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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