Imperial state’s latest attack on Rage Against the War Machine shows what threatens our ruling institutions

The reason why Rage Against the War Machine is still worth discussing, even though the original event of that name happened over a year ago, is because RAWM isn’t just that one event. It’s also a permanent organizing coalition between the groups that both took part in the initial action, and have wanted to commit to working together long-term. That’s part of why the Data Journalism Agency, the Ukraine-based attack dog group with links to the U.S. State Department, has specifically listed RAWM in its big hit piece against anti-imperialists. It was notable in itself how these anti-NATO forces were able to come together, but because they’ve also largely stayed together, the drivers of the war against Russia have continued to see RAWM as a threat worth naming.

“This antiwar movement is interesting because it tries to attract figures from different camps, including ideologically opposite ones: both left and right,” says the piece about RAWM. It describes this as “interesting” because such an effort to broaden the antiwar struggle beyond the leftist niche, and to reach people with antiwar consciousness across the political spectrum, represents a kind of threat which the empire hasn’t seen in decades. As John McCarthy of the Center for Political Innovation has written in response to the piece: “in a show of weakness the panicked Empire has unleashed a desperate wave of slander and censorship in an attempt to keep the American People in the dark…The Imperialists are frightened that Americans across the political spectrum are breaking free from their lies. They are scared that the American People will realize that our interests are the same as the interests of the nations breaking free from Imperialism. They are afraid that we will find out about the unlimited Growth and Prosperity that BRICS is offering the world.”

This reality of what threatens our ruling institutions is the foremost thing which Marxists in the United States need to consider as we navigate activism and discourse. Our ruling class, and the propaganda operatives they deploy, are at this moment mainly focused on preventing anti-imperialists from solidifying into a clear united front. They don’t want there to be a well-defined polarization in our society when it comes to the question of whether we should support empire. This is because they know that if there were, the pro-imperialist side wouldn’t be able to remain narratively dominant, which would render the war machine untenable. 

Most of the USA’s people have long tired of the narrative that we need to support Ukraine; which has mainly happened due to sheer war fatigue, but if more of the people learn what this war is truly about, the neocons will be in unprecedented trouble. Not only is the war against Russia an unwinnable and wasteful one, but the war’s core justification of “defending Ukraine’s sovereignty” is entirely fraudulent. It’s a cover for the Kiev fascist regime’s plans to ethnically cleanse the Donbass region; Russia got involved to prevent the threatened communities from being massacred and forcibly relocated. These realities have the potential to fundamentally change mass consciousness. Which is why the imperial state and its Ukrainian appendages have been working hardest to discredit and criminalize the groups that recognize Russia was right to take action.

This is where the lesson from the Agency’s attack becomes apparent: as a communist or antiwar actor, it’s wise to prioritize building alliances with those who can assist you in combating the pro-imperialist forces. I’m not arguing we should support or collaborate with everybody who’s listed in the piece; it includes Donald Trump and others in the pro-Zionist “dissident right,” as well as fascist infiltrators like Matthew Heimbach and Lucas Gage who of course haven’t been able to become part of the RAWM coalition. I’m arguing we should take care to evaluate our potential allies in a measured way, where we first assess all the relevant facts before dismissing these allies. The Agency, and the opportunistic actors on the left who align with its goals, want us to uncritically accept whatever negative things we hear about the pro-Russian groups. This is how they hope to fragment us.

That’s where this situation becomes tragically ironic. Because the Party for Socialism and Liberation, a group that fully embraced this sectarian attitude by attacking RAWM during the leadup to its own event last year, is one of the groups included in the Agency’s piece. Within the graphic the Agency created to illustrate the ties between different people and orgs, the PSL is even put in the same cluster as the pro-Russian Uhuru org. This means the U.S. and Ukrainian trackers who’ve been gathering intelligence on antiwar groups view the PSL’s members as being in the same category Uhuru is in. Which isn’t surprising, because though the pro-Russian political forces are the biggest threat, there are growing signs that the ruling class seeks to crush pro-Palestine activists of all kinds. And that includes the activists in PSL. 

By betraying first all the orgs within RAWM, and then the Uhuru org, the PSL’s leaders have cut their own members off from the networks that they’ll desperately need amid the coming repression. We’ve seen how beneficial it’s been for the Uhuru org to ally with CPI during its fight against the DOJ’s charges; this alliance has given Uhuru more strength in a time of crisis. And though I can’t predict the future, because of this I have great confidence that Uhuru is going to keep making progress within the struggle, no matter what the state does. Due to these networks that the org has been willing to build, it’s in a better place to win the narrative battle against the state. As Uhuru’s Chairman Omali Yeshitela has said, “We are creating a situation where people clearly understand the connection of this attack on the African People’s Socialist Party and the Uhuru Movement, and the future of freedom for everybody in the world.”

This is why I’ve walked away from the side of the movement that PSL represents—which will only accept people who join it in denouncing its sectarian targets—and embraced Uhuru’s strategy. Omali and his org’s members understand the indispensable value of aligning with every force, both foreign and domestic, that’s an ally within the struggle against the imperial order. It’s the sensible thing to do when the U.S. government, along with its proxies, are putting you and numerous others on implicit target lists. We should view this hit piece by the Agency as an extension of the Ukrainian government’s list of U.S. citizens that it wants assassinated; though only a few of the Americans from the Agency’s list are on the official kill list, this new list has further put groups like Uhuru and CPI on the radar of Ukraine’s Nazi terrorists. 

The PSL hopes its neutral stance on Russia-Ukraine, and its disavowal of the “bad” anti-imperialists, will save it from the imperial state’s retaliations. But the state is coming for everybody who’s speaking out on Palestine. We need to respond to these threats with strategic wiseness, and strengthen the united front against the forces which seek to destroy us.

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Why does liberal media promote anti-patriotic leftism? Because it’s a substitute for genuine class struggle

In The Ideological Struggle against Fascism, Dimitrov explained something that today’s U.S. Marxists urgently need to understand if we want to win:

We Communists are the irreconcilable opponents, in principle, of bourgeois nationalism in all its forms. But we are not supporters of national nihilism, and should never act as such. The task of educating the workers and all working people in the spirit of proletarian internationalism is one of the fundamental tasks of every Communist Party. But anyone who thinks that this permits him, or even compels him, to sneer at all the national sentiments of the broad masses of working people is far from being a genuine Bolshevik, and has understood nothing of the teaching of Lenin on the national question.

Yet within Marxist spaces, we see just such sentiments all the time. Ben Norton, the media figure who’s been able to find great success in the algorithm despite nominally being a communist, promotes just such rhetoric; Norton has said that

Trying to “reclaim” the genocidal US flag as a symbol of the ‘left’ would be like Israeli leftists trying to reappropriate the Israeli flag. You can't claim to support Palestinian liberation while waving an Israeli flag. The same is true for the US flag. It's a ridiculous idea. “Patriotism” in an imperialist country founded on genocidal settler-colonialism will never be remotely similar to patriotism in a formerly colonized country. It depends on one's position in the capitalist world system. Patriotism in the imperial core is inherently reactionary.

That Norton uses “leftist” and “communist” interchangeably further shows the anti-Marxist nature of the ideas he pushes, because communists are not the same as the left. Whereas communism is a way of bringing history to its next stage of development, the concept of the “left” comes from the idea of bringing progress within the bourgeois system. It comes from how the progressive side within early bourgeois democracy sat on the left side of Parliament in France. That’s why the view of the U.S. national identity which Norton’s camp promotes is consistent with what the New York Times, and other liberal institutions, have been saying in recent years. 

In 2021, Jake Silverstein of the Times wrote a defense of the 1619 Project, the effort by a series of academics to promote the ahistorical idea that the American revolution was fought to preserve slavery. In this article, Silverstein noted some things that should make every Marxist suspicious of the ideas this Project represents. Referring to Nikole Hannah-Jones, the author of the original piece, Silverstein described how “Portions of Nikole’s opening essay from the project, which would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary, were cited in the halls of Congress; candidates in what was then a large field of potential Democratic nominees for president referred to it on the stump and the debate stage; 1619 Project book clubs seemed to materialize overnight. All of this happened in the first month.”

If these ideas are so revolutionary, why have they been getting gladly embraced by our imperialist institutions? Because imperialism’s ideological support doesn’t only come from jingoism. Especially in the modern era, its narrative basis also comes from the inverse to jingoism, which is national nihilism. The propaganda method that the “radical” wing of the liberal establishment has been using, where it gets left-leaning people to conclude that U.S. history is all bad, represents just as effective of a means for manufacturing consent as super-patriotism does. If not more so, because today many of the same people who have the greatest sense of patriotism have been coming to a conservative antiwar orientation. At the same time, many of the same people who agree with Project 1619’s thesis have been the ones most inclined to support imperialist wars, especially against Russia and Syria. Or at least they’ve been among the ones most actively working to undermine the resistance to these wars, taking a non-commital “neither NATO nor Russia” stance and attacking everyone who supports multipolarity.

At the moment, the jingoist narrative strategy from the Cold War and the Bush era is gaining more prominence, as the ruling class is using a controlled anti-woke backlash to attack the pro-Palestine cause. This anti-woke psyop is likely to continue being the direction the narrative managers take, partly because they need a way to prevent antiwar conservatives from gaining further revolutionary consciousness. What we always need to remember, though, is that the woke and anti-woke color revolutions are dependent on each other. The presence of the anti-woke psyop is used to strengthen the woke psyop, and the same is true the other way around. Even as anti-woke rightism comes to be the predominant overall propaganda angle, the ruling class is going to continue backing the pseudo-radical element which the 1619 Project represents. 

The threat from the anti-woke backlash will be used by these synthetic radicals to make themselves appear to be the only ones to turn to for anybody who’s against the right. They want to keep Marxism tied to radical liberalism by scaring Marxists into becoming dependent on the promoters of national nihilism. It’s the same thing the Democrats do when they point to the Republican Party as supposed evidence that we have no choice but to vote blue. The goal is to push out any genuine sources of dissent by intimidating potential rebels into compromising with the forces of reformism, convincing them that a united front with capital’s “progressive” wing is the only way to combat fascism.

There are plenty of Marxists who consciously embrace this idea, as they represent an explicitly reformist current of “Marxism” that believes we need to vote Democrat. But most people who call themselves communists want to believe they’re authentically working against the Democratic Party, so the way that they’re brought into the liberal coalition is different. They’re told, through the kinds of arguments which Norton makes, that the best way they can resist imperialism is by fighting against U.S. patriotism. Yet they only strengthen imperialism, because they’ve fallen for a discourse psyop. 

Burning the U.S. flag, or telling the workers that their cultural identity is inherently wrong, doesn’t even partially have a positive impact. All it does is keep Marxism confined to the left. The anti-woke wing of the ruling class isn’t hurt by it, but rather benefits from it, because these radicals are only convincing other radicals that their national nihilist position is correct. It’s not something that’s capable of winning mass support. The anti-woke element can then use the actions of these radicals as agitprop, convincing more of the masses that communism is opposed to their interests.

Actors like Norton don’t care that what they’re doing has these effects, because fundamentally they aren’t concerned with winning the masses. They’re concerned with building influence inside the left, meaning communism will never get majority support as long as it’s guided by their ideas. This is why they say that using the U.S. flag is the same as using the flag of the Zionist state: in order to keep up the perception that an anti-popular practice is capable of defeating the capitalist state, they need to make it seem like revolution can happen here the same way it can happen in Palestine. 

The idea which leftists who subscribe to these narratives come to is that we can defeat the U.S. ruling class by simply replicating the methods the Palestinian resistance is using against “Israel.” Which translates to fetishizing armed struggle within conditions where armed struggle will be secondary to the other tactics for winning the class war. Because the overwhelming majority of “Israelis” have a primary material investment in colonialism, and therefore aren’t going to become part of the effort to end Zionism, violent resistance is the main thing Palestinians must do in order to gain their liberation. The equivalent is not the case in the United States, because most of the white workers here lack a primary stake in continuing the oppression of indigenous and African peoples. It’s possible for workers of all colors to unite on a mass scale, with the white workers not making up a marginal number within this effort. 

That’s the distinction Norton ignores: in the USA, the majority of the people share an interest in revolution regardless of their race, unlike is the case in the tiny U.S. welfare colony of “Israel.” The U.S. hasn’t been able to sustain its stable old dynamic, where most white workers were part of the labor aristocracy. The decline of the imperial order since the mid-20th century, wherein inequality has vastly increased, has made most U.S. Americans unified in a desire for economic change. 

It’s because of this systemic decline that we’ve seen the country’s political reorientation from the last twenty years; the shift where tens of millions of conservative-leaning people, who would have been pro-imperial jingoists in an earlier time, have been increasingly turning against the war machine. Our big problem at this stage is that the primary current of “Marxism” acts like this shift hasn’t happened, and like jingoism is still the only big pro-imperialist narrative tool. We must escape the cycle of defeat that this current has long been keeping the class struggle within, and build a Marxism which centers the masses.

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Growth is what the war machine is keeping from us, and what will bring North American civilization to prosperity

The essence of the class conflict we’re seeing take place across the North American continent is one between the side that’s for growth, and the side that’s against growth. It’s the institutions of monopoly finance capital, as well as the radical liberal counter-gangs which they cultivate, that are working to prevent the growth our society needs. They’re trying both to prevent the re-industrialization of America, and to further de-grow the economy. This effort by the monopolists and their footsoldiers to not just hold back history’s progression towards the next stage of growth, but also destroy what economic strength we still have, makes these forces actively reactionary.

The effort to keep bringing down living standards is fundamentally tied to monopoly capital’s drive towards endless wars. As the monopolists intensify the exploitation of the USA’s people, and use corporate price gouging to further transfer wealth upwards, they’re funneling ever more resources into military adventures and occupations. They need degrowth to keep waging warfare against more and more of the world; this is apparent in how the U.S. empire’s operations are dependent on austerity. The monopolists are now acting to take austerity to a new level, one that involves an engineered inflation crisis which the people aren’t allowed to find relief for. Our leaders have long abandoned any serious efforts to invest in the economy here, because their priorities are to expand the war machine and to crush the workers.

That’s why to find who’s on the side of progress, and who’s on the side of reaction, we foremost need to look at where political actors stand on these macro-level socioeconomic questions. Does somebody support growth, and seek to end imperialist wars? Then should they show themselves to be principled in advancing these goals, they’re on the side of progress. What Marxists need to understand is that this applies to a great deal of conservatives and libertarians, who’ve increasingly been coming to an orientation that’s opposed to monopoly capital’s wars. At the same time, growth is something these demographics have a great desire for, as evidenced by how these days conservative politicians can only succeed by promising to revitalize industry. We need to take this into account within our mass work, and within our coalition-building efforts. We also need to grasp that many of the leftists who ostensibly are aligned with communism truly fall within the reactionary category, because they’re anti-growth and hostile towards multipolarity.

These are the things we must consider as we figure out who to ally with in the class struggle. Just because somebody is socially progressive, or describes themselves as “anti-colonial,” doesn’t necessarily mean they’re on the side of progress. A great deal of the actors who take these stances are in practice reactionaries, because they oppose the utilization of industry and work against any serious anti-imperialist efforts. Once again, these issues are intertwined. The leftists who say that China’s use of markets to achieve industrial growth makes it a capitalist state, or who say that the Belt and Road Initiative is imperialist, also take the stance that an industrial growth project on the North American continent would be “fascist.” 

It doesn’t matter that these Chinese projects have been lifting hundreds of millions from poverty, or that industry would realistically be the way to end poverty where we are. Growth is simply seen as bad, for the same reason that China and the other anti-imperialist countries are seen as bad.

The lesson to take from this is that we shouldn’t align with people based on how far to the left they are, but on how good a job they do at countering the degrowth imperialism of the monopolists. Moreover, the point of communism isn’t to be leftist in the first place; communism and leftism aren’t the same thing, as Lenin helped clarify in “Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder. Communism transcends the ideological spectrum of bourgeois politics, because its entire role is to advance history to a stage of development beyond the one where this spectrum exists. Our task is to bring civilization to its next evolutionary epoch, which means the forces we need to align ourselves with are the ones that share an interest in ending the present epoch. The era where growth is suppressed for the sake of maintaining super-profits.

It’s this reality about what communists in the USA must do that’s largely why so much of the left has rejected growth, and has opposed the struggle against U.S. hegemony. Pursuing growth and the defeat of imperialism means making an alliance with the elements of the ruling class which aren’t invested in monopoly capital’s geo-strategic games, due to these games harming domestic industry.

Leftists often call this united front strategy “Strasserism,” in reference to the Strasserite “socialists” who aligned with Germany’s fascists. But the Strasserites invested themselves in the wing of the ruling class which received support from monopoly finance capital, rather than with the wing that actually had a stake in seeing big capital lose. The latter is what today’s pro-growth communists are increasingly seeking to do: enter into a coalition with the forces that have enough resources to be able to stand against the monopolists, but aren’t loyal to the monopolists. It’s for this same reason that we don’t seek unity with fascists, like how the Strasserites did; fascism and anti-Jewish hate were the things that monopoly capital elevated to power, and that therefore got embraced by such opportunists on the left. We obviously don’t intend to do the equivalent of what the Strasserites did, both because fascism is incompatible with communism and because our united front is one between big capital’s enemies.

Revolutionaries have historically been able to win by making allies out of the ruling class elements which aren’t of the highest level, and which are willing to help defeat big capital by any means necessary. That’s one of the steps we’ll need to take as well; we have to take full advantage of the intensifying conflict between the different wings of the ruling class.

The leftists who oppose this strategy naysay about how it will supposedly bring communism’s defeat. Yet there’s massive historical precedent for communists prevailing after fighting alongside small capital against the old order. The Chinese revolution, which saw communists gain support from the bourgeois elements who found the old governmental system unacceptable, is one example of this. As Mao wrote: “Our enemies are all those in league with imperialism - the warlords, the bureaucrats, the comprador class, the big Landlord class and the reactionary section of the intelligentsia attached to them. The leading force in our revolution is the industrial proletariat. Our closest friends are the entire semi-proletariat and petty bourgeoisie.”

We know we’re capable of making the equivalent kinds of alliances, because the United States is not exceptional. And an increasing amount of the people who are coming to communism understand this. Leftism isn’t the only ideological orientation from which people are entering into communism; there are plenty of Marxists who started out as libertarians, conservatives, or simply people who were politically unaffiliated. We can build an iteration of communism that lacks leftism’s baggage, and that can therefore outmaneuver the reactionaries.

Emphasizing how communism means growth is a crucial part of how we’ll be able to make these alliances, as well as gain support from workers across the ideological spectrum. Anti-communist dogma says that communism means everyone is equally poor, and that everyone gets paid the same. Whereas degrowth leftists have ironically been affirming this idea, the communist elements which truly align with existing socialism recognize that the opposite is true. Growth is how China has eliminated extreme poverty, and how the PRC and its partnered countries are building a prosperous new world. If we communicate this reality to the USA’s people, we’ll show them a demonstrable solution to the decline which monopoly capital is subjecting our society to. 

Growth is what can connect Americans to the other peoples around the globe who have an interest in overthrowing the monopolists. It’s the thing that’s letting these people abroad become free from neo-colonialism, and the thing that will let us bring prosperity to our hollowed out economy. Therefore it’s the rallying point that can simultaneously bring mass education on anti-imperialism, and lift the average worker up to a revolutionary consciousness. By putting forth this vision, wherein we bring the benefits of Eurasia’s growth to our own continent, we’ll gain the support needed to prevail against growth’s enemies.

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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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Mass-based practice vs petty-bourgeois radicalism: knowing the difference so we can win the class war

Petty-bourgeois radicalism is a phenomenon much older than the version of it that exists in the modern United States, but the patterns within its older iterations directly parallel the ones we see in the ones from today. All petty-bourgeois radicalism entails a substitution of proletarian struggle for a politics that’s based within the petty-bourgeoisie, and within the ideological tendencies which are aligned with this class. As my political partners in the Party of Communists USA have stated about what modern U.S. petty-bourgeois radicalism is, and how it’s different from the mass-based mode of practice:

The New Left refers to a petite bourgeois and intellectual movement that emerged in the 1960s which continues today that is characterized by a lack of centrality of the working class, focus on intellectuals and students, decentralization/localism, Anti-Sovietism, and focus on non-class social movements (movementism). We oppose “Critical theory” and “Cultural Marxism” as ideologies promoted by the CIA which is anti-Communist and anti-working class. For example, Herbert Marcuse, early exponent of Critical Theory, worked for the Office of Strategic Services and later the CIA in order to promote these ideologies. Marcuse trained Angela Davis who rose to leadership in the CPUSA only to split it…

The PCUSA upholds the Marxist theory of class struggle, knowing that the working class is the primary agent of change. Critical Theorists and the New Left, on the other hand, believe non-class social movements and the lumpenproletariat to either be equal to or above the proletariat. Herbert Marcuse said that intellectuals, students, and the lumpenproletariat replaced the workers as the revolutionary class. “In contrast, Marxism utilizes dialectical materialism to understand that these ideas merely reflect reality rather than determine it.” (“On the Frankfurt School”, The Communist Vol III, pg12)

When we look at the petty-bourgeois radical movements from the 19th century, all the essential similarities are there. These different iterations of petty-bourgeois radicalism just focus on different social and class groups, with none of them being the working class. Wrote Lenin about the Narodniks, the Russian political current that put forth a “national” version of socialism: “The essence of Narodism is that it represents the producers’ interests from the standpoint of the small producer, the petty bourgeois.” Lenin observed that in order to justify this shifting of focus away from the working class, the Narodniks embraced a type of morality that comes from petty-bourgeois sensibilities; from a perspective of blaming the people for how capitalism’s contradictions persist:

The contradiction of interests has already begun to assume definite forms, and is even reflected in Russian legislation, but the small producer stands apart from this struggle. He is still tied to the old bourgeois society by his tiny farm, and for that reason, though he is oppressed by the capitalist system, he is unable to understand the real causes of his oppression and consoles himself with illusions about the whole trouble lying in the fact that the reason and sentiment of people are still in an “embryonic state.”

“Of course,” continues the ideologist of this petty bourgeois, “people have always endeavoured to influence the course of things in one way or another.”

But “the course of things” consists of nothing else but actions and “influences” of people, and so this again is an empty phrase.

“But they were guided in this by the promptings of the most meagre experience and by the grossest interests; and it is obvious that it was very rarely and only by chance that these guides could indicate the path suggested by modern science and modern moral ideas” 

This is a petty-bourgeois morality, which condemns “grossness of interests” because it is unable to connect its “ideals” with any immediate interests—it is a petty-bourgeois way of shutting one’s eyes to the split which has already taken place and which is clearly reflected both in modern science and in modern moral ideas.

Though this passage is written in a different style than what modern readers are used to, the critique Lenin makes is a fairly simple one. He’s ridiculing the argument, made by the types of anti-capitalists who are disenfranchised by capital but lack a proletarian class character, that the people (especially the workers) are to blame for the big bourgeoisie’s continued rule. I’ve encountered this exact same type of argument in my personal confrontations with petty-bourgeois radicals. Upon seeing examples of the people being able to gain revolutionary consciousness, like with how most Americans have come to be against the Ukraine proxy war, they’ve sought to minimize the significance of these developments. To argue that because these kinds of antiwar or class conscious sentiments are embryonic, the emergence of these sentiments doesn’t truly represent progress. 

These people who’ve been getting angry at corporate price gouging and the war machine are just seeking to influence the course of things, like people always have; therefore their consciousness shift means nothing. This is the same idea conveyed by the political actors on the left who’ve been dismissing the proto anti-imperialist awareness that’s appeared among libertarians and the MAGA base. Which shows why these left actors are drawing from a fundamentally petty-bourgeois mode of analysis: they view the people as fundamentally reactionary. They dismiss whatever revolutionary potential within the people as not really revolutionary, but merely a crude expression of the people’s “grossness of interests.” 

These days, such derisiveness comes in the form of arguing that working class people who articulate social discontent are simply acting out of cynicism and bigotry. That when they object to our declining living conditions, they just want to hold on to their white privilege, or to their privilege as “labor aristocrats” according to the third-worldists. It’s a framing that ignores how white and nonwhite workers share an interest in proletarian revolution, and that acts to divide the proletariat. Which helps prevent the rise of an authentic mass workers leadership, and thereby keeps the New Left able to dominate organizing.

As one critic of this thinking has said while addressing the PSL, today’s foremost propagator of petty-bourgeois radicalism: “You reject this ‘America First Nationalism’ which is the real social response of the neglect of American citizens to our country falling apart which can create the groundwork for anti-war consciousness towards Ukraine and whatever future conflict comes next.”

When the Narodniks employed this kind of reasoning, they concluded that the real revolutionary subjects are not the workers but the small producers. When the New Left employ it, they conclude that the real revolutionary subjects are the lumpen and the members of the intelligentsia. It all comes from the same petty-bourgeois root. To be able to dismiss the working masses, to interpret all of their revolutionary activities as not truly being signs of hope, one needs to be based in a worldview that’s detached from the proletarian struggle. Not everyone who shares this petty-bourgeois radical mindset is petty-bourgeois; some of them are ironically workers themselves. Yet because they’ve taken example from the petty-bourgeoisie on how to view the masses, they all nevertheless are detached in this way.

We can overcome the problem of the New Left, like how the Bolsheviks overcame the problem of Narodism. The essential thing is for us to not act like communists are dependent on the left, and instead build beyond it. We should work to bring in the students who show themselves to be open towards a serious anti-imperialist and class struggle; this needs to be just one part of our practice, though. Our primary outreach needs to be towards the kinds of workers who’ve been alienated from bourgeois politics, and are looking for a way to advance their material interests. The New Left’s strategy is not the path towards winning these masses; this path runs through building a united front against monopoly capital. A united front which includes the proto-revolutionary elements that exist outside of leftism, rather than confining itself to the non-proletarian groups which the New Left seeks to center.

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If you appreciate my work, I hope you become a one-time or regular donor to my Patreon account. Like most of us, I’m feeling the economic pressures amid late-stage capitalism, and I need money to keep fighting for a new system that works for all of us. Go to my Patreon here. 

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The anti-imperialist bloc has won, and the USA’s people are increasingly unified against the war machine

The progression towards our final victory over monopoly finance capital is speeding up. Washington’s challengers have thwarted the hegemon’s recent attempts to destroy them, which in essence means they’ve won. If the hegemon can’t prevent the rise of the Eurasian economic center, then it’s not going to be able to maintain monopoly capital’s domination over the Global South. The Belt and Road Initiative is going to continue to lift the formerly colonized countries out of poverty, which means they’ll increasingly gain a choice over whether they want to be exploited. This makes for both the long-term liberation of the neo-colonies, and the weakening of capital in the empire’s core. 

These changes were already quite far along years ago. But what’s changed since 2020 is that the people within the core have come to a much better place for going along with these global shifts. For understanding that it’s their own government which is the enemy, rather than any of the countries their government tells them they should hate. With this knowledge, they can overthrow the U.S. ruling class, and then join with the emerging new world. Many have been coming to a proto anti-imperialist consciousness, growing dissatisfied with how our leaders spend endless funds on wars while letting our living standards keep dropping. The next step is for them to discover how much growth our economy will be able to undergo if we break free from our present governmental system; if we stop isolating ourselves from economic partnerships with the “enemy” countries, and build a cooperative global future. 

There are ideological elements that seek to prevent the people from taking this step in their development, ones that the government is backing. We need to identify what these elements are, and which ideas they use to blunt anti-imperialist consciousness, so that we can take this revolutionary process to its next stage.

To understand what the goal of these anti-growth, anti-multipolar forces is, we need to look back on the recent past which they want so badly to restore. Just four years ago, the country was as divided as ever, even though we had been in a perpetual economic crisis since 2008. The heightened class contradictions weren’t yet able to bring the people towards a unified sense of outrage, because the ruling class was exploiting their discontent and pitting them against each other. There was a massive culture war over masks and vaccines. The Democratic Party could easily co-opt that year’s massive protest movement, and thereby make it into something which fizzled out. When the election happened, the ensuing culture war escalations became the predominant narrative focus, with the media able to push out ideas that could have led to substantial progress for the class struggle. Class, and the imperialist system it’s tied in with, were in the background of the discourse, as the narrative managers had essentially full control.

They lost this dominance when the new cold war escalated, and the imperial project’s connection to our worsening conditions became apparent to the average person. Once Russia responded to the empire’s provocations by starting the special military operation, the discourse couldn’t continue to function as it used to. The Ukraine psyop was effective at first, but within a year-and-a-half most of the USA’s people became exhausted with the war effort, and no longer wanted aid sent to Ukraine. They had more reason to care about reversing the wild price increases that they’d been subjected to. Then the victory for the Palestinian resistance on October 7 brought the demise of the Zionist state closer, making the empire scramble towardsy an additional proxy war. These two big developments would have ramifications for the narrative managers that we’re only beginning to see.

At this moment, the biggest project of the psyop machine is to divide the opponents of the Ukraine war from the opponents of the Gaza genocide. The goal is to prevent the emergence of a clear polarization when it comes to the question of empire; to split the opposition to the war machine, keeping our discourse defined by left vs right rather than pro-war vs antiwar. The ruling class knows that only a small minority of the population consciously and committedly supports the idea of maintaining U.S. hegemony. Only the people who exist within the imperial institutions, or who’ve adopted extremely online Reddit ideologies centered around glorifying NATO, seriously believe in this goal. Because the vast majority of people can’t relate to the ruling class when it comes to securing market control for multinational corporations, the ruling class needs to rely on the culture wars. 

This has been the case since the post-war economy began to decline, and the capitalists decided to implement neoliberalism; with the disappearance of the “middle class” and the shrinking of the labor aristocracy, more and more Americans have been growing susceptible to revolutionary consciousness. It’s no coincidence that as soon as the USA’s people started to become less materially tied to imperialist interests, the culture warriors became the driving force within political discourse, and made the two parties polarized in the way they are now.

For this half-century-long paradigm to become threatened so suddenly, with 2020 having been defined by the culture wars while 2024 is quite different, means that the objective nature of our conditions is catching up to the people’s subjective understanding of these conditions. No longer can reality be distracted from so easily. No longer can the manufactured fights eclipse the fight between the people and their capitalist dictatorship. 

Of course, the culture warriors continue to do all they can to poison the discourse. Anti-woke commentators, like Ben Shapiro, are using the woke vs anti-woke conflict to rally people against the pro-Palestine cause. Yet there’s evidence that culture war outrage alone can’t sway the bulk of the masses; survey data has shown that among all voters, including Trump voters, candidates who talk about the economic situation are seen as preferable to ones who simply focus on social issues.

To become popular outside the right-wing culture war bubble, you need to speak to the economic struggles which people are experiencing. That’s why right-wing populists like Marjorie Taylor Greene have been bringing up the living standard crisis while arguing against aid to Ukraine. Obviously these populists—whose “populism” is a way to divert popular discontent towards support for things like Zionism—are not the solution. The way to beat them, though, is not by blankedly cutting off their supporters. That just reinforces the culture war paradigm. The way communists can win is by acting like we’re the only ones on the ballot, metaphorically speaking, and thereby attract the kinds of people who’ve attained a proto anti-imperialist consciousness.

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The unfortunate reality is that not all of our fellow Marxists want to build on the progress we’ve seen over these last four years. Many of them want to reverse this progress by destroying all efforts at building an anti-imperialist united front; by sabotaging the project to bring together antiwar-minded Americans from across the ideological spectrum. This is because these types of Marxists fundamentally agree with the liberals that only socially progressive people should be engaged with, and that all social conservatives are simply fascists.

A major recent example of such “red lib” sentiments is an article the PSL published this January, titled The resurgence of America First isolationism: the far-right’s opposition to NATO and the Ukraine war. The article concludes by saying:

America First isolationism is nothing new, nor is it just anti-interventionist doctrine. This new realignment within the Republican Party is only reflective of the shifting face of U.S. imperialism, as the ruling class tries to contend with the heightening of the capitalism’s contradictions domestically. Then as now, such isolationism is tied to a platform of austerity, historically coupled with the elimination of the welfare state and public services, along with racist anti-immigration policies. Its policies rob workers at home of a social safety net, while shifting the blame to workers across the border and abroad. The far right’s antiwar posturing on Ukraine is a smokescreen, and we shouldn’t be fooled by their rhetoric: America First isolationism is a war on the working class.

By itself, nothing the article says is factually untrue, yet that’s what makes the agenda it’s pushing so insidious. It’s correct that “America First” isolationism has a racist history, and that the politicians advancing America First today have an ulterior motive of advancing their own reactionary goals. The problem is in what the article doesn’t say. Because it simply states opposition towards America First without advocating for reaching antiwar conservatives, or recognizing how America First’s presence has potential to weaken NATO, the effect it has is to assist in the proxy war against Russia. That’s what American Partisan, a fellow traveler of mine within this struggle, explained in his rebuttal to the article:

Why do I say this is a pro-Ukraine war article? Because: 1) You reject the exploitation of these war-critical voices and the platforms they provide for actual anti-imperialists to infiltrate these spaces and convince the people to go beyond people like Trump or MTG, creating the public pressure for our retreat from Ukraine. 2) You reject the critical support and utilization of these voices *that have fractions of actual state power* which seek to end our role in the actually existing war against Russia, which can be used to create explicit political divisions in the US state, thus weakening it and paving the way for our retreat from Ukraine. 3) You reject this "America First Nationalism" which is the real social response of the neglect of American citizens to our country falling apart which can create the groundwork for anti-war consciousness towards Ukraine and whatever future conflict comes next. 4) The only "solution" you offer is a hot bag of air saying "we need to build international solidarity" -- whatever that means.

None of these criticisms actually provide a solution to answering the Ukraine question. Instead it resigns us to maintain our current position to Ukraine - one which continues to send millions of dollars of weapons unabated, and keeps the Americans unable from developing higher consciousness. Do you know what real, international solidarity can look like which will directly help the Russians, non-Nazi Ukrainians, and the Chinese? For the USA to pull itself back from meddling in these foreign affairs and actually put Americans as its primary concern. To stop sending millions of our money to countries people can't even locate on a map and revive our cities and labor. InterNATIONALISM means respecting, maintaining, and advancing the sovereignty of our own nations (in a working class context) and associating ourselves in ways which are mutually beneficial, not putting the well-being of other nations ahead of our own at our expense. *That* would be cosmopolitanism. 

If we’re being generous, we can say the red libs are so unconfident in their own ability to advance the working class cause that they believe there’s no way somebody can be an effective communist while taking advantage of the antiwar shift among conservatives. It’s as if they’re scared of doing mass work, and of exploiting the divisions in the ruling class which America First is creating, because they expect to fail at winning the masses and outmaneuvering the reactionary forces. Less generously, we can say that their problem isn’t a lack of confidence but a lack of integrity. These actors have taken on a role as obstacles towards the anti-imperialist struggle’s success, impeding the cause at a crucial juncture.

There are individuals within the red libs spaces who’ve simply been misled, and who have potential to come to a serious place, but the ones behind this argument PSL has made are not acting in good faith. There’s a material incentive for the organization to be tacitly putting out pro-Ukraine war materials: it’s connected to the NGO industrial complex, which will only back the types of “communists” who strip communism of its effectiveness. The liberal NGOs, and the State Department officials they’re tied to, want to prevent the emergence of a communism which takes the steps necessary for winning. Their goal is to not let the antiwar majority get connected to any source of revolutionary leadership; to cultivate a layer of socialists who aren’t interested in reaching anybody outside the students, and the other parts of the left-leaning intelligentsia.

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Just because the pro-Palestine student protesters take on the woke strategy which communists of my tendency reject, doesn’t mean I don’t support them. They deserve our support for the same reason the MAGA people with antiwar consciousness do: they’re objectively having a positive effect on the struggle. That’s why Palestinians in Gaza, as well as other Axis of Resistance participants like the Yemenis, have been voicing gratitude for what the USA’s students are doing. Both the propagators of the anti-woke psyop, and the liberal actors who seek to fuse communism with wokeism, want to dissuade Marxists from having this consistent sense of solidarity. They just want to divide us from different elements among these advanced sections of the masses.

There’s no single action that can break the power of these discourse manipulations, and bring us straight to the stage where we can win. It’s totally possible for us to reach that stage, though, and we can do so by adopting a mindset that’s conducive to building up the anti-imperialist united front. Over the course of my experiences with this struggle, I’ve seen which kinds of attitudes are helpful and harmful towards the cause, and I’ve concluded that the attitude we need is one of prioritizing cohesion. We need to refrain from cutting people off unless they give us a truly good reason to do so, with “taking the opposite side in the culture war” not being one of those reasons.

This is just the first step when it comes to unlearning the thinking patterns of bourgeois politics. What we truly need to do is escape the culture war framework itself, so that we don’t even subconsciously feed into the polarization which our ruling class wants to maintain. This doesn’t mean we need to refrain from openly supporting equal rights; my political partners at the Party of Communists USA include equality for LGBT people in their program. The important thing is that we avoid promoting liberal identity politics, which somebody is absolutely capable of doing even if they call themselves a Marxist. 

That’s what the PSL does when it argues against serious anti-imperialist practice while using social justice as a rationale. Red libs can always justify their efforts to interfere with counter-hegemonic efforts by saying that they’re simply doing what’s necessary to advance social inequality. (They use the idea of indigenous sovereignty for this same rhetorical purpose.) Yet the domestic justice struggles which they claim to care about aren’t even capable of succeeding so long as the anti-imperialist struggle is neglected. Without an anti-imperialist struggle, everything else gets undermined.

Moreover, U.S. hegemony is the primary global contradiction, which is something that these American Marxists aren’t accounting for when they act like this. Not only do we in the core lose if we turn away from this struggle; numerous peoples around the globe also lose, or at least become much less easily able to win. Our participation in this struggle is a vital part of how the world becomes free from U.S. occupations, proxy wars, sanctions, and other imperialist evils. 

The anti-imperialist bloc has been able to make massive amounts of progress towards liberating the globe from these evils, and the USA’s people haven’t been essential towards this. China has been beating Washington economically, Russia has been beating it militarily, and the countries they’re aligned with have been building up their economies due to these larger-scale victories. To take this struggle to the next step, where the U.S. empire itself becomes extinct, we in the core will need to fulfill our own role within this effort.

To advance the united front strategy that this task of ours depends on, we need to understand the capacity which we have for impacting history. That’s what red libs fail to do, even when they ostensibly support the anti-imperialist countries; they recognize the progress that the multipolar world is making, yet they’re not willing to do what’s needed for expanding that progress to the North American continent. The outcome is that capital’s rule gets prolonged within the imperial center, keeping the task of ending U.S. hegemony only partially fulfilled. 

Ben Norton is perhaps the biggest example of these actors who are helping keep Marxism ineffectual, and tied to liberalism. He talks about multipolarity, yet he takes the PSL’s position that we shouldn’t reach beyond the left and shouldn’t take advantage of ruling class infighting. You can discuss the good things that are happening outside the imperial sphere all you like, but still have a negative impact if you’re working to block the people’s victory within this sphere.

The anti-imperialist bloc has already won, because it’s proven the hegemon’s victory within this geopolitical conflict to be impossible. This alone doesn’t make for the final victory over capital, though, however much it makes capital weaker. To get that victory, we’ll need to go beyond simply celebrating the rise of the multipolar world, as actors like Norton do. Unless we take advantage of the opportunities for revolutionary progress which our conditions present to us, all we’ll be doing is acting in the shadow of successful revolutions like China’s, using the aesthetics of anti-imperialism as a substitute for meaningful action. 

Anti-imperialism without a deep understanding of our own class struggle is simply a kind of idealism, where these types of red lib socialists look up to what others have achieved while not seeing how they can achieve something themselves. As we see in the PSL’s criticism-without-solution on MAGA antiwar sentiments, all that can come from this is for socialists to give up the anti-imperialist struggle, and surrender to the war machine. We must refuse to surrender, and choose the path of authentic international solidarity.

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