The class war’s next stage will be filled with perils. We must stay on the path of principled struggle.

Today’s strategic situation is shifting in favor of the anti-imperialist cause, and this has been the trend since capitalism’s supposedly definitive triumph in 1991. The last generation has seen an unprecedented decline for unipolar hegemony, because whether or not there’s been a USSR, there’s continued to be a need for a new paradigm. The Soviet Union’s fall ultimately represented a backfiring upon the imperial forces. It created a vacuum within the anti-imperialist movement, which was soon filled by a resurgent opposition towards Washington’s rule. This is the historical dynamic that we must consider amid Syria’s fall: when a revolutionary force gets destroyed, the energy behind it will have to go in new directions. This fact represents hope, but we must be active in guiding that energy; we cannot be complacent, and wait for the existing momentum to carry us to victory.

This becomes more apparent every day, as Washington and its Zionist proxy expand their extermination campaign. The hegemon is looking to take millions of lives across West Asia, in addition to the mass deaths it brought about through its “War on Terror” invasions. The goal is to destroy as much of the region’s infrastructure as possible, and to maximally set back Iran’s scientific progress in particular. That’s what the Syria regime change is supposed to enable: a project where the imperial forces launch unprecedented attacks on Iran, with Syria as their new vantage point. 

This hasn’t been enough to eliminate the forces that are bringing Zionism towards collapse. Hamas continues to frustrate the Gaza ethnic cleansing effort, while the Houthis keep sabotaging the Zionist entity’s daily security. And because the resistance is to this extent undefeatable, the demise of the settler state is certain; Palestine will get its own state, and this state will outlive what remains of the settler entity. China and Russia will also keep winning against the empire in their own kinds of battles; and as Washington gets drawn into another quagmire inside Syria, it will have to sink its resources into an unwinnable fight, undermining its plans for war in east Asia. 

This will accelerate the transition to multipolarity, letting China build up its economy and global development projects even faster. The overall trajectory of history is in the favor of the revolutionaries. Yet if we underestimate the present threats, the empire will be able to do much more damage than otherwise, because it won’t face an opposition that’s prepared.

China cannot bring this fight to completion; neither can Russia, Hamas, the Houthis, or any of the other forces that are presently fighting the hegemon. The fight won’t be done until the imperial state has been overthrown from within, which is a task that’s fundamentally connected to the Palestinian struggle. Right now, the U.S. government is using its war against the pro-Palestine movement to prepare for crushing the workers movement; which makes sense, because these two struggles are inseparably connected. The plans for deporting Palestine protesters, and for illegalizing pro-Palestinian groups, are designed to harm the proletarian struggle by extension. Therefore, any ostensibly pro-labor organizations that abandon Palestine out of hope for escaping repression won’t even be rewarded with relative safety. 

Nobody who believes in the rights of the working class will gain anything by giving up solidarity for this genocide’s victims; our rulers will only target organized labor even more ferociously, taking advantage of its leadership’s weaknesses. Such is the nature of opportunism: it can only think to compromise with those in power, even when they don’t intend to reward the ones who help them. Our task is to disempower today’s opportunistic forces within the workers movement, and build an organizational force which can commit to this fight.

The Palestinian struggle has brought up one of the fundamental ideological conflicts within the communist movement: the fight between liquidationist and revolutionary thinking. Liquidationism says that the communist party must be dissolved, and that its members must enter into a united front with one wing of the ruling class. This is the path that today’s opportunists within the left are taking when they de-center Palestine. The organizations that will survive this crackdown, and bring the masses to their side, are the ones that take an anti-opportunist path. That don’t cower from any of the tasks involved in defeating our imperialist dictatorship.

The biggest lesson from this moment is that it’s not enough to rhetorically align oneself with the era’s revolutionary struggles. There also needs to be a commitment to advancing these struggles; a practical application of the cause’s ideas. PSL, DSA, and the other leftist groups that are working to de-center Palestine all say they stand with the Palestinians; they also say that they’re against imperialism, and for socialism. Yet in practice, the thing they’re doing is tailing behind the Democratic Party; they’re making Trump the central focus of their events and their rhetoric (as shown by their roles within the “We Fight Back” January 20 rally), which effectively aligns them with the Democrats. Many communists have recognized the unprincipled nature of both the left-imperialist DSA, and the red liberal PSL; but just because we’ve recognized this, doesn’t mean we aren’t at risk of replicating their errors. At all times, we must make sure that we’re advancing a practice which genuinely advances the struggle. 

This genocide has made our tasks much clearer, illuminating which actions are opportunistic and which ones truly threaten our ruling class. Our conditions demand more from us than a principled anti-imperialist stance; form is one thing, and content is another. The contents of our practice need to include serious operational security measures; they need to include robust, proactive efforts at building ties with the unions; they need to include consistent cadre training, of both the theoretical and physical kinds. We have to take the measures that ensure our orgs remain in operation no matter how extreme the state’s attacks become; and these orgs need to stay connected to the masses, rather than retreating away from the people. Forsaking the people is how liquidationists respond to crises; this crisis needs to make us redouble our mass work.

Our class enemies fear both the loss of their empire’s geopolitical dominance, and revolt from the USA’s own people. They’re reacting by waging war against civilization throughout West Asia, while preparing a purge against dissent. U.S. communists and our allies have an unprecedented opportunity for advancing the class struggle, and we have a crucial role to play in the hegemon’s defeat. The question is whether we’ll navigate these circumstances correctly, and treat the imperial state as the dangerous foe that it is. There is no way to negotiate towards peace with this enemy; trying to get “peace” in that way means willful self-destruction, where you let the enemy annihilate you without a fight. That’s the thinking which led to the Soviet Union’s downfall, and communists will either learn from this or lose again.

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Trump & Musk share the pro-imperialist left’s goals. Class struggle is how to defeat this liberal alliance.

Trump and Musk have revealed their compatibility with the liberal order; this is exemplified by their support for the H-1B high-income immigration work visa. And because of this, I predict we’ll see the amplification of a certain psyop: the “Jewish question” psyop. This is the narrative which seeks to convince the anti-establishment right that the driving force behind monopoly capital is not a socioeconomic system, but rather a Jewish conspiracy. As more of the MAGA base becomes alienated from Trump, Musk, and those within their Reaganist conservative camp, this is the idea that we’ll increasingly see the far right push. Those who propagate the “JQ,” and frame the class struggle as a fundamentally racial conflict, will attack these conservative leaders as Jewish agents. 

The JQers will be boosted by the deep state, with Musk’s own platform ironically being the main tool the feds use for this. The goal is to steer disillusioned conservatives away from class consciousness, and towards a racial ideology that prevents worker unity. These days, a major part of the JQ psyop is co-optation of the Palestinian cause, which JQ voices frequently talk about in a shallow way. When JQer Dan Bilzerian has denounced the actions of the Zionist entity, he’s only partially focused on the genocide itself, using it as a vehicle for advancing his core argument: that Jewish supremacy is the source behind all of today’s systemic wrongs, rather than merely being a tool imperialism uses to oppress Palestinians. And the empire likes to see these perspectives put forth, because though it can’t totally eliminate anti-Zionist sentiments, it at least prefers that JQers represent the face of the pro-Palestine stance.

JQers discourage people from thinking in economic terms; from seeing how capital’s exploitation transcends racial and national barriers. They reduce everything to a racial conflict, where Jews have supposedly hijacked the system to subjugate whites. These modern JQers are only talking about Palestine because this captures attention; they’re not trying to build any actual anti-imperialist solidarity movement. Their goal is to advance a race-baiting grift, and the feds are assisting them in this.

These are the ideological forces that seek to pick up support from those who’ve invested themselves in MAGA, but are now seeing that Trump doesn’t truly represent MAGA. The anger over how our ruling class draws upon labor from around the globe, rather than prioritizing the workers here, relates to a larger outrage about our imperial system. The parts of the MAGA base which hate H-1B are the same Trump voters who tend to hate NATO, and the war on Syria, and the financial monopolies that the war machine fuels. 

The pro-imperialist left characterizes them as simply motivated by racism because within the left imperialist worldview, anything that goes against global financial interests must necessarily be hateful and backwards. It’s because of this leftist reaction to MAGA that these days, most committed pro-imperialists are left-wing. There are still people on the right who support imperialism from the pro-Zionist position, but they’re increasingly in conflict with the conservative currents which view Zionism as an enemy. And as it gets harder to reconcile opposing NATO with supporting Zionism, more among them are gaining the potential to break from this position. 

There are still figures like Ben Shapiro, who’s tried to sell his followers on supporting both Zionism and Ukraine; but Shapiro has alienated many on the right by doing this. The trend is in favor of anti-establishment thinking, so the system’s best option is to steer this thinking away from class conscious ideas. To substitute the proletarian struggle with a struggle against “the Jews,” where the historical processes we’re experiencing get portrayed as the product of a racialized conspiracy.

JQ rhetoric represents the inverse to the other kind of race reductionism we see in the modern day; that being the “decolonial” New Left’s view of race, in which class struggle gets simplified as a conflict between whites and nonwhites. In this framework, class is not at the core of the power struggle that’s taking place, because class is seen as secondary to identity. The phenomena we see in capitalism’s modern age, where a new financial imperialism has worked to disenfranchise workers of all colors, is interpreted as being centrally racial in character. This defeats the potential for multi-racial worker solidarity. And when the actors who push it claim to be communists, it turns “communism” into a vehicle for liberal intersectionality rhetoric. Neither the JQ, nor intersectional and “decolonial” theory, can explain our situation; only genuine dialectical materialism can. That’s why authentic communists—the ones who represent not “decoloniality” but real class analysis— have an essential role to play in our new political era.

We’re now at a stage where the proto-conscious mass elements which have embraced MAGA are realizing the liberal nature of the leaders they once believed in. Myself and other communists anticipated that the MAGA base would react to Trump’s second term in this way, but the disillusionment is happening even faster than I expected. There’s come to be widespread awareness that voting for Trump could neither get the neocons out of the White House; nor end the project to use immigration for creating an American caste system. Our job is to point towards class struggle as the solution, guiding all mass elements with revolutionary potential towards joining with the proletarian cause. Our class enemies are trying to divert these elements away from the cause, but if we do our duty, they won’t be successful enough in this to save their system.

More opportunities are appearing for us to expose the contradictions within MAGA. Trump’s next failures are going to involve capitulations to the war machine; it’s apparent from his record of anti-Russian provocations, and his unwillingness to present a peace proposal Russia would accept, that the new cold warriors are going to get their next wishes. They won’t win in Ukraine, but they’re already won the domestic power struggle; the White House will remain committed to the neocon agenda. The differences will be that Trump’s cold war maneuvers are going to manifest in more chaotic ways; and that the MAGA coalition will experience unprecedented splits.

These disruptions will produce a series of different reactions. Some in the coalition will react by doubling down, and insisting that Trump or his successor must be trusted. But this won’t be as popular of an opinion as it was in the past, and the deep state’s abandonment of the QAnon psyop has shown this. Many more will become alienated from the MAGA leadership, and where these disaffected elements go will determine which role anti-establishment conservatives are going to have next. If the deep state gets its way, the JQ will fill the vacuum left by MAGA; we must prevent this by propagating worker solidarity, and building a mass movement against imperialism. 

The New Left can’t stop us from doing this; the thing that threatens to derail our efforts is state repression, which will greatly intensify during Trump’s second term. Our rulers see the limitations of their narrative management efforts, and even something as insidious as the JQ can’t stop a serious proletarian movement. So the counterinsurgency is going to shift more towards direct crackdowns. If we can prepare our organizations to absorb this, we’ll get to change where the country goes next.

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Capital is waging war on civilization. Ansarallah’s collective fighting will shows how to overcome this.

The primary ideological conflict that’s happening right now is one between the forces of collectivism, and the forces of individualism, with the latter being what the imperial system depends on. It’s a struggle between the ideology of class solidarity, and the ideology of neoliberal atomization; it’s a struggle between international solidarity, and national chauvinism. Whether the collectivist side is fighting against a sectarian ideology, or liberal hedonism, or political opportunism, the conflict is about whether somebody wants to prioritize narrow, ego-centric goals or the collective good. And the more someone can separate themselves from the interests of the collective, the better they can rationalize forsaking their duty to humanity. This is why a society like Yemen has such a strong current of revolutionary mass dedication, while the “western Marxism” of the core imperialist countries lacks such principles.

There’s been a concerted effort by the CIA to make U.S. communism detached from the actual working class, and instead connected to the professional managerial class, which lacks economic incentive for caring about the proletariat’s interests. The communist movement here wasn’t always like this, but since the 1970s it’s been under the control of petty-bourgeois elements. And it’s only recently that an authentically proletarian current has begun building a major alternative to the “red liberal” organizations. 

As the conditions of the U.S. working class continue to get worse, and our individual experiences become more filled with obstacles, we must consider the circumstances that peoples like the Yemenis or the Gazans have had to navigate. How these peoples have been able to keep waging revolt against the hegemon, no matter how desperate their poverty has been or how extreme the enemy’s violence has become. 

When you lack any options besides revolt, it’s so easy to become part of a revolutionary collective effort, as the members of Ansarallah and Al Qassam have done. It’s so apparent that the only path forward is through the sacrifice of oneself, if the cause demands it, for the sake of bringing the collective closer to liberation. This does not look like individual acts of self-destruction or violence; as a communist, I do not promote suicide, nor adventuristic political assassinations. Everything done by groups like Ansarallah and the Al Qassam brigades has the sole purpose of advancing strategic goals, goals which can only be reached through careful assessments and planning. 

The more serious our situation in the empire’s core becomes, the more urgent it will be for us to take strategy into account, and forsake liberal notions of being individually “special.” The point is not to become messiahs, it’s to win a war that’s incomparably bigger than any one of us; and by acting according to this principle, we truly do the heroic thing.

The fighters of West Asia’s anti-imperialist battles are facing a situation so serious, it represents an actual apocalyptic scenario. There is evidence that Washington’s Zionist puppet has dropped a small nuclear weapon on Syria, with the blast from its “earthquake bomb” not just shaking the ground but leaving traces of radiation. This week, the Biden administration bombed Yemen’s capital, an act that the U.S. media didn’t even report on; the aggressors are trying to get away with as much as they can, testing how far they can take things following their Syria regime change success. They’re preparing for bigger assaults against Lebanon and Iran, which they’ve both recently crossed major red lines within; their hope is that no repercussions for this will come, letting them demolish even more infrastructure across the region.

That’s the essence of the empire’s mission in West Asia: to tear down as much as possible, rendering the local societies weaker. But no matter how effective it becomes in this, the motivation behind it is fear. The monopoly finance capitalists aren’t coming at this from a place of advantage; they see how unipolar hegemony is doomed, regardless of the imperial victory in Syria, and they want to make West Asia crippled before Washington’s power further declines. The USA, the Zionist entity, and Turkey have certainly been emboldened by Syria’s fall, and the human costs of this are incomprehensible; but the power balance remains such that in the end, the revolutionary forces have the advantage. History’s overall trajectory is on their side; multipolarity will continue to come into being, and Washington’s Syria maneuver has actually accelerated this transition.

Chinese strategic professor Wang Xiangsui has concluded that Washington’s decision to carry out regime change in Syria is not overall going to benefit the United States; instead, it will in more ways benefit the PRC, while creating blowback for the imperialists. In its summary of the arguments Xiangsui has put forth, Wave Media says that:

Israel’s opportunism in Syria will deepen U.S. entanglement in the Middle East, hastening the decline of U.S. hegemony. According to Al Jazeera, on December 8, Israeli forces occupied the Syrian-controlled area of the Golan Heights. This marks the first open entry of Israeli ground forces into Syrian territory since the Yom Kippur War. Such a military venture is bound to exacerbate tensions between Israel and the Arab world. In the next four years, this could trigger more conflicts, creating additional aid burdens for the U.S. as it supports Israel. Meanwhile, the White House will have no choice but to foot the bill, as the Trump administration has been dominated by pro-Israel officials…Prof. Wang points out that there will be no second “American Century.” What follows will not be a “Chinese Century” either but rather a truly multipolar world. What we are witnessing in Syria is an ulcer in the U.S.-led world order. With Syria now fragmented among various factions, we are witnessing the collapse of the old order, which has yet to give rise to a new one.

This is the true strategic situation, despite the recent assertions about Syria’s fall meaning the death of multipolarity. Because of Washington’s hubris in Syria, multipolarity is coming even faster than otherwise, and China’s economic victory over the empire will be even more total. The problem is that as of this moment, the imperialists and their proxies are in place to use genocide as a punishment for this defeat of theirs. Finding themselves endangered by the historic laws of imperial decline, they’re expanding their extermination campaign, preparing to increase this holocaust's death count from the hundreds of thousands to the millions. 

China and Russia cannot prevent every death that Washington intends to bring upon West Asia’s people, no matter how great their victories are elsewhere. The only thing that can bring the region out of this is the power of collective resistance and construction, embodied by Ansarallah, Hezbollah, the Palestinian resistance, and Iran’s anti-imperialist elements. The enemy is engineering an apocalypse within West Asia, but even an apocalypse can’t stop this kind of power. The will to keep fighting is there, and that will is what’s going to define the future.

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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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Degrowth, the plot to collapse our society, & the world war that will become a class war

The workers in the empire’s core are experiencing a backlash from our ruling class, one that’s going to last indefinitely and is accelerating our society’s collapse. The event which the big capitalists are reacting to is how the pandemic gave workers new leverage in the labor market; the pendulum swung in the proletariat’s direction, creating an employment ratio where employers needed to compete for job seekers. When entities like Bank of America saw this happen, they threw the ultimate tantrum.

According to Bank of America’s summer 2022 economic memo, big capital’s desire was for unemployment to rise, with the rationale being that wage growth was supposedly driving the inflation. The memo exaggerated the rate of wage growth, while ignoring how rising profits were the true source of the price increases; the workers were the scapegoat, and the plot to harm their living conditions wasn’t even truly motivated by inflation concerns. Our class enemies are blowing up the economy because to keep the system going amid capitalism’s crises, there needs to be a degrowth; a sacrifice of ever-more people, economically and therefore physically. 

As part of this plan, the Fed raised interest rates, putting pressure on employers to shrink their work forces; year after year, they kept seeing the economy fail to recover from 2020’s shock, so they concluded that they had too many workers. Instead of mass firings, which would have been bad for PR, they made it so that hiring new people was the exception; when workers retired, they usually weren’t getting replaced, and in every possible area the amount of available jobs was reduced. That’s how we got to where we are now, in which a recession has effectively already been happening for a while; the official unemployment rate confirms that joblessness is going up, hinting at the hidden realities which the real unemployment rate reveals. The true rate of people who lack access to the jobs they need is now 23.9%, up by almost 2% from what it was in June of last year. The trend is that Bank of America’s plot to engineer unemployment has become increasingly successful; and this is just the start of what our class enemies intend to do.

From their perspective, the workforce is still too large; it’s bigger than it was prior to the pandemic, and since then degrowth has become an even greater priority. The pandemic had effects that were unexpected for the monopolists, despite how much they were able to profit from it; as it created that moment of worker empowerment, it sped up de-dollarization, slowing global exchange and compelling more countries to pursue alternative currencies. The speed of de-dollarization shouldn’t be exaggerated; it is causing the imperialists anxiety, though, which is driving their warfare escalations.

We’re going to see more of these escalations under Trump, and in a more chaotic form. While the tariffs exacerbate all problems for U.S. workers, the combination of unemployment and inflation is going to create crises that our enemies aim to take advantage of. The hope shared by Trump’s team, and by the rest of the super-rich, is for a new economic calamity to bring them another massive financial infusion. They’re trying to create the pretext for a new bailout, which would multiply inequality and necessitate more radical crisis management measures. Measures like a big war, likely to take place in east Asia, and an explosion in austerity. For the workers, it will effectively be an economic collapse, except their government will be able to say it’s not one because the monopolists have profited from it. Or at least that’s the narrative our rulers will push for as long as they can, until the engineered collapse gets to its next stage.

Our only path forward is to turn this world war into a class war. To translate the destruction brought by our ruling class, both abroad and within our own country, into the masses mobilizing for the capitalist state’s overthrow. This worldwide imperial destruction is absolutely coming for our communities in the United States; it’s already here, just in a mild form compared to what things are going to look like. The USA’s people will need to survive societal breakdown, ecological crisis, and many different types of civil conflict. The civil war aspect isn’t going to look like civil wars traditionally have; it will look like a heightened version of the reality we have to navigate now, where men and some women get radicalized to commit acts of violence. The goal is to feed into society’s anger and alienation, getting people to turn on each other instead of pursuing collective action.

The cultural phenomenon around Luigi Mangione is absolutely an example of this. The conversations he’s created about for-profit healthcare and class are being redirected towards an ideology of ultraviolence; for these conversations to inspire truly productive actions, it will be in spite of the adventuristic and individualistic views that he represents. Part of the message he conveyed through his action was that when somebody engages in lone wolf violence against individuals, it’s necessarily a blow towards the system, when in fact this tactic never brings any systemic victory; it’s a diversion from actual class struggle, one that could easily be weaponized against the proletariat. It’s not something the state has a real reason to fear, unlike pro-Palestine organizing, labor organizing, or the other mass efforts which have been truly disrupting capital. 

The state wants us to gravitate towards ultraviolent ideas, because this actively impedes our potential journeys towards taking part in serious power-building. And should these ideas successfully inspire copycat violence, the only effect this will have is to perpetuate the mistaken thinking. It will also give the state another pretext for exacting violence against the masses, who won’t be able to defend themselves if we don’t focus on organizational work.

Only through building solid institutions, with operational security and substantial ties to the working masses, can we win this fight. We will find plenty of popular support for this endeavor, so long as we properly understand what the objectives are. The goal is not to fight for its own sake; as Fred Hampton said, “We do not support people who are anarchistic, opportunistic, adventuristic, and Custeristic,” with wanton violence representing a certain type of opportunism. The goal is to give the people the tools required for overthrowing the state, which means acting as servants of the masses rather than going ahead of them. Something that will truly gain you the people’s support is advancing their material needs, and doing so in a way that exposes the state’s failures to provide; this is what communists are increasingly doing. 

If this practice comes with an analysis of U.S. imperialism that’s dialectical, and that recognizes how these wars are hurting the people, then we’ll be able to translate the mutual aid into an expanded anti-imperialist movement. There are other essential ingredients to building the institutions we need; serious connections with unions, instituting internal cadre training regimens, building broad anti-imperialist coalitions. It is complex, and it’s a learning process, but there’s no option besides this. This is how we can turn our era’s austerity and war into developments that genuinely endanger the rule of capital. Those behind the collapse are depending on the present power balance staying the same, and no serious revolutionary project coming into being. That way, the people won’t have any effective way to respond to the warfare being waged against them. We can hand the masses such a means for gaining power.

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

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The communists who can adapt to multipolarity’s rise will be able to win this era’s great conflicts

There is a clear contrast between how the communist parties which hold actual power have responded to the recent geopolitical shifts; and how the compromised “communist” parties have done so. Many of the globe’s “communist” formations denounced Russia’s Ukraine operation; yet what all of these formations have in common is that the bourgeoisie don’t truly view them as a threat. They’ve either been parties that hold zero state authority; have functionally taken on the role of social democratic parties, like the “communist” parties of France and Japan; or have engaged in a retreat from Marxism that’s wasted their momentum, like Greece’s KKE. There’s a reason why the ruling Marxist-Leninist parties have either endorsed the operation (like Korea’s WPK has), or pointedly declined to denounce it while materially backing Russia (like China’s CPC has). It’s because victory depends on properly adapting to the reality of the multipolar world, and these parties are aware of this due to the experience which power has given them.

Now that our third world war has expanded, and West Asia is at least as big of a battleground as eastern Europe, the multipolar question is affecting how different communists respond to Zionism’s genocide. The rule is that the same ones who refused to embrace NATO’s Ukraine narratives are the ones who’ve acted principled on Palestine; who’ve fought against the regime change project in Syria, which has let the genocide to expand and accelerate. And essentially everybody who denounced Russia from a “Marxist” angle has promoted the anti-Assad psyops that let Washington destroy secular Syria. This places them on the opposite side of many on the “right,” including the large parts of the MAGA base which haven’t liked the wars against Syria and Russia.

It’s the same phenomenon that’s come about during many other imperialist wars: a certain element of “communists” side with the imperialists, while certain conservatives and patriots speak up against the war effort. It defies what the political divide is supposed to look like, yet it’s kept happening. When Ukraine made it happen again at a crucial juncture, the big lesson I took away was that any real anti-imperialist united front is not based within the left; far too much of the left is imperialism-aligned, while so many outside the left are increasingly hostile towards the war machine. It’s still true that we need such an anti war alliance which transcends the conventional ideological divides. Since October 7, though, history has provided us with a gargantuan amount of new information. Information about what the multipolar era truly means, and who we can expect to align with the revolutionary side in this geopolitical conflict.

With Operation Z, Al Aqsa Flood, and the other recent blows against the hegemon, the anti-imperialist side has gained a series of strategic victories; the problem we’re now facing is that when the enemy has struck back, it’s been able to find too many vulnerable targets. By assassinating ever-more hardline Iranian leaders, Washington and the Zionist entity have given the country’s liberal reformers an opportunity to gain major influence. This has let them obstruct Khamenei’s efforts to fight the enemy, weakening the Axis of Resistance on all fronts. That was the first big structural weak point the hegemon took advantage of. Next it exploited the Syrian government’s lack of willingness to accept help from Iran, as well as the corrupt and disloyal character of many Syrian military officials. 

With Iran’s growing internal interference from liberals, Washington saw an opening. It saw that for the first time in the thirteen years of its latest war against Syria, those who stood against it were now experiencing unprecedented issues. The empire knew that if it went on the offensive now, it would have a real chance of overthrowing Assad; which meant that the “Israeli” Nazi state could now agree to a “ceasefire” in Lebanon, while expecting Hezbollah to soon lose an important ally. This is why “Israel” immediately began to violate the so-called ceasefire: it expects that Iran can no longer get a substantial amount of weapons into Lebanon, and must now rely on sea shipments to transport the arms.

This belief is actually mistaken, and our enemies have admitted as such; Michael Knights of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy has warned his fellow imperial strategists that “Although the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime is certainly encouraging, this does not mean its former patron Iran will simply give up on using Syria as a corridor for reconstituting Hezbollah next door in Lebanon. Quite the opposite: Iranian arms smuggling has historically thrived in collapsed or weak state environments.” Therefore, the thing that could truly prevent a sufficient response towards the enemy’s aggressions is not a logistical obstacle. The real threat is a lack of adequate proletarian power.

If the interests of Iran’s workers don’t drive what the country does next, then such a weapons smuggling operation won’t take place, because the anti-imperialist faction will be prevented from carrying it out. There is a real risk that the liberal interference will reach this level, because it’s already created comparable catastrophes; it was because of Iran’s reformers, with their false promises of a Lebanon ceasefire, that Nasrallah got assassinated.

The solution is not to turn against the anti-imperialist states; the anti-imperialists within Iran’s government still need our solidarity, and we can’t abandon them any more than we can abandon the Russians who brought about Operation Z. The answer is also not to oppose multipolarity, whatever that means; multipolarity is simply our reality at this moment, and opinions can’t change this. What we must do is adapt our practice to the conflicts which multipolarity entails. The multipolar era is an era of heightened warfare, where both the progressive and reactionary sides intensify their offensive actions; whether the progressive side wins depends on how well we can engage with this reality. And that goes for anti-imperialists in every part of the globe, including my home the United States.

As somebody who lives in the empire’s heart, I’m acutely aware of how the anti-imperialist struggles in places like Iran or Syria are not my primary business. My primary business is the struggle between the ruling class and proletariat in the USA; which is also one of multipolarity’s wars. Our ruling class is waging a counterinsurgency that’s still only in its early stages, and that’s going to accelerate with these latest global escalations. The USA’s war on dissent has come to center around the crackdown on the pro-Palestine movement, and now that Syria’s fall has let the genocide accelerate, the state will react massively to whatever solidarity actions we take next. 

The U.S. empire’s acts of terrorism abroad, and attempts to terrorize the people here, are part of the same effort to turn back history; to return capitalism to the stability which it had before multipolarity came about. We within the USA’s anti-imperialist movement will do our part to achieve victory, and ensure that a revolutionary organizational force survives the next attacks. Then we’ll be able to keep making connections with the country’s masses, and strike the enemy from within.

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The effort to memory-hole Zionism’s crimes, & how the pro-Palestine movement can overcome this

Above: the Israeli Offense Force dropping its “earthquake bomb” on the Syrian coast as part of its ongoing invasion of the country

Expand the genocide, create a distraction from it during a crucial juncture, then crush the pro-Palestine movement: that’s been the plan of our ruling class. And we’re now at a stage in this operation where an important threshold is being crossed. If the U.S. empire can keep the discourse detached from the extermination campaign—even at a moment like this one, when the genocide is rapidly growing—then the empire will gain more advantages in the domestic repressive effort. To crush the pro-Palestine organizations, our government will need to sufficiently divert the public’s attention towards a wedge issue; that being the pro-Trump vs anti-Trump cultural battle.

That’s the primary purpose of the push for a new ResistanceTM  towards Trump: to take eyes off of Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, and the other targets of these Nazistic aggressions. To defeat this discourse psyop, what we must do is overcome the most insidious part of the anti-Palestine counterinsurgency. This hidden threat is the NGO industrial complex, the network of organizations which fund activist groups with the goal of steering them in a certain ideological direction.

The pro-Palestine struggle is going to continue, no matter how severe the repression gets. People will keep being compelled to take action against the genocide, even if they’ll have to do so clandestinely. We will be able to find a solid base of participants in any potential underground projects; the greatest threat to the success of such projects, and to the efforts which already exist, are the liberal institutions that seek to co-opt the struggle. Because if these institutions get to define how the movement goes, even the ostensibly anti-Zionist groups will become funneled into the ResistanceTM. They’ll be led away from their true purpose, convinced that the best way to fight against this genocide is by focusing on Trump.

The argument for this relies on the perception that Trump, and by extension his base, is the primary problem for the class struggle to overcome. This is the idea that these organizations put forth, even if they make statements about how they’re fighting against a system; if an org views an anti-Trump rally as more important at this moment than a rally for Palestine, that org’s priorities are backwards. Numerous left-wing groups and leaders, including the “communist” PSL, have gotten behind the Trump-centric “We Fight Back” Inauguration Day demonstration. This has the effect of de-centering Palestine, even if that isn’t the intention. It also perpetuates the antagonisms between self-described Marxists and the MAGA base, wherein at least a third of the country’s people get preemptively excluded from the communist movement.

Because this further pushes the genocide out of the discourse, and keeps millions of proto-conscious Americans out of the anti-imperialist struggle, the ruling class is better able to push the inverse psyop. That being the right-wing psyop about how Elon Musk’s big tech rule will save the country, and bring a new prosperity. Trump’s promises of re-industrialization and an end to neocon foreign policy won’t come true, as Trump’s cabinet-building decisions have already shown; which is why this psyop is destined to largely fail. But in order to take advantage of MAGA’s coming decline, communists and their allies can’t tail the Democratic Party, and echo the standard liberal anti-Trump statements. We must point to the ways Trump has betrayed his antiwar mandate, with his support for the Palestinian genocide being among the prime examples of this.

Adopting this strategy isn’t just about winning more people to the Palestinian cause. It’s also about treating the Palestinian cause as the universal, culturally transcendental thing that it is. The Palestinian question is not a left vs right matter, and framing it as such only undermines the struggle for a free Palestine. Rather it’s a question of whether all people deserve to live and be free. The anti-Zionist struggle is something that people across the ideological spectrum are capable of joining with; that’s why the majority of the USA’s people have already realized the genocidal Gaza military action isn’t justified. By building a pro-Palestine movement that’s based not within the left, but within the people as a whole, we’ll be able to bring in far more participants while throwing off NGO control.

As the NGOs and their affiliated groups push the “anti-Trump” movement, we’re getting a clearer sense of what building this alternative force looks like. It looks like avoiding the liberal trap of fixating on Trump, and instead truly orienting our practice around fighting the genocide. Criticizing Trump is certainly a necessary part of this, but not in the way that’s designed to exclusively appeal to leftists; only a minority of people are in the headspace of obsessive anti-Trumpism, and such an obsession detracts from the Palestinian cause anyhow. If we want to stop the NGOs from sabotaging the struggle, we must refrain from echoing their rhetoric, which too many activists uncritically absorb.

This is what the Marcyists in the PSL have been doing for decades: aggressively signaling that they represent the cultural left, which takes attention away from whatever anti-imperialist statements they make. It also keeps them confined to a niche, which isolates the anti-imperialist movement by extension. The logical conclusion of this is what we’re seeing today, where PSL has joined the ResistanceTM at a moment when the anti-Zionist cause desperately needs more focus. And the core of why they’ve done this is because that’s what keeps their NGO funders happy. 

It’s not something that can be reconciled with a committed anti-imperialist, anti-Zionist, or communist practice; it’s a deviation that’s now more harmful than ever, because the stakes are higher than ever. If we don’t commit to this struggle right now, the empire will succeed at taking millions more lives, and at destroying even greater amounts of infrastructure throughout West Asia. It will also be able to delay revolution in the core by crushing the pro-Palestine movement, and the proletarian movement by extension.

The ResistanceTM now has a different role than the one it had eight years ago; at this point, its main purpose is to take attention away from the genocide. Originally, this color revolution came from a genuine anxiety within the dominant wing of our ruling class, which was shocked by Trump’s victory in 2016 and wanted to ensure the system wouldn’t get destabilized. Today, the bulk of the ruling class has come to accept Trump, because he’s shown that he can be controlled. What remains of the “anti-Trump” movement is a psyop that’s specifically tailored to mislead the people who are most conscious on Palestine. If we fall for this ploy, the repressive aspect of the anti-Palestine counterinsurgency is going to succeed, because the movement will lack serious leadership.

We cannot open our orgs up to influence from the NGO-industrial complex, which is fundamentally tied to the State Department and therefore allows for federal infiltration. We cannot start treating the genocide as a secondary issue. It’s still necessary to explain to the people how the genocide is part of the imperial system, and how this system is what’s harming working families; such a rhetorical tactic is in fact crucial, because it’s how we can win the USA’s people to the fight for Palestine. Palestine must still be among the central things we orient ourselves around, though. If we can keep this cause from getting derailed, build substantial ties with the masses, and prepare our cadres for clandestine organizing scenarios, then we'll be able to keep making progress amid the crackdown.

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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. 

To keep this platform effective amid the censorship against dissenting voices, join my Telegram channel.