The CPI’s manifesto for rebuilding what communists in the USA have lost

Upon finishing the Center for Political Innovation’s Out of the Movement, to The Masses: Anti-Imperialist Organizing in America, I’ve come away with the sense that it was written out of both sadness over what U.S. communists have lost, and genuine hope that we can regain it. It’s necessary, to an extent, to mourn the great mass movement which got taken away from us during the 20th century. But this mourning needs to be done for the purpose of invigorating our efforts towards building something new. Towards reconnecting Marxism with this country’s people, and thereby connecting this country’s people with the global masses who are struggling against imperialism.

Much of what Caleb Maupin and the book’s other authors have done is compile writings by American communists from this last century, and by non-American communists (like Rosa Luxemburg) who have special things to contribute to our struggle in this country. They’ve republished writings by Marxist-Leninists like William Z. Foster and Gus Hall, as well as by figures who’ve deviated from Marxism-Leninism like Bob Avakian and Sam Marcy. For the book’s purposes of learning from history, the important thing is that all of these people have things to teach us. So their evaluations of the class struggle during the times when they wrote these things have been put into this record, able to go towards building the important argument which this book makes.

The idea this work conveys can be summarized as: what the USA’s communists built has been destroyed by both the state, and the actors within the communist movement who’ve made mistakes which aid the state. And the only way we can make the legacy of the past U.S. communists matter, and use their ideas to build another successful version of U.S. communism, is if we avoid repeating those errors.

A key part of this lesson is understanding the dual nature of Sam Marcy, one of the pivotal figures within 20th century U.S. communism. As the book makes clear, Marcy may have been a Trotskyist, but he was not one of the deranged kinds of Trots who single-mindedly attacked the Soviet Union. He actually had a geopolitical analysis with depth, and saw that being an anti-imperialist means not treating the imperialist and anti-imperialist blocs in the same way. For this reason, Marcy’s Workers World Party (and its offshoot the PSL) have avoided the destructive theoretical error the Maoists made, where they came to view the USSR as “social imperialist.” Such willingness on the part of the Marcyists to reject that particular type of dogmatic opportunism has made the Marcyist parties able to attract many anti-imperialist minded people over the decades. But within the ideology that Marcy formulated, there was a crucial flaw, one that would produce the different type of opportunism which PSL is now advancing.

One of the things that came from Marcy’s synthesis between Trotskyism and Marxism-Leninism was a strategy of aligning with liberal Democrats and the left. This was rationalized by how during much of the Cold War, especially the McCarthy era amd the Reagan era, the liberals were on the defensive against a dominant hard right-wing. The mindset such a practice created among Marcyism’s adherents was so strong that it blinded them. It made them unwilling to change their strategy when the country underwent a political reorientation, and the conservative base reacted to the 2008 crisis by turning against the war machine. Today’s Marcyists put forth a deteriorated version of Marcy’s teachings, where they tail the Democrats on the culture wars to show that no one outside the left is welcome in their circles.

The book makes it apparent that the solution isn’t to simply restore the original Marcyism, because Marcyism’s strategy was always flawed. As the book recounts, during the 80s the Marcyists would argue against capitalism by uniformly calling the capitalist state’s policies “racist.” Which they weren’t wrong about, but the effect this had was to reduce capitalism to race. It was a way of signaling that liberals could find a friend in the WWP, which evidently didn’t bring WWP to success. It couldn’t rebuild U.S. communism following its crippling by McCarthyism, and its next big defeat with the destruction of the Black Panther Party. 

The explanation for this Maupin comes to is that WWP’s leaders view the masses as fundamentally reactionary: “The reason WWP has often hidden its Communist beliefs and talked about ‘jobs’ and other things assumed to be ‘more working class’ is because deep down, many of the high-ranking members believe that the working class are a crowd of dumb bubbas who couldn’t possibly understand Communism. The low ideological level of WWP’s literature is based on an inherent feeling of superiority. However, when one gets to know a large number of the WWP cadre, one realizes that despite their feelings of superiority, the rank and file of the party often cannot explain basic Marxist concepts.”

Due to WWP’s opportunistic activities, it’s since declined into irrelevancy. But its mode of practice has been replicated by the PSL, and therefore represents the primary form of petty-bourgeois radicalism today. Marcy did not share such a smug view of the people, but the leaders who’ve operated according to his practice certainly do. And the positive aspects of Marcy’s ideology are being used by these figures to keep Marxism-Leninism under the domination of their opportunistic project. PSL’s Brian Becker, one of the individuals who picked up organizational skills from Marcy, is putting forth a brand that’s ostensibly aligned with existing socialism but really acts to launder liberal ideas. Ideas like critically supporting social democrats, like Becker did with Sanders in 2020, and like taking a “neither NATO nor Russia” stance on Ukraine.

Though the book doesn’t go into as much detail about the PSL’s opportunism as Maupin unusually does, it refutes Becker’s core ideas by showing how they’re the same things that have driven WWP to ruin. Even if PSL doesn’t become irrelevant, it’s not going to win the people, which is what’s truly important. The book’s conclusion is that we need to break from the movementist model which has come to define U.S. communism, and recapture the old movement’s success at connecting with the masses. In the last section, CPI’s president Elizabeth Young says: “We take up the directive to get past the western leftist held spaces and methods, the US radical nostalgia and the elitist phrases disguised as Marxism and instead actually approach working class people with an anti-war message and economic populist program of demands.”

When CPI talks about anti-war messages, it means something different than what the PSL does; and when CPI talks about economic populism, it means something different than what “populist” bourgeois politicians do. This is a kind of anti-establishment politics that’s informed by the history of what’s truly been effective at combating the USA’s ruling institutions. The things Young advocates for can easily be twisted by opportunists into avenues for controlled opposition, which is what CPI’s project has avoided. It doesn’t vulgarize these things; it gives them depth, and speaks to the people about them in an honest and inclusive way. Becker’s version of antiwar activism and socialism is one where anybody outside the left gets excluded from the struggle. And the versions of “economic populism” promoted by figures like Sanders or Trump is one where U.S. imperialism gets maintained, strengthening the ruling class. The CPI is working to both bring in every element of society that has revolutionary potential, and lead these elements to victory by consistently acting against our ruling institutions. 

What the late Marcyists have to offer is an inadequate substitute for the American communism of old; we need to authentically reconstruct such a communism, which is possible through studying historical resources like this book.

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The deep state’s World War III drive is apocalyptic, and is bringing the U.S. government closer to a split

Above: a beach in Sevastopol this last week when the U.S. facilitated a Ukrainian drone attack on the civilians there

What does it mean that the United States government is dominated by an element of the ruling class which can’t be talked down from its cold war escalation plans? That there’s an unelected series of intelligence officials who are loyal to monopoly capital’s geo-strategic goals, and who can go after anybody that challenges this agenda? Amid the unprecedented nuclear war dangers these actors have brought about, and the economic and civil liberties threats which relate to these conflicts, it means there’s a growing tension within our political system. Tension that’s going to bring the U.S. power structure to an internal confrontation of some kind.

During Biden’s term, there have been some signs of such disputes. In fall of 2022, General Mark Milley said that Washington needed to get towards negotiations with Russia over Ukraine, which visibly upset the White House. And though Milley retired last year, his break from the official position on Ukraine showed that these kinds of developments can simply happen on their own; military officials are often better able to recognize what the pragmatic course of action is, compared to the politicians and their fanatical pro-war monopolist backers. So it’s always possible that another military official could start bringing about these kinds of disputes in the future. The most immediate potential for the World War III drive to create a split, though, comes not from a dispute between different branches of the state but from within the government itself. And if the situation escalates enough, this could embolden whoever within the military may privately be hoping to end these nuclear perils.

This week, Donald Trump’s advisers presented him with a plan that’s essentially what Milley proposed: negotiate with Russia to partition Ukraine. Unsurprisingly it includes language designed to make Trump look tougher on Russia, with it saying Trump should increase aid to Ukraine if Russia doesn’t negotiate. But since Russia has shown it’s willing to do so, if this plan gets implemented then the war will be ended. (Or at least the parts of the war that don’t involve Ukraine’s burgeoning terrorism program.) Which is enough to give the deep state and its allies a reason for going after these pro-negotiation elements within Trump’s circle.

If Trump wins, we should expect a repeat of the Russiagate psyop. A propaganda effort that involves both retreads of the original psyop’s assertions, and a series of new narratives that are designed to discredit these people around Trump. The deep state and its monopolist masters no longer view Trump himself as a serious risk; they were once worried that he would go against their new cold war agenda, but then he acquiesced, and acted even more aggressively against Russia than Obama had. The parts of Russiagate 2.0 that get directed against Trump are going to be largely theatrical, like how Republicans have targeted Biden with a “Chinagate” narrative even though he’s quite reliable on attacking China. The main figures within the potential second Trump administration who the deep state will truly see as a threat are the ones which seek to push Trump in a pro-negotiations direction, or at least use their platforms and authority to weaken the deep state in other ways.

A major thing the narrative managers hope to do should Trump win is divide the anti-imperialist movement from these figures within the government who could advance this movement’s goals. They don’t want us to take advantage of the growing divisions within the ruling class, and the way they aim to stop us is by sabotaging coalitions or potential coalitions. The goal is to keep the discourse too trapped within the culture wars for us to mount an effective opposition towards the war machine; to divide the different elements which are against the wars, and use cultural battles to distract us from the struggle against monopoly capital.

At this stage, the deep state has fully committed to a version of this plan wherein the anti-woke psyop has become the main tool for creating such division and confusion. This is both because the country’s people have become thoroughly tired of what comes from the “woke” side of the culture wars, and because the anti-woke psyop is what the deep state will likely need to lean on following this election. Biden’s inability to articulate during yesterday’s debate has made Trump’s victory even more likely, as the voters can see clearer than ever that the “woke” side’s candidate isn’t neurologically functional. This development has made it quite risky for the deep state to try to meddle in the election, like it did last time; that Biden has become so thoroughly discredited means Trump’s election theft accusations would be convincing to even more people than they were in 2020. So by far the safest option is to let Trump win, then keep up the “Russiagate” pressure campaign on him while nurturing his anti-woke ideology.

The hope is that through amplifying anti-wokeness, the ruling class will be able to create the narrative precedents for a purge of anti-imperialists. We’re seeing this in how the main propaganda against the pro-Palestine demonstrations is that they simply represent “wokeness,” and therefore aren’t anti-establishment in any way. This is how the narrative managers aim to turn the conservatives who’ve gained antiwar consciousness on Ukraine against the anti-Zionist cause: by convincing these conservatives that Palestine and Ukraine aren’t connected, and that the people mobilizing for Palestine have bought into a liberal psyop. There’s a desire among the anti-woke psyop’s targets to defy the mainstream media, and to free themselves from the war machine’s ideological control. The psyop seeks to limit their knowledge, to only let them see one part of the picture.

This is why it’s crucial for communists to bring these people with a proto anti-imperialist consciousness towards a full consciousness, and to do this for as many of them as possible. In Hegelian dialectics, the word for this is “sublate.” To sublate is to change an initial idea by negating that idea’s incorrect aspects, while incorporating its correct aspects into a larger and more whole truth. That’s what we can do with many of the people within MAGA, within the libertarian movement, and within things like the pro-Palestine protests. We nurture the people’s anti-imperialist impulses, and we put ourselves in a better strategic place to take advantage of these emerging tensions within the state. 

The crises our imperial system is creating are big enough to cause proto-revolutionary ideas to emerge, both among the masses and among potential rogue ruling class factions. Which is why the reactionary forces are working so hard to inject more apathy, chaos, and ignorance into the consciousness. If they can prevent a unified opposition from emerging, if they can stop a clear polarization between the supporters and opponents of these wars, then they can neutralize the threats towards the system. We need to thwart these schemes, and make such progress materialize.

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The ruling class has pitted a radical liberal “anti-colonialism” against anti-imperialism & genuine mass struggles

What happens when radical politics lack a mass base? When the ruling class has succeeded at destroying the structural foundations for the class struggle, but the layer of young people who are alienated from capitalism hasn’t disappeared? What happens is that these disillusioned youths get directed away from the class struggle, and towards something that can act as a replacement for genuine mass efforts. In the case of the modern United States, this alternative radical current has mainly taken the form of anti-colonialism. Or rather a version of “anti-colonialism” that’s radical liberal in nature, as it’s detached from the people and can’t come to connect with them.

Keeping U.S. communism liberal & unserious

The other major thing the bourgeoisie have sought to substitute the class struggle with is LGBT politics, which like modern “anti-colonial” politics have been heavily twisted by liberal ideas. To understand how to avoid falling for the culture war traps our class enemies have set for us (especially if you’re pro-LGBT like myself), look at how LGBT issues are treated by actual mass-based communist parties vs how they’re treated within conventional U.S. radicalism. 

In socialist Cuba, sexual minorities have gained marriage equality. A comparable example is China incorporating its first trans healthcare clinic. These are somewhat exceptional cases among the socialist states, with most of them being overall socially conservative; they’ve all had to take care not to make themselves compromised by the liberal NGOs, which use LGBT issues as a trojan horse for undermining socialism. When the socialist countries do something pro-LGBT, they need to make sure they’re doing it because they genuinely see this as the best way to advance socialism, rather than because NGOs have intimidated them into changing their practices. 

If these powerful parties need to act with such reservation when it comes to social and cultural matters, consider how a communist movement with almost no power should handle them. In the United States, the communist movement has neither state control nor has mass backing, at least at this stage. So when communists here focus on social or cultural issues, we need to be careful not to end up promoting liberal idpol; and there are plenty of U.S. communists who are glad to sacrifice the class struggle in favor of liberal tailism, because opportunism dominates today’s leftist spaces.

By acting like it’s best for a Marxist to center cultural issues, these actors make it so that there’s no real difference between them and the Democrats; just saying you’re for the class struggle isn’t enough to make yourself an effective actor within this struggle. You must build the connections with the working masses that we’ll need in order to win proletarian victory. Which you can’t do if you’re in practice simply helping the Democrats fight the left-wing side of the culture war.

Faced with this reality of how an imperialist party has overwhelmingly co-opted the struggles for social equality, the way that many developing U.S. radicals react is by adopting maximally strong rhetoric on anti-colonialism, and by turning to the most transgressive anti-colonial theories. (Or at least that’s what these theories are sold to them as being.) They declare that they’re no longer Americans, or dramatically destroy flags, or make other such statements showing how aggressively they reject U.S. patriotism. They embrace the theories of figures like Gerald Horne, who’s argued (through a quite poorly researched historical account) that the American revolution of 1776 was a “counter-revolution.” When they find out that history’s biggest Marxist figures viewed 1776 as having represented progress, they’re still able to rationalize upholding Horne’s view, sometimes by saying that these figures didn’t live in the United States. And the historical U.S. Marxists who share this analysis are simply seen by these radicals as chauvinists.

Despite the many ways in which embracing this version of “anti-colonialism” sets somebody up against Marxism’s framework of analysis, these radicals can conclude that they’re simply updating Marxism. Because they aren’t actually building power, though, this new strain of thought isn’t proving itself to be something that can drive history forward. They aren’t doing what figures like Gaddafi or Chavez have done, which is build a socialism that’s distinct from the Soviet model but nevertheless real. They’re simply building movement influence, primarily within social media platforms that have been designed to produce cliques. When a group that centers anti-colonialism deviates from this insular model and builds true community power, like Uhuru has done, most of these “anti-colonial” leftists don’t act in solidarity with it. They have more important things to focus on, like attacking “patsocs.”

This is the role of the types of radlibs who hate the liberal tailist orgs, like PSL and CPUSA, on the basis that these orgs aren’t good enough on “anti-colonialism.” They’re able to recognize that these orgs are reformist and tied to the Democratic Party, but from this they’ve concluded that the solution is to simply act more ultra-leftist than these orgs do. They don’t have a problem with how these parties tail the Democrats on the culture war, because the culture war is entirely compatible with their pan-leftist orientation. They just wish these orgs would make “anti-colonialism,” rather than social and cultural issues, into their main means for diverting energy away from the class struggle. 

Both the organized left, and this more online element of radical liberals who complain about the organized left, are having the same effect: to steer people with proto-revolutionary consciousness in an imperialism-compatible direction. The online radlibs have the most numbers compared to the organized left, since online politics are so big and many people who join the liberal tailist orgs end up leaving them. It’s partly because of this that the main “socialist” orgs are incentivized to keep tailing liberals, because their organizing model depends on managing to regularly recruit at least some of these radlibs.

This helps keep the USA’s communist movement compromised when it comes to anti-imperialism. Because the view of the world which these radlibs promote is one where it’s acceptable to be apathetic about geopolitics, as supposedly the best way to fight imperialism is by combating U.S. patriotism. This is a framing that’s compatible with the liberal narratives about how Russia and China are the real imperialist powers, or about how “both sides” are imperialist. And even among the types of radlibs who recognize how this isn’t an inter-imperialist conflict, there’s a lack of commitment to building the coalitions necessary for effectively practicing solidarity with the anti-imperialist countries. It renders useless whatever correct information they’ve been able to absorb.

Uhuru is the only anti-colonial focused org that’s been willing to ally with antiwar groups outside the left, and that’s therefore capable of building a presence beyond the narrow space which the “woke” elements dominate. For this reason, its anti-colonialism is authentic, as it’s actually capable of winning power. So is not the case for what most other “anti-colonial Marxists” have to offer.

The ahistorical ideas behind this unseriousness

The “anti-colonialism” espoused by the majority of today’s left is one whose true roots are not in what figures like Fanon have written, as much as its adherents claim this to be true. Its real ideological basis is in J. Sakai, and in the modern promoters of Sakai’s ideas. Sakai argued that there’s no way the bulk of white workers will come to a revolutionary consciousness, even while U.S. imperialism’s decline continues to bring down living standards and shrink the labor aristocracy. He asserted in Settlers that…

As U.S. imperialism stumbles faster and faster into its permanent decline, once again we hear the theory expressed that some poverty and the resulting mass economic struggles will create revolutionary consciousness in Euro-Amerikan workers. The fact is that such social pressures are not new to White Amerika. For three decades — from 1890 to 1920 — the new white industrial proletariat increasingly organized itself into larger and larger struggles with the capitalists. The immigrant European proletarians wanted industrial unionism and the most advanced among them wanted socialism. A mass movement was built for both. These were the most heavily exploited, most proletarian, and most militant European workers Amerika has ever produced. Yet, in the end, they were unable to go beyond desiring the mere reform of imperialism.

To effectively refute this argument, I’ll need to illustrate some key parts of the U.S. communist movement’s history, ones which Sakai leaves out. When Sakai talks of how reformism prevailed within American communism following the country’s most economically arduous times, a key part of what he’s referring to is the Communist Party USA’s uncritical backing of Roosevelt. This was a mistake that came not from some innate love for reformism among the white workers, but from an organizational structure which gave disproportionate influence to the leader of the reformist push Earl Browder. 

In 1945, after starting on a project to restore the party’s revolutionary character, William Z. Foster wrote that “a vital reason why Comrade Browder was able to foist his opportunism upon our Party was because of the super-centralism prevailing in our organization. With his great personal prestige and his excessive degree of authority, Browder’s word had become practically the law in our Party. Consequently, he was able to suppress any analytical discussion whatever of his false thesis…It is my opinion that if Browder’s proposals could have been really discussed, they would have been finally rejected by our Party, but such a discussion was out of the question.” 

This is quite different from the narrative Sakai puts forth, where Browder’s policies got the approval of the workers. And as Foster reported following the party’s reorientation, these workers were grateful for how Browderism had gotten defeated: “The morale of our Party members and sympathizers is now being greatly raised by the Party’s new line. They are happy to get from underneath the suffocating cloud of Browder’s opportunism and bourgeois revisionism…The supreme measure of our new policy is its application in practice to the immediate demands and interests of the people. Only if we have successful practical mass policies and activities can we free ourselves from Browder’s revisionism, on the one hand, and avoid the pitfalls of ‘Left’ sectarianism, on the other.”

These facts destroy Sakai’s entire thesis. They prove what nonsense it is to say that white workers have historically reacted to capitalism’s crises by doubling down on supporting the existing social order. They show that the new reformist turn which CPUSA took after World War II happened not because of the will of its working class members, but in spite of this will; the FBI’s covert takeover of the party was a fundamentally top-down event, one the workers couldn’t be blamed for. Yet today, we have figures like Gerald Horne who continue to promote Sakai’s thesis, except in an updated way that doesn’t explicitly uphold Sakaism.

Horne has used the emergence of MAGA to argue that the white workers are fundamentally reactionary, writing: “when Euro-Americans vote across class lines for faux billionaires, we are instructed that the reason is that the opposition did not meet their exacting progressive standards—hence, they voted for the right…Of course, this miscomprehension begs the question as to why descendants of the enslaved even in the same borough and nationwide—marinated in the ultimate class struggle of slaves versus slaveholder—vote against the right wing in extraordinarily high numbers.” 

Like how Sakai’s ideas can sound true to the untrained radical, this sounds like a solid analysis to many. Yet it ignores all the facts about Trump’s election that indeed show many Trump voters would have voted differently if the Democratic Party weren’t neocon and neoliberal. Concerns over Hillary Clinton’s pro-war record were a key reason why many military families in swing states voted for Trump; Trump was able to take advantage of the ongoing depression which the country’s working families had been in since 2008, a problem the neoliberal Democrats had been perpetuating; there’s evidence that a decisive amount of Trump voters would have voted for Sanders.

These realities about what actually drives so much of the MAGA base, and about how much the Democratic Party’s betrayal of the working class has helped figures like Trump, make Horne’s grandstanding hollow. He’s also said that “The U.S. left has difficulty acknowledging that Mr. Trump has a mass base. You don’t get 75 million votes from the 1%… it is in the Euro-Amerikan middle class and working class…The left has no notion of settler-colonialism and class collaboration.” With this statement, he’s pulling the same trick that Sakai did: twist history to make it look like the white workers can only ever be expected to support a pro-imperialist path. 

Donald Trump is not the kind of leader that white workers (who actually didn’t make up as much of Trump’s voters as the media suggested) will always prefer. He’s the kind of leader that a certain element of them have come to see as the best choice, compared to what the Democrats have to offer. This is further supported by how Trump’s policies are actually much more pro-war than what most of his own supporters prefer; the bulk of opposition to the war in Syria, which Trump advanced, has come from conservatives. And they felt this way while Trump was president, showing that these Americans don’t simply support whatever their own party supports. A disconnect has appeared between what the MAGA base wishes for, and what their leadership is willing to do. Communists must take advantage of this.

Finishing what Foster started

My argument is not that the MAGA base is the sole element which communists need to bring in, but that utterly rejecting this element keeps communists isolated to the left. And we’ll lose if we stay in this place; if we invest ourselves in a mode of practice that’s fundamentally opposed towards what history has shown to be effective. When Foster created that moment of success following World War II, where American communism was on a trajectory towards victory, he didn’t do so by orienting his party around attacking patriotism. This is because Browderism didn’t simply mean flying the American flag; it meant liquidating the Party, with the patriotism aspect being incidental to this. 

The correct takeaway from the damage Browderism did is not that we should burn flags, or divide the anti-imperialist movement over things like symbols; what we should learn is that the class struggle can only succeed by centering the masses. By advancing the people’s practical needs, as Foster said. These cultural battles, which have become the predominant thing within the default “Marxist” spaces, are distractions from this task.

Henry Winston—one of CPUSA members who tried to bring the party in a more positive direction following its fall back into liberalism—warned about such left deviations. In his 1973 polemic Strategy for a Black Agenda, he explained that the view of Black America as being an “internal colony” was a misinterpretation of his community’s particular conditions, one which bourgeois theorists were pushing to divide the class struggle. He even identified the same phenomenon I’ve talked about, where the ones promoting such undialectical ideas on “anti-colonialism” assert that they’re just making Marxism fit our conditions:

It is ironic that many of these radicals, who claim that Marxism is European in origin and must be revised in order to apply to the Black people in the U.S., advance theories based on revisions of Marxism by such Europeans as Herbert Marcuse, Leon Trotsky and Regis Debray, as well as the Trotsky-like revisions to be found in the “thought” of Mao Tse-tung. It was especially under the influence of Marcuse and Maoism that the New Left radicals began to be attracted to one or another pseudo-revolutionary theory, including the concept of an “’internal colony” of Black people in the U.S. While Marcuse’s ideas are not identical with “the thought of Mao,” the views of both stimulated anti-Marxist misconceptions of the world revolutionary process, the historic role of the working class and its relationship to the liberation struggles of oppressed people, and the imperative need for strategies based on the specific features and historic development of each country, each working class and each national liberation movement. During every upsurge in the people’s struggles, especially those of the mainly working-class Black people, there is a more extensive activation of counter-measures designed to sustain disunity and block alliance between Black and white workers, together with the Black people as a whole, against corporate monopoly.

Winston argued that the logical conclusion of incorrectly identifying Black America as an internal colony is to fragment the workers. And the same applies to the “anti-colonial” theories which modern ultra-lefts espouse about the indigenous First Nations. Because even though the tribes can much better be called internal colonies, it’s equally backward to use this as justification for sneering at the people’s patriotic sentiments, as Dimitrov explicitly warned communists against doing. 

As Winston observed: “Marx recognized that the strategy of struggle under slavery could not be the same as that against capitalist exploitation. And today, despite similarities in oppression, the liberation strategy for the oppressed Black minority in the U.S. cannot be the same as that for a colony. Both, for example, need and would be greatly aided by allies on an international scale; but the Black liberation movement requires first of all a strategy that involves internal allies.” The equivalent is true for Native liberation; without a mobilization by working class people of all colors, exploited people of all colors and nationalities will lose. And the strategy promoted by Horne’s camp, where communists gatekeep the class struggle based on whether people accept their ahistorical theories, is preventing such a mobilization. 

If pressed, of course these Marxists would say they want to mobilize the country’s people towards revolution, and many of them even disown Sakai. Yet the only parts of the people which they view as acceptable allies are the ones who are willing to uncritically believe their dogmatic New Left “anti-colonial” theories, and join them in promoting national nihilism.

To find which forces today are best carrying forth the project that Foster began, you need to look to many of the same people and groups who these “anti-colonialists” hate the most. They’ve derisively labeled as “patsocs” everyone who advances Marxism in a way that centers class and geopolitics, rather than the symbolic and cultural battles which pan-leftists have invested in. And that they use this label shows how far the pan-leftists are from a mass-based practice; “patsoc” is a word which people only know if they’ve been deep within an online niche. 

To bring communism to victory, and defeat the reactionary power structure that’s behind pan-leftism, a crucial thing we must do is avoid the same kind of trap that the pan-leftists have fallen into. Even if we have the correct ideas, we won’t win so long as we stay confined to a fandom. We have to build an organizational structure that has a base within our communities, that’s capable of providing leadership to the workers who otherwise wouldn’t even become part of a political project. We should continue to combat pan-leftism and its petty-bourgeois radical theories, while doing the mass work required for truly becoming successful. 

The algorithm is a game that the ruling class controls, and that’s not connected to the task of building real mass power. The ruling class is going to keep promoting these distractions for as long as it has the means to do so. And we can only prevail by connecting with the majority of society, which these distractions aren’t going to reach. That’s the strategic limit of this discourse psyop our class enemies have been crafting over the last half-century or so: it can influence many people who’ve gone down the socialist ideological pipeline, but it can’t convert the majority of the people to the same mindset. The danger it poses is that it can separate communists from the people, which we’re capable of avoiding if we navigate our conditions correctly.

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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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