re out of the circle. You talk to any of the “bad” anti-imperialists who don’t promote Land Back, and you’re not welcome. This is the policing you’ll experience if upon entering into radical politics, you cultivate the kinds of allies who promote Land Back. It’s a trap of social pressure that many U.S. Marxists will never escape once they’ve fallen into it.

Beyond these ways that Land Back is used to create cliques, the theory it represents is itself flawed. As I’ve commented on, the predominant ideological currents that use this phrase advocate for a type of “Land Back” program which ironically aids U.S. imperialism, because it wants to abolish not just the United States but also Mexico. These “anti-colonial” theories claim to be Marxist, but the only effect they have is to undermine solidarity with Mexico’s anti-imperialist forces, and with broader Latin America. That’s what happens when you apply Horne’s race reductionist views of history to today’s conditions: you come to the conclusion that any state whose borders aren’t consistent with all historical tribal territories is an enemy. This is an especially detrimental stance for U.S. Americans to take, because it’s our government that seeks to break up the countries challenging imperialist interests in the name of “anti-colonialism.”

These ideas which the pro-Land Back elements put forth also hinder our own class struggle within the United States. Because even among the Land Back advocates who don’t claim to advocate for balkanization, or who don’t claim to support the capitalist “anti-colonialism” of the NGOs, the impact their practice has is to make a unified revolutionary mass force less likely to emerge. And to therefore make way for such counterrevolutionary projects.

In order to realize such a mass force, we need to build a united front against imperialism. Because imperialism represents the highest levels of capital, and we therefore can’t defeat capital without seriously combating it. But the standard position on U.S. imperialism among Land Back leftists—even ones who say they support countries like China and Russia—is that fighting imperialism isn’t as important as fighting to give the land back right here. 

This is the sentiment that’s represented by the strategy of pan-leftism, where somebody above all else prioritizes making alliances with people on the left. The reasoning is that we need to build as many ties as we can with people who share the Land Back orientation, because that supposedly gives us the best hope for advancing the struggle. This thinking is backwards. Building a pan-leftist coalition comes at the expense of building an anti-imperialist coalition, because what we call the left is dominated by elements which are hostile towards anti-imperialism. That will exclude you if you support Russia, or China, or any anti-imperialist group (such as CPI and Midwestern Marx) which backs these countries in a way that’s not pan-leftist. If we invest our practice in Land Back, we’ll perpetuate these divisions among anti-imperialists. Which means hindering both the fight against U.S. hegemony, and thereby every other type of popular struggle.

Our focus needs to be on doing whatever is necessary to advance the class struggle, and in this time and place, our most urgent task when it comes to the class struggle is advancing anti-imperialism. There is no class struggle without a serious effort to defeat U.S. hegemony. And such an effort isn’t possible when one acts dependent on leftism, because that leads to conflicting loyalties. The gatekeepers of what “Land Back” means are going to ask you to act loyal towards their pan-leftist coalition, which means compromising on anti-imperialism and embracing anti-popular ideas. Such a path is ironically opposed to the interests of real anti-colonial movements, i.e. ones which come from materially based mass interests. There’s a disconnect between what the Land Backers are doing, and what we actually need to do to defeat our class enemies. 

You can invest yourself in this “anti-colonialism” that proclaims itself as the only path to victory, while consistently rejecting practical means for defeating our ruling institutions. Or you can fully embrace the anti-imperialist struggle, which truly makes victory possible. Rejecting “Land Back” is at this stage the best way to advance anti-colonialism, because anti-colonialism’s triumph is made possible when we have an effective anti-imperialist and class struggle.

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The USA’s people have recognized Zionism’s evils, and will join the pro-Palestine struggle if we lead them into it

The majority of the people within the imperial center have become opposed towards what “Israel” is doing. Surveys began showing most U.S. citizens to be against the Zionist state’s actions months ago, and with Zionism’s latest war crime, the public’s hostility towards “Israel” can only grow. Everyone besides the most heartless and dishonest partisans for Zionism recognize that this week’s bombing of Rafah civilians was indefensible, because the video evidence of the horror is right there for all to see. The rage against the evils of the “Israeli” colonial project has reached its widest extent yet, and I don’t believe it’s peaked, because Washington is determined to allow the settler state to continue these atrocities. The question is whether we’ll be able to navigate our conditions so that the tacit enablers of the genocide, who actually quite outnumber the hardcore bloodthirsty fanatics, can keep letting the fanatics slaughter Palestinians.

Our task of seizing control from the enablers depends on expanding the amount of people who’ve advanced beyond the stage of merely hating what “Israel” is doing, or of merely supporting Palestine. To overcome Zionism’s institutional power, we have to strike against the broader system which Zionism is based within: imperialism. And to strike against imperialism, we must deepen the consciousness of these social elements which have begun to understand how vile U.S. foreign policy is. We have to bring the antiwar-minded individuals towards supporting Palestine in particular, as well as towards supporting the wider anti-imperialist struggle.

This need to educationally lift up the masses applies to every part of our struggle. Wrote Lenin: “every effort must be made to raise the level of the consciousness of the workers in general; it is necessary that the workers do not confine themselves to the artificially restricted limits of ‘literature for workers’ but that they learn to an increasing degree to master general literature. It would be even truer to say ‘are not confined’, instead of ‘do not confine themselves’, because the workers themselves wish to read and do read all that is written for the intelligentsia, and only a few (bad) intellectuals believe that it is enough ‘for workers’ to be told a few things about factory conditions and to have repeated to them over and over again what has long been known.’” 

We can’t give absolutely everyone a comprehensive revolutionary education until after we’ve overthrown the capitalist state. What we can do at this stage, though, is expand the number of Palestine supporters, while furthering their knowledge so they can advance the fight against U.S. hegemony. This means taking the pro-Palestine struggle to a stage beyond the one it’s in at this moment, where it’s overwhelmingly concentrated within the students and the established leftist groups. 

The next stage is one where the struggle has come to be primarily based within the wider working class, as the struggle will be diverse enough that it no longer relies upon students or the preexisting activist circles. This stage will also have to involve these Palestine supporters coming to support not just Palestine, but also Iran, China, Russia, and the other forces which are weakening Washington’s global hold.

To carry out such a mass educational project, we’ll need to bring our outreach efforts into the biggest parts of the masses which share anti-imperialist impulses. Leftists are just one of these elements, and many leftists are obstinately hostile towards the counter-hegemonic actions Washington’s challengers are carrying out. Libertarians and MAGA represent much larger elements than the ones the established left orgs represent, and there’s evidence that these conservative-leaning types are willing to oppose wars even when Trump is the one carrying them out. These antiwar-minded constituencies are important to reach, because they’re some of the biggest elements that have already developed a proto anti-imperialist consciousness. 

This doesn’t mean we need to forsake all efforts at reaching Democrats who are against the “Israel” proxy war, because Democrat voters have been shown to be against the genocide in the highest numbers. It means we need to think bigger than appealing to liberals, and not compromise on anti-imperialism just to win over the liberals who’ve invested in Russiagate. No Palestine supporter should disavow Russia’s anti-fascist Ukraine action just because they’re worried this will alienate a Democrat.

Escaping the confines of left-liberalism enables us to also reach an even larger demographic: politically unaffiliated Americans, who represent the country’s largest ideological group by default. There’s a reason why “didn’t vote” is the candidate that massively wins every U.S. presidential election: a plurality of the country’s workers are too alienated from their government to feel like engaging in politics is worth their time. The only way they’ll ever become politically active is if somebody presents them with a way to advance their material interests. Which is why though plenty of them are already disgusted by the Zionist state’s actions, they can’t simply be brought into the struggle by showing them evidence of Zionist crimes. 

Such righteous moral appeals are enough to mobilize students, but these non-student workers are operating under different circumstances which are conducive to different motivations. Even though most of them don’t like what “Israel” is doing, they won’t join a revolt until it’s clear this revolt is capable of defeating their class enemies. The way to mobilize them is by presenting this issue as not just a fight for liberation by a colonized people; but also as a fight between the USA’s workers, and a ruling class that’s sacrificing the wellbeing of working families for unjustifiable wars. 

Students have always been especially compelled to action by moral arguments; they were among the main ones who sacrificed themselves to combat the war effort in Vietnam at a time when the U.S. labor aristocracy was still massive, and most Americans were too comfortable to want to revolt. Unsurprisingly, the students have manifested the initial stage of the pro-Palestine struggle. But under today’s conditions, where the labor aristocracy has greatly shrunk and most Americans now have a class interest in proletarian revolution, we have an opportunity to mobilize the wider masses as well.

To do this, we need to fuse the pro-Palestine struggle with the class struggle. The synthesis between the two is the wider anti-imperialist struggle, which encompasses both the fight by oppressed peoples abroad and our own fight against the USA’s capitalist dictatorship. Wrote Gus Hall on why the opportunists within the left oppose effective strategies like this one: “The very essence of capitalism is class exploitation. It is exploitation of people, again in mass. The essence of any struggle is the class struggle. The central moving force is the exploited class–the working class. Concepts of struggle not based on the above reality will sooner or later come into conflict with it. The advocates of petty-bourgeois radicalism try to by-pass this reality. They believe they can avoid the necessary and unavoidable consistent and sustained work, the work of organizing, educating, mobilizing and leading people in mass, of leading people on the level of their understanding, of their own self-interest, and in this sense reflecting the objective processes leading to a revolutionary struggle against capitalism.” 

This is the reality we need to take into account while we try to expand the participants in the anti-Zionist cause. The vast majority of the people are not students, and therefore won’t be persuaded to take action through the same messages which have persuaded the students to do so. An analysis of the settler-colonial situation within Palestine, and efforts to raise awareness of Zionism’s crimes, are of course essential. They’re not all we must put forth, though, if we want to win this fight. We have to also show the workers why it’s in their interests to join this struggle. Which means making the antiwar alliances necessary for gaining access to these broader masses, and presenting these masses with an analysis on how the imperialist system is harming them.

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Libs keep trying to conflate multipolarity with the far right, but Palestine is bringing the discourse beyond their control

The Big Lie of the liberals who’ve been promoting the “Russiagate” psyop is that multipolarity represents a fascist agenda. This is the true purpose of the effort by these discourse managers to portray “Russian interference” as the reason for the far right’s rise. They want to stigmatize everything outside liberalism as being synonymous with the most reactionary kinds of politics, keeping the “left” unified behind NATO and its narratives. Right now, the imperialist media is carrying out its latest campaign to discredit anti-imperialist politics in this way. But the reality of our conditions keeps making multipolarity gain prominence within the discourse, no matter what tricks the liberals pull. Because in addition to the mass disillusionment of the last couple years over NATO’s Ukraine proxy war, there’s another massive factor which is creating a perceived mandate for ending U.S. hegemony: the genocide against Gaza.

Like the TikTok ban, the recent propaganda pieces against anti-imperialists are related to a desire for neutralizing the narrative threat which Palestine poses. It’s part of the reason why The Guardian just went to the trouble to talk about MAGA communism, and why Daily Kos has been publishing attack pieces on MAGA communism as well: the narrative managers always need to latch on to an avatar for vilification, one they can use to dismiss the entire anti-imperialist cause. And The Guardian showed this week that these managers have decided to make MAGA communism into the latest of these avatars. 

If you’re a Marxist who’s not a MAGA communist, you should keep in mind that the actors behind the Guardian piece don’t oppose MAGA communism on the same basis that you do. As I’ve stated, I’ve declined to embrace the MAGA communism label because MAGA isn’t the only mass ideological base from which Marxists can recruit. That’s not why these liberal journalists and their intelligence handlers are going after MAGAcoms, though. They don’t want to engage in good-faith criticism for the sake of advancing the class struggle, because a major part of their mission is to divide the class struggle from the fight against U.S. hegemony. And employing their familiar Russiagate conspiracist tropes to spin a story about fascists infiltrating American communism is how they can do this. 

We know many self-identified socialists have fallen for this story because Yanis Varoufakis, icon of the struggle against the big banks, has posted the Guardian piece while saying: “The last thing the Palestinian liberation cause needs is these neofascists pretending to support it. [Nothing new here, of course: Fascists always pretended to embrace antisystemic ideas - until they gained power & went into bed with the establishment]”

Any iteration of the communist movement that’s effective is one which has the wisdom not to amplify this kind of propaganda. I say this both because I’ve taken on an anti-sectarian stance towards MAGAcoms, and because the contents of the piece Varoufakis shared include more than statements against this particular group. It also seeks to portray the struggle against U.S. hegemony as inherently far-right, with the implication being that Washington’s geopolitical challengers mirror the far right by acting “authoritarian.” The piece says that MAGAcoms “see themselves as pitted against ‘the unipolar world’ and ‘western hegemony’, and they often support authoritarian nations that the US sees as its adversaries, such as Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.” There’s a difference between refraining from stating support for a person you’re speaking about as a journalist, and structuring the piece to try to guide the reader towards opposing the subject’s ideas. 

That the article was written with a pro-NATO agenda is further apparent in how it says that Jackson Hinkle “was booted from Instagram earlier this year – shortly after claiming in a series of posts that Ukraine was behind the terrorist attack on a concert hall in Moscow, despite Islamic State claiming responsibility for the act.” This is an utterly misleading statement. Even if ISIS did commit the attack, which it could be lying about having been behind, the Islamic extremists who carried out the deed were without any doubt acting with the aid of Ukraine. They couldn’t have crossed the barrier through which they got to the concert without information provided by Ukrainian and U.S. intelligence, which have access to the particular details that someone would need in order to gain this route of entry into Russia. And that was the exact route the terrorists took. Now NATO’s propagandists are trying to classify these realities as misinformation, and stigmatize the entire anti-imperialist cause as an “authoritarian” current. By uncritically sharing the piece, these are the ideas Varoufakis puts forth, even though he claims to be pro-Palestine.

The mentality that these kinds of narrative manipulations depend on, in which it’s seen as more important to purge the discourse of “bad” anti-imperialists than to consistently advance anti-imperialism, can’t dominate within the climate we’ve entered into. It’s apparent to the vast majority of the globe that helping Palestine’s liberation struggle is an urgent task, which means the liberal attempts to distract from this task can’t truly succeed. Everybody sees the full extent of the depravity that the U.S. government is making possible. Footage just came out of “Israel” bombing an UNRWA headquarters, murdering fifty people in a fiery and absolutely horrific scene. The liberal propagandists expect us to see images like this one, and then divert great amounts of our attention towards attacking certain pro-Palestine figures who supposedly represent a great new problem.

That the liberal media has decided to start focusing on MAGA communism at this moment, when the Ukraine psyop has failed and “Israel” has been abandoned by most of the world, makes this narrative parallel the media’s portrayals of the student protests. Pundits like Piers Morgan have hyper-focused on the language and tactics which some of these protesters have used, devoting the bulk of their discussions on Gaza to concern-trolling over these often petty topics. They’ve kept asking Palestine supporters if they support certain demonstrators chanting “death to America,” or if they think it’s okay to break windows, as if these are more pressing matters than a genocide. They’ve also fabricated a crisis of anti-Jewish hate on campuses, uncritically reporting made-up accounts of Zionists getting assaulted or false-flag hate incidents orchestrated by the counter-protesters. Now the media’s liberal wing is using MAGA communism to push a similar kind of smear narrative, except this narrative isn’t just about discrediting the pro-Palestine stance. It’s about discrediting the broader anti-imperialist position.

Just because I don’t share the woke strategy the student protesters have utilized, doesn’t mean I won’t defend them from incorrect accusations by the imperialist media. The same goes for the MAGA communists. To the fullest extent possible, I’m trying to help build a united front among people who oppose U.S. hegemony, which means acting principled on combating media smear narratives.

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To combat the anti-woke psyop, we must separate communism from “Antifa” & its violent radical liberalism

Twenty years ago, conservatism was the main ideological tool of our ruling class. It represented the narrative basis for the War on Terror and the crackdown on civil liberties, because the Christian right had already been the dominant wing of U.S. politics for decades at  that point. Then in the 2010s, the highest levels of capital decided to greatly inject neoliberalism and imperialism with “wokeness,” where the dictatorship of capital can legitimize itself by claiming to represent social progress. Its other function is as a weapon against dissent by labeling all who oppose the system as bigots, fueling the “cancel culture” of the social media age. Wokeness had already been present in things like the “liberate Afghan women” narrative, but now it was the main part of propaganda.

Wokeness remained big capital’s primary cultural weapon for a long time, until the escalation of the Gaza genocide prompted the narrative managers to pivot. It’s now best for them to engineer a controlled anti-woke backlash, where they send in fake dissident right-wing leaders to manage discontent. What these leaders are trying to do is crush the pro-Palestine movement, the broader anti-imperialist struggle, and the class struggle using the lie that all these forces simply represent “wokeness.”

This is where communists can take control of the narrative. The way we must respond to the anti-woke psyop is by making it clear to the USA’s people that we do not represent the insular, alienating brand of leftism which the ruling class has cultivated. These two opposing cultural forces, wokeness and anti-wokeness, are color revolutions which the psyop machine has pitted against each other. Investing ourselves in either of them means playing this game on the terms of our class enemies. And right now, a big way we can differentiate ourselves from the woke side of this proxy battle is by pointing to how communists are not “Antifa.” The reality is the opposite. Because what we today call Antifa is a ruling class fighting force whose targets ultimately include communists more than anyone else.

Among the pan-leftists who seek to keep Marxism invested in wokeness, a common defense of Antifa is that it’s not a formal organization, but a concept around which anybody can organize. Doesn’t this loose nature of Antifa make it all the more susceptible to federal infiltration, though? And in today’s political climate, where anti-imperialists get heavily attacked by the mainstream “left,” which types of individuals are the most inclined to carry out activities under the “Antifa” label? 

Not the ones with the ideological training or integrity to resist the psyops which infiltrators proliferate within organizing spaces. It’s a recipe for the formation of left-wing counter-gangs, where the most sectarian kinds of anarchists have been radicalized towards destroying what they deem “fascism” by any means necessary. And if you have the fortitude to stand with the anti-imperialist countries that leftists often call “fascist,” or to enter into coalitions with anti-imperialists who leftists shun, you’re not one of the communists who these Antifa anarchists will accept. They see you as one of the fascists.

Beyond this ideological overlap between the typical “Antifa” worldview and the worldview of the State Department, there’s more direct evidence that the intelligence agencies are guiding Antifa’s activities. This evidence can be found in how Antifa anarchists have participated within the U.S. empire’s recent proxy wars. The ones who’ve fought for Ukraine have been native to that country, which means that though they fall under the “anti-fascist” label, they represent a more specifically Ukrainian category within this element. The ones who’ve fought for the YPG in Syria, though, have in great part consisted of foreigners. 

This means that Antifa, including certain parts of Antifa within the United States, have been trained by the Kurdish fascists who NATO backs. They’ve traveled to Syria to fight for a Kurdish supremacist force that’s committing ethnic cleansing. And following this training, they’ve come back to the U.S. better equipped to carry forth the ultraviolent goals of the left counter-gangs. It parallels how U.S. white supremacists have been going to Ukraine to get combat experience, creating a greater risk of future far-right terrorism in this country.

Part of the anti-woke psyop’s purpose is to provide narrative cover for the violence that the far-right counter-gangs seek to commit. One wing of these counter-gangs, this being the organized Zionists, have already been carrying out such violence against the student protesters. And the anti-woke psyop has indeed been helping them, namely by shifting the conversation away from their crimes and towards “antisemitism.” This is the primary discourse manipulation tactic that the ruling class is now using on the broad masses. And like the wokeism of Antifa, this psyop is based within an anti-majoritarian worldview. Most of the USA’s people are opposed to the actions of “Israel,” meaning that when the anti-wokes call all who share this view anti-Jewish, they’re demonizing the majority of Americans.

This mass-directed hate is effective at rallying the extremist minority towards terrorist acts, but it’s not going to win the bulk of society towards siding with the Zionist counter-gangs, nor with “Israel.” So though these violent Zionists and their Nazi counterparts have a role in the counterrevolutionary terror campaign, Antifa is at least as important to this effort. Because Antifa has the narrative advantage of representing itself as the foil to the fascist counter-gangs. This deception can’t fool the majority of the people either, though, because the ideology of Antifa is one that condemns most of society for not adhering to “leftism.” That’s what communists must take advantage of.

As the class conflict intensifies, and the deep state increasingly mobilizes the radlib counter-gangs, we need to draw attention to how these ultraviolent left forces are most prominently arrayed against communists. I say that communists are their primary target, at least in the long term, because communists are the ones who pose a threat towards their ideological primacy within organizing. We represent the anti-imperialist, masses-centered agenda which they seek to keep our social movements separated from. 

Islamic Socialist, a fellow traveler of mine within this struggle, recently explained why the anti-multipolar position of Antifa anarchists is opposed to the pro-Palestine cause: “You can't support Palestine without supporting the Resistance who is protecting them, you can't support the Resistance without supporting their primary allies who are the reason they are able to fight. No nation has provided arms and funds to the Gaza resistance like Iran has. Next to Iran is DPRK (North Korea), China, and Yemen. Every faction of the Palestinian resistance in both Gaza and the West Bank openly announces this. This is important to stress because it seems western pro-Palestine supporters aren’t tapped into the pulse of Palestine’s values or their resistance’s stances. Of course they aren’t, at least not most of them; because the only group today who is live updating on the values of Palestine and their resistance is the Resistance News Network on Telegram.” This need for consistent anti-imperialism applies to every other part of our fight against the capitalist state. We divide our struggle from the struggles of Washington’s other enemies, and we fail. 

The goal of “Antifa,” and of the pan-leftists who defend it, is to keep us isolated from the global struggle in favor of a coalition with the left counter-gangs. Most of the country is alienated from these counter-gangs, which is what gives the anti-woke psyop its strength. We have to thwart this psyop’s efforts at conflating communism with Antifa, and align with the masses against the deep state’s terror campaign.

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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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Parenti set an example by rejecting the imperialism-compatible left. Now many more are following his path.

When I was a pan-leftist (i.e. someone who believes the best way to advance the class struggle is by unifying the “left”), I viewed Michael Parenti as someone who was fully compatible with my ideology. Which required some contradictory thinking on my part, because Parenti made it clear that he did not view a great deal of the “left” as allies to the anti-imperialist cause. He ridiculed the types of anarchists, Trotskyists, social democrats, and so-called progressives who supported NATO’s destruction of Yugoslavia because it represented a blow against “Stalinism.” 

Though I shared his disappointment in these imperialism-compatible leftists, I still viewed pan-leftism more broadly as correct, and assumed what Parenti represents was essentially the same as what I represented at that time. Then I came to understand that the class struggle doesn’t depend on Marxists investing themselves in “the left,” and thereby realized something about Parenti’s ideas which I’d never noticed: he helped give us the ideological tools we would need in order to reject pan-leftism.

He helped repudiate the liberal anti-Marxist smear of “class reductionism,” which today we ironically often see Marxists use against their own peers within the struggle. Parenti identified how accusations of class reductionism have become so prominent in our discourse due to liberal efforts at discrediting the concept of class struggle, in favor of a worldview that’s entirely focused around identities. 

Parenti accounted for the importance of recognizing how different types of people experience different types of injustice; he didn’t join with the liberals in condemning so-called “orthodox” Marxism for its alleged betrayal of minorities, though. He ridiculed what he called the “anything but class” left for its identity reductionism, pointing out how its role has been to obscure what Marxism means:

The "left" ABC theorists say we are giving too much attention to class. Who exactly is doing that Surveying the mainstream academic publications, radical journals, and socialist scholars conferences, one is hard put to find much class analysis of any kind. Far from giving too much attention to class power, most U.S. writers and commen­tators have yet to discover the subject. While pummeling a rather minuscule Marxist Left, the ABC theorists would have us think they are doing courageous battle against hordes of Marxists who domi­nate intellectual discourse in this country—yet another hallucination they hold in common with conservatives.5 In their endless search for conceptual schema that might mute Marxism's class analysis, "left" ABC theorists have twaddled for years over a false dichotomization between early Marx (culturalistic, humanistic, good) and later Marx (dogmatic, economistic, bad).6 As Marxist scholar Bertell Oilman notes, this artificial counterpoising transforms a relatively minor development in Marx's work into a chasm between two ways of thinking that have little in common.

Parenti was reacting to the destruction of the old left, which had actually been effective at mass mobilization, and the rise of the “New Left” with its investment in identitarian academic theories. His great contributions were during the most barren era for the USA’s class struggle, where between the 1970s and the 2010s, U.S. “Marxism” almost entirely existed in the form of liberal academia. At that time, Parenti was one of the few people on the left with integrity. While much or even most of the U.S. “left” as it existed in the 90s was celebrating the USSR’s demise, Parenti was defending the USSR’s legacy. While even most “Marxists” in the U.S. were repeating the atrocity propaganda against Serbia, Parenti was explaining the absurdity of the narrative about Milosevic being a “war criminal.” 

He interpreted China’s conditions differently from how myself and many other modern Marxists interpret them, concluding that the PRC had betrayed its socialist gains. But even this was understandable at the time, because when he made these statements, the Deng reforms hadn’t yet had the time to be fully proven as necessary. Now we can see China reversing its capitalistic shift (to the lament of the imperialists), and building upon the living standard gains which the market reforms made possible. Partly for this reason, pro-China communists like myself hold Parenti in great esteem, despite this one thing history has proven him wrong about. When he was able to, he used his platform to advance scientific socialism amid an era where socialism was on the retreat. His legacy is to provide crucial resources for the next generation of communists.

Over the last twenty years, when socialism and anti-imperialism have come to again make great gains, there have arisen many within this new generation who’ve interpreted Parenti’s teachings in a confused way. In the same way I used to, where I thought that he was just adding credibility to my pan-leftist orientation. But it’s a mistake to consume Parenti while clinging to pan-leftism. Because essentially everything Parenti said and did was a repudiation of the same mentality which pan-leftism is based around. What he did was refuse to compromise his revolutionary principles for the sake of appeasing anybody on the “left” who might not share these values. He rejected opportunism and cowardice, which are the things that motivate somebody to take a certain stance just to fit in with a group.

For an example of how his way of operating contrasts with the culture of modern “woke” circles, this is an example of something he wrote which was basically correct, yet would get him canceled within the main online “Marxist” spaces if he wrote it today:

Real patriots ally themselves with that first America [Senator John] Edwards describes. They struggle for fundamental social change. They want to tax the rich, not low-income working people. They want to develop renewable nonpolluting wind, tidal, and solar energy sources, and swift safe mass transit systems with less reliance on toxic fossil fuels. In contrast to the profit-oriented conservative superpatriots who repeatedly profess their love for America but seemed unconcerned about America's forests, rivers, wildlife, wetlands, water supplies, and overall ecological health, the real patriot puts environmental concerns before everything else, for without a livable ecology nothing else will survive.

The only part of this statement I take issue with is the one about using taxes to pay for these things, since I believe socialist Korea’s post-taxes system is what communists should aspire to. The reason why I believe today’s pan-leftist Marxists would hate somebody for saying this is because he argues that patriotism can be a good thing. Among the USA’s pro-China communists, there’s emerged an element that seeks to maintain pan-leftism’s dominance over Marxism by obsessively attacking “patsocs,” as in socialists who utilize patriotism. I used to be part of this element, until the Ukraine conflict showed me just how urgent our task of advancing anti-imperialism is. The only thing that can make patriotism divide Marxist-Leninists is us choosing to let it divide us. We can’t turn it into the primary debate, and divert attention away from our foremost task of combating U.S. hegemony. Because of we get distracted from that, the struggle will fail.

Since Parenti made his final contributions to the struggle during the early-to-mid 2010s, communism has risen within the USA’s popular consciousness to an unprecedented degree (at least for our own lifetime). This is because the ongoing depression the country’s working class has been in since 2008 is spurring more and more people to learn about Marxism. At the same time, it’s become apparent in recent years that the decline of Washington’s influence is bringing about the birth of a new global order. An order that’s based not in imperial domination, but in international cooperation, where China, Russia, Iran, and their adjacent countries work to further each other’s development. A great amount of this era’s developing radicals have responded to these events by becoming pro-China Marxists, and they’ve been right to do so. The problem is that the forces of pan-leftism are working to divert them away from Parenti’s mode of practice, and towards the practice of the unprincipled leftists who Parenti decried.

The ideological confusion that we’ve seen within this layer of the new ML generation, where many have embraced anti-imperialism in theory yet cling to radical liberal habits, must be combated. There are efforts by orgs like PSL to separate Russia from the other countries fighting imperialism, simply because Russia is unpopular among liberals and leftists. There are figures like Ben Norton, who claim to support multipolarity yet attack other anti-imperialists for not investing in pan-leftism. We need to get beyond this underdeveloped stage within modern Marxism, and truly carry on the legacy of fighters like Parenti. We have to follow in his example, and always act foremost with the desire to advance the struggle—not with the desire to build influence inside the “left.” Though the ones who have been following in Parenti’s anti-opportunist path are relatively small, there are many of them, and their numbers will only continue to grow.

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