The idealist notion of how to reach “peace,” & how anti-imperialists can combat it

Photo by Dado Ruvic/Reuters

Inside the antiwar movement, there’s emerged a new struggle between two ideological camps. Camps which have distinct goals and values, despite them in theory both wanting “peace.” It’s a different disagreement than the one between the pro-Russian anti-imperialists, and the anti-Russian “peace” liberals; whereas that debate is mainly between communists and Democrats, this new debate is moreso between communists and conservatives. 

This dispute is centered around the question of how peace can be reached, particularly with Russia and Iran; because it’s these two countries that the Trump administration is seeking to win over into the pro-U.S. camp, which would give U.S. imperialism an advantage over China. With China, there’s no question that Washington will remain in an antagonistic relationship, at least for as long as U.S. imperialism exists. China is ruled by a workers party, one that won’t seriously compromise with imperialism for the foreseeable future. But with the PRC’s two biggest Eurasian strategic partners, there’s less certainty about what will happen, because Russia and Iran have influential capitalist elements. It’s this potential for making “peace” through inter-capitalist partnership that Washington seeks to take advantage of.

Even though it would objectively be a catastrophe if Russia or Iran were to sell out to U.S. monopoly capital, there are plenty of antiwar (or ostensibly antiwar) voices which effectively advocate for this. That’s what it means to uncritically praise Trump’s effort at getting “peace,” while omitting the reality that what Trump really wants is more U.S. client states. All of the biggest conservative “alt” media commentators have promoted this misleading narrative; Russell Brand has done it, Candace Owens has done it, Tucker Carlson has done it. 

From Carlson in particular, we’ve seen “pro-peace” arguments on Ukraine which clearly show the ulterior motives behind this type of “peace” plan, which is to harm China. In his conversation with Colonel Daniel Davis, Carlson revealed that one of the reasons he opposes the Ukraine war is that this conflict has driven Russia closer to China, something he hopes Trump will undo. He then observed how much Washington’s unipolar dominance has disappeared in the last thirty years, and lamented this development, saying it’s a bad thing for America.

This is how the narrative managers are selling the Trump White House’s strategic shift: by portraying U.S. imperialism as fundamentally positive, and winning antiwar-minded Americans to that view by pointing out how the Ukraine war has backfired on imperialism. Indeed it has backfired, and this is an extremely good thing. 

When you understand what it entails for the U.S. to be the hegemon, and how this necessarily means imperialist wars will continue, the dangerous nature of Carlson’s message becomes apparent. But this psyop that people like Carlson are pushing is highly effective, because it’s able to exploit and redirect the popular desire for change. Their argument is based in the notion that “peace” can come from solidifying American capital’s global control; which is an idealistic view that’s similar to liberal pacifism, except this view has the added element of explicitly pro-capitalist ideology.

These pro-capitalist pacifists sell a certain narrative about how the world works; a narrative that says the United States can end the wars, and revitalize its industrial base, while still being the world’s great capitalist superpower. Which is an idea that’s attractive to many Americans, because within our culture it’s still the default belief that we should take pride in being the epicenter of global business. It’s a way of appealing towards sentiments that came from Cold War-era propaganda, just like Russiagate is. 

When “dissident” right-wingers argue that we should make Russia or Iran into client states so the U.S. can become dominant again, they’re doing what Russiagate liberals do, which is try to prove how true they are to the Cold War values of jingoism and anti-communism. How determined they are to restore the former American capitalist strength that our enemies have taken away.

Both the culturally liberal and culturally “traditional” wings of ruling class politics are using this appeal to nostalgia; the difference is that the “trad” wing has managed to build a growing popular support base for its goals. With the discrediting of the Democratic Party in the minds of most Americans, and the widespread dissatisfaction with liberal wokeism, the anti-woke psyop has gained serious cultural sway. To combat this psyop, we’ll need to bring the real story of our country to the USA’s people. We’ll have to counter the narrative which says that America has tragically lost its former power, and must now fight to get it back. The real story is one of the United States becoming captured by monopoly finance capital. Which has let the monopolists use our country as a vessel for exporting their destructive ventures, while de-industrializing the United States itself.

The U.S. imperialist mythology, in which we as Americans are bringing the rest of the world into our great project, is a corruption of the actual story of America; a story that’s inextricably connected to working-class history, and to popular movements where Americans have found solidarity. 

This country wouldn’t exist in its unified form if not for the struggle that its people fought against slavery. Its people would now be living in much worse conditions if not for the worker struggles that followed, where the country’s proletarians were able to reach great unity across racial barriers. These efforts are a continuation of the 1776 revolution, where a mass struggle emerged to defeat British colonialism. And every real achievement by the country’s people since then has been due to the struggles against the capitalist order, which represents a continuation of the anti-democratic system Americans fought during that revolution.

When pro-imperialists say we need to restore U.S. hegemony for the sake of our country, they’re trying to pass themselves off as defenders of these past revolutionary gains. They’re alluding to national accomplishments which came about through class struggle, and saying the way to uphold these accomplishments is by uniting with monopoly capital in attacking China’s workers state. This is our ruling class co-opting what we as workers have created, thereby tacitly admitting that it’s the workers and the other revolutionary forces which have actually driven our society forward. 

The monopolists and their lackeys are stealing from our rich proletarian cultural traditions, attempting to take credit for the things we’ve built. By definition, the workers have built everything in our society; our ruling class has only accumulated the wealth from our labor. The capitalists have used their imperial system to create a sense of false solidarity between between themselves and the U.S. workers, but the workers here would gain infinitely more from ending imperialism than from letting it continue.

We must show Americans the reality of their country: that what you take pride in as Americans comes from the class struggle. Your rulers are trying to dissuade you from the class struggle, and from real anti-imperialist solidarity, by presenting global monopolist expansion as the thing that can defend America’s achievements. If you want to defend America, join with the class struggle, and join with the globe’s anti-imperialist forces in overthrowing the parasitic empire.

————————————————————————

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.

The Luigi movement, our third world war, & the growing prospects for workers victory

Above: Luigi Mangione supporters outside the Supreme Court, Stefan Jeremiah, AP Photo

At the start of December 2024, the plans of our imperialist ruling class were actually going quite well, even amid the unraveling of their global hegemony. They were losing the economic war to China, as they continue to do so. But in tactical terms, they’d recently gained numerous advantages. And for the world’s revolutionary forces to sufficiently change the power balance, there would first have to be new major shake-ups. There’d need to be disruptions to the imperial psyop machine; disruptions in popular consciousness that could be turned towards mass mobilization.

In that historically pivotal moment from last year, Washington was in place to overthrow Assad, and would soon succeed in doing so. This would cripple the Axis of Resistance, letting Zionism’s genocide expand and accelerate. And there wouldn’t be enough domestic resistance to counter the empire’s next schemes, because the pro-Palestine movement had been made to largely fizzle out; the campus repression was working, which encouraged the security state in its next crackdown plans. These plans, along with the latest steps in the extermination campaign, have largely succeeded. 

But throughout this recent series of imperial triumphs, there’s been a certain destabilizing event; one that’s not big enough to take down the system on its own, but that exemplifies a gargantuan shift in mass consciousness. This event was the killing of a healthcare CEO on December 4, 2024, and the mass movement which that act catalyzed. The Luigi Mangione movement has proven that the USA’s people are a lot more advanced than many revolutionary intellectuals might believe them to be; it’s demonstrated a widespread presence of workers who have great potential for joining with the class struggle, if they’re given the means for doing so. And it’s connected to another mass awakening event that we’ve recently seen, which is the revolt within MAGA. 

That so many within Trump’s base have recognized his neocon activities as betrayals, and not accepted the policies of “Silicon Valley MAGA,” shows the limitations on the empire’s recent psyops. Our ruling class has tried to use MAGA as a tool for selling war, genocide, and oligarchic power consolidation, but a growing element inside MAGA is becoming disillusioned. 

By election day in 2024, Gaza had already caused the Democratic Party to collapse, so Silicon Valley MAGA was the narrative control tool our ruling class turned to. This isn’t working either, though, because the masses have become narratively unmanageable. All the ruling class ideological tricks keep failing, from Bernie-style social democracy to Trumpian “right populism.” Now the psyop managers are trying to direct the MAGA base towards controlled opposition “alt” media, and this tactic is so far largely successful; but it hasn’t stopped the Luigi movement from continuing to gain mass pull. 

The Luigi movement’s persistence is indicative of which direction the American people are going to head next. As the third world war progresses, our government keeps destroying our liberties, and the economic collapse gets worse, the reaction from the masses is going to be to keep embracing things like the Luigi movement. And, most importantly, to seek out voices which speak to the class-based rage that Luigi represents. This is why it’s the correct strategy for us communists to show ourselves as friends to those who support Luigi. While the class war progresses to its next stage, only those who take the right stance on this issue will be able to capture the proto-revolutionary energy that’s spreading across our society.

This energy is not something that came from the psyop machine, which is why the ruling class keeps struggling to manage it. Our rulers feel comfortable enough to keep going on the offensive in the third world war, expanding the slaughter of Palestinians, Yemenis, and others; yet there are certain weaknesses within their system, which they increasingly fear will bring them down. 

They know that if Palestine wins, or Russia wins, U.S. capitalism will no longer be able to exist as it does now. They also know that should the USA’s people build a sustainable and strong workers movement, one that acts in tandem with the globe’s anti-imperialist forces, then the damage from these geopolitical losses will be multiplied. It will also make these foreign policy losses themselves much more fast and severe, because our movement in the United States has real potential to impact how Washington’s wars go. A strong international united front is instrumental for the victory of the Palestinians, the Russians, the Yemenis, and all others who are resisting the hegemon. The more of the U.S. masses we bring into the fight against our imperial war machine, the more the third world war will backfire on those who’ve started it.

“If the anti-imperialist camp triumphs in World War 3, a new era of revolutionary upsurge surpassing the period immediately after World War 2 will begin,” observes Stephen Cho of the World Anti-Imperialist Platform. “On a global scale, imperialism and fascism will suffer decisive blows, and anti-imperialist and communist forces will be greatly strengthened.” It’s because of this prospect, where the empire’s war escalations end up bringing its own downfall, that the security state is expanding the crackdown so much. To carry out its next plans, the system will have to stop any effective U.S. revolutionary movement from emerging. And because the system keeps being strained, the potential for such a movement keeps growing. This is the inescapable reality that our ruling class is reacting to.

In 1966, after Indonesia underwent a military coup which led to political mass murder, the Communist Party of Indonesia affirmed that capitalism’s control systems are fundamentally weak; they’re weak because capital is opposed to the interests of the people. The problem is that when the revolutionary forces fail to harness the power of the people, these systems will be able to crush the people. Said the Party: “From a strategic point of view, the imperialists and all reactionaries are weak, and consequently we must despise them. By despising the enemies strategically we can build up the courage to fight them and the confidence to defeat them. At the same time we must take them all seriously, take into full account of their strength tactically, and refrain from taking adventurist steps against them.” 

The emergence of the Luigi movement, and the revolt within MAGA, both prove the reactionary order’s strategic weakness. The ruling class efforts to police mass consciousness keep failing, with new narrative disruptions happening at an ever-more frequent pace. There’s no avoiding these disruptions, because they’re the inevitable outcome of a dying system. 

We cannot tail after the spontaneous energy of the masses, that would just be a surrender to the forces of chaos and collapse. To bring victory for the people, we must actively lead the people towards workers revolution, which is the only way to end the destructive process we’re experiencing. Our task is to take advantage of the systemic weaknesses the collapse is creating, turning this into a victory for the forces which oppose the imperial order. If we can keep building upon this mission’s progress, even as the state’s attacks on us multiply, then the people will be able to overthrow their capitalist dictatorship.

————————————————————————

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.

Our ruling class wants to turn the U.S. into Haiti, so we must take example from Haiti’s revolutionaries

Above: Haiti’s Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier, who’s leading the country’s mass anti-imperialist revolt

The end goal of our ruling class is to transform the United States into Haiti, making the population here lumpenized to the same extent that Haiti’s is. The U.S. working class has already been de-industrialized, and much of its former “middle class” has been pushed into the status of working poor. The next step is to make millions more of them unemployed or underemployed, creating a situation which parallels that of “Fourth World” countries like Haiti. 

When a society has been economically destroyed to the extent that Haiti’s has, much of that society’s population will turn to crime out of necessity, making them part of the lumpenproletariat. Those within the U.S. proletarian movement must therefore adopt a synthesis; one which acclimates us to organizing communities which have in great part been forced out of the working class.

While undertaking this task, we must reconcile two crucial realities about the conditions we’re navigating: 1) that we cannot win the class war without organizing the lumpen, and 2) that such an organizing project cannot be led by the reactionary elements of the lumpen. The communist Bruce Franklin observed that there is “both the danger of tailing after the lumpenproletariat’s existing values and lifestyles, and the necessity of conscious leadership for the lumpenproletariat to assert their own liberation through revolutionary struggle. Of all classes, this may be the one that most needs to be led by conscious revolutionaries with a sense of their historical condition and an awareness of their weaknesses and instability. It would be a mistake, probably a fatal mistake, to think that the only peoples qualified to lead them are individuals just as unpredictable and as lacking in ideology.”

Henry Winston also warned of such an error, responding to the ideas the Black Panther Party had put forth about the lumpenproletariat being the vanguard:

For ways in which the ruling class can manipulate the lumpen elements, we need only refer to the Panthers’ own experience with George Sams, who was used to frame Bobby Seale, Ericka Huggins and others. And we should remember that a white lumpen individual was used to assassinate Martin Luther King, while black ones were recruited to murder Malcolm X. And we should also recall the German monopolists’ manipulation of Van der Lubbe to frame Georgi Dimitrov as part of their drive to launch a genocidal war for world domination. The Cleaver-Newton theory of the lumpenproletariat as vanguard would mean objective surrender to the ruling class because only the working class can lead the fight against poverty and exploitation. And not only does this theory fail to offer an offensive strategy for liberation; without working-class leadership of the struggle, the lumpen victims themselves will not be provided with even their own barest needs.

An effective program for bringing the lumpen into the class struggle does not look like romanticizing the criminal lifestyle. That type of mindset leads revolutionary groups to descend into criminality, as has happened to the Shining Path or the Naxalites. The “lumpen as vanguard” notion comes from a fallacy in thinking. If we want to successfully mobilize the U.S. masses in the era of lumpenization, we’ll need to look to figures like Haiti’s Jimmy Barbecue, who’s brought the country’s lumpen towards a point where they can feasibly defeat neo-colonialism.

The imperialist media portrays BBQ as a gang leader, but this story leaves out a much larger context: that BBQ is responsible for leading a popular revolutionary movement, of which the gangs are just one part. The gangs aren’t the vanguard of this movement. They’ve only been united due to the successes of a larger mass effort; an effort that’s brought great material gains to Haiti’s people, even amid all the economic limitations the imperialists have imposed upon it. 

In the territories controlled by BBQ’s forces, there’s a collective project to bring education to the children, rather than letting them go without school and get recruited by the pro-government lumpen elements. As BBQ has explained, this is an early stage in the movement’s project to make Haiti develop on its own. The rebel-controlled neighborhoods have cultivated a sense of safety, even as a war unfolds nearby. They’ve kicked out the corrupt police, who used to shoot at unarmed people with impunity. And that BBQ has unified the gangs means the potential for violence has been greatly reduced.

For all practical purposes, BBQ is constructing an anti-imperialist state; one which is already highly advanced, in the sense that it largely functions without the traditional governmental structures. The communities within the liberated zones don’t need the aid of the government that oppressed them; now the people take care of themselves. This is something relatively close to the end goal of communism, where the state has withered away after society’s old contradictions have been overcome.

The lesson from this is that when you organize around meeting the needs of the people, the lumpenproletariat will unify with you. As Franklin concluded upon observing the stories of U.S. lumpen groups which have joined the class struggle: “The Young Patriots and Young Partisans have shown that these people are capable of becoming not only revolutionaries but revolutionary leaders. And the only way for them to do this, as both groups have shown, is by organizing around the principle of serving the most oppressed and exploited people in American society.” This transformative process cannot happen on its own. It’s interdependent with the construction of an org that’s separate from these lumpen formations, but is capable of bringing these formations into a wider mass movement. That’s what BBQ’s gang unification success has shown.

For us in the United States to do the equivalent of what BBQ has done, though, we’ll need to avoid the errors which have led to past failures at lumpen organizing in this country. When Rodolfo “Cheyenne” Cadena of the Mexican Mafia attempted to unite California’s gangs, the Mafia’s rivals in Nuestra Familia murdered him in prison, catalyzing a new cycle of retaliations. Cheyenne had been connected to the communist movement, working with the Black Panthers and the Brown Berets; but he couldn’t achieve the inter-gang unity that BBQ’s revolutionary movement has. This was because unlike BBQ, Cheyenne didn’t have the kind of institutional power that can actually unite gangs, and thereby overcome a crucial hurdle towards organizing the lumpen.

Such an effort can only succeed when you’ve built a popular movement beyond the gangs; which you can only do when your actions are oriented around advancing the people’s interests. And there is a contradiction between the interests of the gangs and the interests of the wider masses, including most of the lumpen masses. The gangs are based within self-interest, which is why the intelligence centers have been able to weaponize them. As we build our country’s workers movement, we must be vigilant of any efforts to use the gangs for attacking us, like they were used to sabotage Cheyenne’s project. Capitalism has cultivated innumerable types of social forces that are opposed towards popular revolution, and we can’t be naive about the threats which could come from these forces.

Should we keep our cadres secure, though, and continue building this movement, a U.S. parallel to BBQ will emerge. In the last year alone, the U.S. communist movement has exponentially expanded its initiatives to materially aid the people, and it’s going to gain a proportional amount of mass support; when you look at the feed of the American Communist Party’s official account, almost every other statement is about how the party’s members have been assisting their communities. If we keep building on this progress, the people will gain the tools for workers revolution, even as our ruling class acts to lumpenize them. Because when a workers party takes power, it will be able to bring the lumpenized masses back into the working class, constructing a new economic infrastructure in place of the one which capitalism destroyed.

————————————————————————

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.

Yemen’s unstoppable resistance, & how it shows we can overcome the empire’s terror campaign

Above: a graphic that the Yemen Military Twitter account recently posted

Right now, the U.S. empire is trying to terrorize the world’s people into submission. This is the main purpose of Trump’s bombing campaign against Yemen, the extermination effort against Gazans, and the inevitable next assaults on Lebanon and Iran: to put fear into anybody who may defy the hegemon. The hope is that Russia, Iran, and the geopolitical “swing states” will be intimidated by these displays, then back away from any serious anti-imperialist goals. 

The empire is also trying to put fear into the people of the United States, and the other imperialist countries. It’s criminalizing speech, disappearing people, and opening up the potential for citizens to be treated the same ways that non-citizens already are. This is only the beginning of the crackdown, and with the latest war escalations, our ruling class has the incentive to exponentially accelerate these repressive efforts. These are the objective realities we need to account for. Under no circumstances can we let our organizations become demoralized by these realities, though. 

Demoralization is the outcome our enemies depend on, both in their foreign offensives and in their war against the American people. Therefore, one of our central priorities must be to cultivate a revolutionary joy within our circles; a joy that comes from confidence in our ability to win. 

Healthy morale serves to defeat the illusion of invincibility that the imperial enemy is trying to create for itself; an illusion that it’s relying on in order for its next attacks to succeed. As Yemen’s resistance proves, the empire isn’t truly strong; not strong in the sense that it’s capable of eliminating all of its opponents with ease. This has never been the case for the U.S. empire, which got beaten back by the Korean and Chinese revolutionary forces right after it gained hegemon status. The world has also seen Washington’s weaknesses in Cuba, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Ukraine and Gaza; the illusion was truly shattered a long time ago. 

The narrative managers are trying to re-create the illusion by saying the empire has succeeded in Yemen, but this lie will become exposed Ansarallah continues to successfully enforce the Red Sea blockade. Yemen’s military stated today that “We affirm, as we confront the aggression, that our military position today is better than it was weeks ago”; in Yemen, the imperialists have picked a fight with a revolutionary force that can’t simply be bombed into defeat. Ansarallah’s sources of strength run very deep.

Such imperial defeats have been instrumental in inspiring peoples to rise up. Just in the last few years, this process has created a global revolutionary wave; because of Russia’s recent anti-imperialist successes, we’ve seen a domino effect of revolts across Africa’s Sahel region. Operation Al Aqsa Flood was also partly carried out because of the hope which Russia’s military gains had created. When we look at the enemy’s offensive in this context, where the forces of popular revolution have shown their true strength, then we gain a crucial source of hope. This history provides an entirely rational reason to expect victory in our own class struggle, no matter how extreme our government’s purge becomes.

The task of overcoming terrorism and discouragement is about more than looking to the success stories. Another essential aspect is to construct the networks that can keep our operations going, however many individual members may get taken away. It’s when we make these efforts to fortify our institutions, and create a backup plan for the movement, that the enemy’s attacks can be rendered ineffectual from a practical standpoint. When you know your org is ready to replace its leaders, and to keep gaining new members even amid intense repression, then you don’t have reason to believe the state’s attacks will work. These attacks won’t be able to destroy what we’ve built, or prevent us from building more. Which means the sacrifices we make will matter in a tangible way.

The state wants each new story of political persecution to intimidate us. But we can’t be intimidated if we’re connected to a political project that’s outmaneuvering the state. Any “loss” we experience will be something that we anticipated, and unable to disrupt the progress of our organizational machine. 

We have the blueprints for what an underground network would look like; there are communist parties that have needed to operate under dictatorial conditions, and that have written guides to how others can gain their resilience levels. That surveillance technology has advanced does not make such efforts futile; as recent anti-imperialist victories show us, these digital spying methods have vulnerabilities, ones that in certain ways make them weaker than human surveillance. When we’ve studied what these weaknesses are, we can outmaneuver even the most complex systems of control.

This organizational fortification project isn’t just about absorbing the state’s assaults. It’s about making these assaults backfire on the state, and create social disruptions that the counterinsurgency isn’t prepared to handle. A political persecution campaign can galvanize popular energy, drawing the masses into the struggle; that’s what we saw when Uhuru got raided by Biden’s FBI, and it’s what we’re seeing now with the Trump White House’s war on dissent.

Mahmoud Khalil has become a household name; Mohsen Madawi is on his way to becoming just as well-known; across the ideological spectrum, people see how alarming these detentions and disappearances are. The average American recognizes that acts of this nature represent an attack on everybody’s freedoms. Should we do the work to connect with the masses, and give the people an institutional outlet for fighting back, we’ll gain millions of allies.

An institution that I’ve lately been discussing is the American Communist Party, not just because of its worker organizing successes but because it can provide real protection for those who get targeted. When you’re part of an organization like this one, you’ll have a coordinated collective of friends across the country who are ready to assist you should the state come after you. Whether any given person wants to join ACP is their decision; but the biggest idea I seek to convey about ACP is that people should not be intimidated into distancing themselves from it, or from any other org that’s attracting the state’s attention. We must respond to these attacks by working to strengthen these orgs, or at least strengthen the coalitions they’re part of. That these groups are being targeted confirms they’re a threat to the system’s survival, and they’ll play a decisive role in the class war.

The incredible feats of resistance from the Palestinians, the Yemenis, and others show that things can change in unexpected ways, even amid the direst of circumstances. On their fronts in this struggle, these resisters continue to make progress in weakening the imperial structure. And their acts have provided new strategic and tactical lessons for revolutionaries around the world; through Ansarallah, for instance, I believe we’ve gained crucial knowledge which builds upon Che Guevara’s military theories.

At this moment throughout the American hemisphere, the revolutionary forces are in a defensive position. But in many places, the struggle has been reaching a highly advanced stage, a stage where the resisters can wear down the enemy’s infrastructure and resources. This trend will keep spreading to more countries, and in time it will reach the locations where the empire seemingly has the most control. When this happens, there will be forces which are ready to outmaneuver the imperial state, and lead the people towards victory.

————————————————————————

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.

By killing a peace deal, the Trump neocons have picked a fight with both the Russian & American peoples

Our imperialist ruling class has chosen which path it wants to take. It seeks an outcome where this proxy war with Russia keeps going, like the Vietnam War did after Nixon promised to negotiate its end. Even after Trump was elected on a mandate to end the Ukraine war, the neocons in his circle have managed to circumvent the popular will, and sabotage all efforts to reach a deal Russia would reasonably agree to. The latest indication of this came on Friday, when Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the administration will decide “in a matter of days” whether to simply “move on” from negotiating on Ukraine.

In all likelihood, the decision will be to give up on peace, and this was entirely predictable. In his first term, Trump advanced the empire’s cold war escalations against Russia even more than Obama did, and during his 2024 campaign everything showed he’d remained captured by the deep state. This was when we saw the rise of Silicon Valley MAGA, which has served as a facilitator in the effort to make neocons guide Trump’s policy. Some have gone along with Silicon Valley MAGA’s psyop, where tech billionaires get sold as anti-establishment heroes; but for much of the MAGA base, and the broader American masses, this scheme against the people is unacceptable. As Carlos Garrido has observed about how Trump’s working class supporters have reacted to what he’s done:

These discontented workers have not only taken note of Trump’s continued bellicosity (after he promised to be an “anti-war” president) and his failure to dismantle the deep state in any significant and not merely symbolic capacity, but also, how in the country itself no serious policies are being taken or proposed to improve the dire living situation of the working masses…This situation led the prominent working-class X influencer, “Texas Trucker,” to tweet at Trump, Secretary of the Department of Transportation Sean Duffy, and Vice President J.D. Vance the following: “It's sad. [Are] all truckers in America going to have to join the American Communist Party to get justice in America. They seem to be the only ones standing with us and for us.” The melancholy in this statement demonstrates the awareness of Trump’s betrayal of MAGA, and the realization that the essential demands of the MAGA working class base can only be realized through another political project.

The Trump White House will do its best to distract from this next betrayal it’s planning, where the hopes for a Ukraine peace agreement get destroyed beyond all repair. But no matter how much culture war propaganda our ruling class promotes, it won’t reverse the great consciousness shift that’s happening. It won’t stop Americans from experiencing the economic destruction that our government is engineering, or from seeing how much the wars have to do with this destruction. More and more of the American people are going to seek a solution to this great outrage. And by doing so, they’ll be aligning themselves with the fight of the Russian people, who are now tasked with fighting off an enemy which has shown it isn’t interested in compromise.

If this conflict won’t be resolved through a compromise, then it can only be resolved through the full defeat of those who started it. Through the destruction of Ukraine’s fascist U.S. coup regime, the restoration of democracy to Ukraine, and the election of a Ukrainian president who won’t continue assisting Washington’s aggression’s. These things were always indispensable for reaching peace; any “peace” that doesn’t involve the ousting of the Banderite junta would be nothing more than a temporary hold-off before war inevitably starts again. A compromise on Ukraine would not have been a good thing; only through denazification can another crisis like this one be prevented. 

This is a reality that’s so often been ignored, even within much of the antiwar movement. Both the liberal pro-NATO zealots, and the liberal-aligned “antiwar” left orgs, have sought to obscure why Russia got involved in Ukraine in the first place. It entered this fight because Ukraine was taken over by a Nazi coup regime, and this regime will continue instigating conflict until Russia forces a fundamental change. 

Part of the Russian people’s struggle has been to make its bourgeois government authentically pursue denazification in Ukraine, and not capitulate to Washington. So far, the Kremlin has become willing to state that denazification is non-negotiable, which is worth something; Russia has evidently taken strong enough of a stance that Washington feels it won’t get what it wants from negotiations. The question is whether the Kremlin will act consistently with this statement, and not allow the continued existence of any state formation that’s controlled by the imperialists. 

As Dimitrios Patelis of the World Anti-Imperialist Platform has observed, thus far Russia hasn’t actually tried to bring about such an outcome, leading to “stagnation” in many areas of Russia’s strategic progress. And this problem can only be rectified through rebuilding the proletarian movement, both in Russia and across the globe. Writes Patelis:

The stagnation in Ukraine and the strategically significant tactical successes of the [imperialist] axis in West Asia and Transcaucasia show the decline and exhaustion of the power, traditional relations and prestige that the RF drew from some achievements (technological, military, ideological, etc.) of the USSR and the internationalist anti-imperialist policy of early socialism in the 20th century…The same is true of the remnants/shadows of those who were once associated with the system of early socialism, the “non-aligned movement” and anti-imperialism…Mere negation, the rejection of the domination of the imperialist axis is not enough. The generic and vague, abstract anti-imperialism, which in reality leaves the strategic initiative to the enemy, is no longer enough. A conscious foundation and formulation of the positive prospect, the alternative strategy and tactics of the pole of socialism and anti-imperialism is what is needed

Such is the shared mission of the Russian and American people at this moment: to build a popular movement, specifically of the kind which seeks final victory for the working class. This revolutionary process will look different in Russia than it does here, because Russia’s biggest problem is attacks from the outside. But as the CPRF has pointed out, the country’s bourgeoisie continue to perpetuate unacceptable conditions for the proletariat; it’s also holding back the anti-imperialist struggle. 

The task of defeating Russia’s bourgeoisie is up to the Russian people; it’s necessary to criticize Russia’s liberal ruling class, but as Americans our primary task lies within our own class struggle. For us in the United States to overcome our capitalist crisis, and act as effective allies of imperialism’s global targets, we must learn from the Marxist-Leninist tradition of our Russian counterparts. This means building a real mass proletarian party, a project which the ACP’s members are greatly helping with.

In all parts of the capitalist world, deepening contradictions are forcing the workers to act. And now that the rulers of capitalism’s core have decided to continue their assault on Russia’s people, the workers in both Russia and America have the task of jointly defeating the hegemon. For our purposes as U.S. communists, what we must focus on is undermining the imperial war machine from within, and providing Russia’s war effort with real support; the support that can only come from a strong international workers movement.

By killing the prospects for compromise on Ukraine, the neocons have furthered the liberal “antiwar” movement’s collapse, making it so that there are only two camps with real relevance: those who support the empire’s offensive, and those who seek to defeat the empire by any means necessary. With Palestine, we’re seeing the same process: the liberal Zionists are getting sidelined by the outright genocidal faction, creating a clearer polarization between the pro-genocide camp and the pro-liberation camp. 

In all areas of our geopolitical struggle, boundaries of demarcation are becoming easier to see; and the liberal actors who are “neutral” in this conflict, or who promote a vague “anti-imperialism,” have been exposing themselves. This has everything to do with the escalation of our third world war, and the ever-greater strain the war is putting on the capitalist system. Through collective organization, scientific socialism, and the mobilization of the masses, the world’s workers will thwart the hegemon’s great assault.

————————————————————————

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.

The global communist resurgence, capital’s great crackdown, & the era of civil wars that we’ll need to navigate

We are in the transitional stage between when the USA started off its own demise, and when the global working class has won its final victory. Washington was the true loser of the Cold War; its self-destructive imperial schemes guaranteed that the U.S. would keep losing influence, and that communism would keep rising. 

This is the conclusion that I credit ACP chairman Haz Al-Din with guiding me towards through his recent post, which said: “Communism won the cold war. The West thought it had the last laugh - now Trump is America's Gorbachev. The fall of the USSR did not defeat the Communist political system as China shows. But the fall of the USA will finally erase 'liberal democracy' from the face of the Earth.” That assessment is completely correct. The question is how much of a cost the struggle to defeat liberalism will have.

Imperialists get ready for the next stage in their offensive

As “liberal democracy” becomes untenable, it will be replaced by liberal dictatorship, at least until the people manage to overthrow this dictatorship. We’re getting closer to that stage every day, with the Trump White House’s present anti-democratic maneuvers only being a set-up for what will come next. After Trump is out, the dominant wing of our ruling class is going to hit back, and it will take advantage of all the ways our civil liberties have already been eroded.

This crackdown in the empire’s heart won’t be able to stop China from continuing to rise. Nor will it stop many more countries from kicking out the imperialists. It’s likely that the next wave of revolutions has already started; the Sahel nations have defeated neo-colonialism, Sri Lanka has come to have a Marxist-Leninist government, and Haiti is undergoing a popular revolution via BBQ’s movement. But the USA’s internal war against dissent will enable Washington to further advance its offensive in West Asia; and depending on how successful Americans are at building up our anti-imperialist movement, this assault will reach East Asia as well. 

When I say “Americans,” I include the peoples across the whole hemisphere. The repression against U.S. Palestine supporters is part of a larger counter-revolutionary sabotage effort, one the empire has been carrying out across its “backyard.” Washington has been able to get Brazil to obstruct Venezuela and Cuba’s entry into BRICS, with Lula taking on a gatekeeping, obstructionist role throughout Latin America. This makes it all the more difficult for Cuba and Venezuela to persevere through their economic crises; which is not something they can’t overcome, but it’s putting the hemisphere’s revolutionary forces in a much more compromised place. 

In Ecuador, the neo-colonial president Daniel Noboa has declared martial law right before an election, and he’s been able to “win” an invalid vote without serious backlash; when you look up the election, all the headlines portray it as being perfectly normal. This contrasts with when south Korea’s Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law in December. Yoon’s blatant assault on democracy caused an international outrage that Washington had to distance itself from; it galvanized the revolutionary energy of the country’s people, and set back the empire’s plans for war in East Asia. Noboa’s anti-democratic act represents a successful consolidation of power for the anti-popular forces, where those who’ve pointed out the election’s lack of integrity are now being pushed out of the discourse. It parallels how the U.S. media has been working to de-center the pro-Palestine movement, which it’s largely done with success.

The trend is towards the revolutionary forces continuing to make gains across Eurasia and Africa, while they’re forced to go on the defensive across the Americas and West Asia. All the while, the Palestinian genocide keeps accelerating, compelling the strongest anti-imperialist forces (like Yemen) into action while the weaker forces fall to the enemy’s onslaught. Syria has been taken over by genocidal Salafists, Lebanon has been severely weakened due to this, and the imperialists have been greatly emboldened in their campaign to destroy Iran. 

The hegemon is absolutely on the offensive right now, and we must treat the situation as such; as anti-imperialists, we cannot embrace the Trump administration’s narrative about how it wants an authentic “peace deal” with Russia and Iran. The U.S. will only accept deals where Russia has agreed to become a client state again, and Iran has abandoned any serious efforts at resistance. Every compromise with the enemy lets it take more lives in Palestine and elsewhere, as well as repress the working class more effectively.

The effort to distract from class struggle, & the conditions we must prepare for

Appeasing the enemy will come at a fatal cost; this is the reality that authentically revolutionary parties, like Russia’s CPRF, have accounted for. As the CPRF assessed in an analysis from this week, a crucial part of our task is to combat the forces that claim to be counter-hegemonic, but that truly promote reformism:

Today, the situation in the world left movement resembles the turn of the XIX and XX centuries. At that time, supporters of "economism", "legal Marxism", Bernsteinism actively knocked the focus of attention of the proletarians from a victorious course to a dead-end one. They advocated a partial improvement of the situation of the working class without encroachment on the political system. They considered parliamentary activity to be the main means of struggle. This kind of installation is not just a skew. They lead directly to treason. In order to avoid such a sad fate for the communists, it is necessary to remember the proletarian character of our party, confidently express the interests of the workers, and subordinate the parliamentary struggle to them…

The legacy of ideological fraud is still alive today. The same Mr. Trump, scourged Biden's team, willingly mixes the neoliberalism of the globalists and the socialism of the communists with all their opposites. This is also done by a large part of Russian experts who wander from one TV channel to another. And those European leftists who followed the renegades forgot the very essence of our movement. Today they are much more determined to defend the "values" of non-traditional orientation than the principles of proletarian struggle.

The party concludes that “Our international activities should serve to consolidate the left-wing movement. And the case should be conducted on two contours. The first is Communist Parties on a solid Marxist-Leninist platform. The second circuit is consistently left-wing forces ready to defend the interests of workers without replacing them with ‘gender’ and other false goals. The basic platform for our unity is the struggle for justice, against imperialism, neo-fascism and NATO aggression.” This effort to combat the imperialism-aligned left is a battle that we in the U.S. have won. Identity-focused leftism has been quite irrelevant in this country at least since November 2024, so it’s now counterproductive for communists to address the left. (The situation is different for the communists in Russia, where they’re fighting off incursions from the “progressive” imperialist NGOs.) 

At this stage, our main enemy in the ideological struggle is the current which says we can defeat monopoly capital without engaging in class struggle, or without having a workers revolution. This current primarily exists in the “dissident right,” the controlled opposition conservative movement that critiques the system but is fundamentally loyal to capital.

There’s an element of this movement that seeks to run cover for Trump’s foreign policy, and that pushes the “Trump will beat the deep state” narrative. But at this point, Trump has been utterly discredited as a “peace president”; so the bigger narrative threat from the right is now the element which simply tries to steer people away from political involvement. That cultivates an audience of individuals who only engage with politics online, without getting organized. This is how the “anti-Zionist” right-wing alt media helps Zionism: by spreading complacency among those who’ve rejected the propaganda. The danger this type of narrative manipulation poses is that it will render the masses passive as the enemy keeps advancing; that it will prevent mass mobilization while the war escalations continue, our remaining liberties disappear, and the working class gets crushed by degrowth policies.

This terminally online type of “dissident right” politics is distinct from the more traditional kind, where people who got radicalized towards the far right were actively preparing for a civil war scenario. As organized white nationalist groups have declined in membership, and the movement has migrated to the internet, the ruling class hasn’t tried to re-organize this movement. If the state were to use the far right for its counterrevolutionary terrorism, this would expose the state’s Nazistic nature; the ultraviolent “antifa” radlibs are now more likely to be the ones who get this assignment. Today, the far right’s main role is to funnel people with revolutionary potential towards an ideology that’s designed to make them apathetic.

What communists must do is fill up the ground that’s been willingly ceded by our enemies on both the left and the right. These forces can’t do what’s required for building an effective mass movement, because they exist as appendages to the ruling class. The left has lost relevance after isolating itself from the masses, and tying itself to the Democratic Party. Now the far right is finding itself unable to find a presence outside of social media, because it’s mostly abandoned the survivalist and militia practices that used to give it major potential for gaining territory. At this point, it’s the communists who are making the most progress in building such an on-the-ground presence, and the ACP is the reason for this. The “dissident right” isn’t going around the country giving out food and clothes, harvesting crops, or aiding disaster victims. The ACP is doing these things. This alone gives us a major new strategic advantage.

The neo-Nazi militias are still there, but because the state views them as a liability, they’ll be a secondary threat. The right-wingers who the feds actually have a reason to utilize for violent ends are the lone wolf incel shooters, which mainly act as false flag perpetrators. Amid the system’s collapse, our ruling class seeks to engineer chaos that it can control, and that counteracts revolutionary developments like the pro-Luigi movement. 

The civil war we’re facing is not a battle of left vs right, but an assault carried out by our government against the masses. It’s being waged by anti-social elements that have been created by capitalism’s illnesses, and that the intelligence centers are able to weaponize. The role of communists is to defend the people against this chaos, and give them the means to overthrow their capitalist dictatorship. 

These are the conditions we must navigate during this stage, when our ruling class is determined to create a third world war but knows such a war will destabilize the system. This era, the multipolar era, is a time when expanded conflicts are inevitable; both the imperialists and their enemies have been compelled to advance, and seismic shifts in the global order are sure to happen. We’ve also crossed a series of technological thresholds, where both governments and rebels can exploit the new tools they’ve been given. 

In these circumstances, where the capitalist world is getting “Israelified” by adopting Zionism’s policing tech, revolutionary forces around the world must take example from those who’ve outmaneuvered the Zionists. As I’ve written about, the achievements of the Yemeni resistance have updated Che Guevara’s military theory for the digital surveillance age; and the Palestinian resistance has expanded upon this theory. The world’s capitalist states are anticipating that their own peoples will rise up, so they’re implementing the same techno-tyranny that the Zionists have imposed on the Palestinians. But this only ensures that our era will be an age of civil wars, because it forces the global proletariat to adopt more assymetrical methods for rebelling.

We’ve seen proof that the modern systems of techno-oppression can be beaten by a revolutionary movement. The oppressors can inflict apocalyptic levels of damage, but the masses can persist amid even the most extreme efforts to terrorize them; this is what we’re seeing in Gaza. Our ruling class wants to make Gaza into the new global normal; the genocide is partly about letting the world’s other peoples know that the same could be done to them. This does not mean these peoples are helpless against the enemy, though. The forces of popular revolution are gathering to strike against the hegemon, and their counter-offensive is already underway. We in the United States will continue building up our workers movement, and when the time comes, we’ll fulfill our own role in this great uprising.

————————————————————————

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.