The deep state wants an anti-communist purge, but ruling class infighting is endangering this effort

Above: from the thumbnail of Tucker Carlson’s video where he interviews Omali Yeshitela, chairman of the African People’s Socialist Party

To find where the biggest weaknesses within the imperial state exist at the moment, look to the conflicts that are happening between the different wings of the ruling class. This rivalry between small and big capital, traditionally called the “yankee and cowboy war,” has been present for centuries but is now escalating in important ways. On one side of this battle, there are the ultra-monopolists, whose interest is in advancing the U.S. empire’s geo-strategic goals. On the other, there are the owners of the smaller enterprises, whose interests are in economic growth. As the imperial order has declined, and the imperialist warfare waged by the monopolists has come to have more severe effects on the U.S. economy, small capital has gotten a greater reason for wanting to oust the dominant wing of the ruling class.

This is why the Libertarians, along with the MAGA people who overlap with them in many areas, seek to defeat the “deep state”: this unelected intelligence grouping is the means through which the monopolists advance their anti-growth, anti-liberty designs. The lower levels of capital share an interest with the popular masses, in that they don’t want these designs to succeed; they don’t want economic production to further be shrunk, which forms the core basis for all the other ways their interests are clashing with those of high-level capital. 

This dispute over growth vs degrowth is why the U.S. has experienced its recent political reorientation, where more of the left has become pro-war while more conservatives have become antiwar. It’s also why the largely petty-bourgeois MAGA elements which follow Tucker Carlson, as well as the predominant wing of the Libertarian Party, have opposed the Uhuru charges. They see that if the APSP can be prosecuted for “Russian interference,” then the deep state wins, and all of its goals get advanced. The anti-communist purge that Uhuru’s persecution could bring is going to mean a loss for everyone who’s opposed to the deep state. And these pro-Uhuru elements of the bourgeoisie know where their own best interests are.

It’s this fundamental difference in priorities between the lower and higher rungs of capital that we need to take advantage of. And especially if Trump wins this election, the best way we can do this is by exposing and furthering the contradictions within MAGA. Obviously this area of agitation isn’t the only one we need to focus on; we also need to agitate among the elements of the masses that have gained a proto anti-imperialist consciousness, whether these elements are on the right or on the left. And as I’ve said, I believe that more than anything else we must agitate among the politically disaffected elements of the masses, who make up an even larger demographic than the MAGA base. That’s the biggest way in which we can help win the people. 

For the purposes of what I’m talking about, which is weakening the state itself, exploiting these conflicts within the ruling class is vital. Plus, all of these things are interconnected; an effort to ally with anti-imperialist elements of the bourgeoisie, as Mao did, is how we gain the strategic advantages needed to win victory for the people. It’s also how we gain access to many of the people, because many of the most ideologically advanced Americans get their information from small capital-aligned voices. This fight within the ruling class is impacting popular consciousness; simply because of how big Tucker Carlson’s platform is, millions of more people have now heard about the Uhuru case. 

If we build up the strength of our own organizations, and thereby enter into coalitions on equal footing with the other players, we’ll be able to build an alliance which brings the proletariat to victory. And if Biden’s handlers can’t manage to keep the Democratic Party in office following this next election, we’ll soon have a massive opportunity to help drive forward ruling class infighting. 

Should Trump win in 2024, he’s going to fail at defeating the deep state like last time, except under conditions where MAGA can’t survive such a failure. His supporters solidly want him to end the Ukraine war, and more of them are becoming aware that the genocide against Palestine must end as well. When he refuses to fulfill the antiwar mandate, or to otherwise act against monopoly finance capital, he’ll destroy MAGA’s momentum. The popular anger towards the monopolies and the deep state won’t have gone away, though, it will be stronger than ever. Which means new leaders, and new political currents, will be able to fill the role within anti-establishment politics that MAGA has had for the last decade.

An important development will be when we start seeing conservative and libertarian leaders who were initially supportive of MAGA, or at least compatible with it, come into conflict with Trump over his deep state-aligned policies. Such splits within Trump’s coalition happened during his first term, but of course they weren’t significant enough to seriously damage MAGA. These next splits will be on that level. 

There are so many issues that could catalyze these disruptions: Uhuru, the proxy wars, mass surveillance, censorship, and so on. Trump has already set himself up for a backlash from his anti-establishment allies over Assange if he fails to free the political prisoner, since he’s claimed he’ll strongly consider doing so. And even if he does the right thing in this area, these allies won’t be satisfied just with that. Either Trump brings fundamental change, or the Republican Party undergoes a crisis of the kind that the Democratic Party is now experiencing.

The dominant wing of the ruling class is working to crush all the forces which challenge it, including the ones within government and the bourgeois class themselves. Should Trump aid in these malign efforts, which he’s likely to do for the most part, it will fully expose the figures within “dissident right” as controlled opposition. This includes actors like the Nazi Nick Fuentes, who’s now trying to distance himself from Trump after years of acting as Trump’s sycophant; communists can win the war of ideas against Fuentes, and against the other Hitlerites who are hoping to fill the vacuum which MAGA will leave.

Amid the collapse of MAGA, our society’s proto-revolutionary energy will need a place to go, and communists must provide an outlet for these revolutionary impulses. If Trump wins, pay close attention to the people in his vicinity, whether they’re public figures, elected officeholders, or even part of his cabinet. There are actors within this sphere who don’t want to see their own leadership assist the deep state at such a crucial juncture, and who could become a source of tension within MAGA. Many of them aren’t like Fuentes, who’s simply an opportunist that promotes hate; a lot of them have actual integrity. For instance, the Libertarian Party’s chair Angela McArdle has ardently defended communists against attacks from the neocons.

There’s also the possibility that the deep state will act to help Biden, like it did last time, and succeed at getting him re-elected. In that scenario, the deep state’s defeat will need to involve coalition-building efforts that are in certain ways more difficult than they would be otherwise. The crucial thing is that we communists hold on to the allies within this fight which we’ve already been able to gain, and reject the culture war psyops designed to divide monopoly capital’s opposition. The most important fight at this stage is the one between the pro-growth and anti-growth forces; if we recognize this, the anti-growth forces are going to be further imperiled.

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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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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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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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