One of imperial propaganda’s main goals today is to hide the importance of the workers struggle in shaping recent global events. Communism is what’s been behind the rise of China; Washington has been escalating tensions with north Korea because it’s a communist country; Russia took action in Ukraine because from the start of the Ukraine crisus, the Russian communists had been pressuring their government to take the fascist threat seriously. Yet in its efforts to shape the narrative about these things, our media has tended to avoid mentioning communism. This is indicative of a shift in imperial strategy, undertaken in response to a fear that the world will undergo a new wave of workers revolutions.
Since the USSR ended, we’ve seen a reverse red scare. My generation, and much of the generation before that, did not grow up hearing that China and north Korea are bad because they’re communist; within this era’s prevailing mode of propaganda, the fact that these countries are run by communist parties doesn’t usually come up. The most default story we’re told is that these places are simply “dictatorships,” or “authoritarian.” And for the people in these younger generations who’ve come to feel like capitalism isn’t the best system—which are many—the narrative we’re presented with is that these countries are socialist only in name.
We’re told that China is a capitalist country, of the same character as the United States but more “authoritarian,” and that the DPRK is some sort of extreme version of this. A popular lie among these left-adjacent propaganda sources is that the DPRK is a “fascist” state, one that’s embraced a Korean racist ultra-nationalism.
The anti-imperialist movement still has a way to go before it gets the bulk of the USA’s people to unlearn these lies, though we have been seeing some encouraging signs on this front. Since the pandemic started, and China proved itself as being vastly superior to our government in the handling of crises, being pro-China has become a more acceptable position on the left. And across the ideological spectrum, including in more conservative circles, there’s come to be a lot more conscious opposition to Washington’s efforts at stoking wars; which has translated to widespread skepticism of the voices that say we need to hate or fear China and the DPRK.
Most Americans haven’t yet rejected the anti-communist narratives, but they have already adopted the attitude that America needs to get out of all wars, and solve its own problems; which contradicts the State Department’s rhetoric about how we must defeat our supposed foreign enemies, or “save” people who are being oppressed by “dictators.” The next step beyond this consciousness shift is for the bulk of Americans to look at China’s economic model (and also the DPRK’s model, when they’re exposed to information about it) with the feeling that we can apply the same successful practices to our own society. This is certainly a scenario that our ruling class fears, and to try to prevent it, capital’s propagandists have used a new discourse management trick: portray the biggest modern socialist project as being just another capitalist dystopia.
For a while, this trick worked quite well. After being so heavily exposed to the fabricated story of a “massacre” in Tiananmen Square, and seeing caricatures of a Chinese society that had supposedly been turned bleak by corporate greed, a lot of Americans saw China as an exaggerated version of their own grim capitalist reality. In both China and the United States, though, the conditions have been continuing to change, and this has started to bring greater understanding among Americans about what China truly is. Which has opened up more potential for them to become aware of the DPRK’s real conditions, as well as the role the communist movement has had in swaying Russia towards standing up to NATO’s aggressions.
In a factual sense, those bleak, out-of-context images of China no longer represent conditions that exist. In the last fifteen years alone, China has massively reduced its pollution, successfully cleaning up the cities that we saw filled with smog. The PRC has also become quite rich, compared to when it had been reeling from the devastation caused by colonialism’s assaults. Through social media, people are able to see the ways China’s society has benefited from its industrial development, epic infrastructural projects, and dedication to technological enhancements.
The evidence of Chinese excellence is there for all to see, and many Americans have been seeing it; the question we must answer for these Americans is exactly how China did this. Which is where we have an opportunity to not just inform people about how the old story on China is outdated; but teach them about the workers democracy model which let China get so far. It’s not that China suddenly became better, because Socialism with Chinese Characteristics was always the superior system compared to capitalism; the difference compared to twenty years ago is this system has had more time to fulfill its purpose.
We need to make it clear to the U.S. masses that the PRC couldn’t have gotten here without a planned economy. That through reorganizing their society around collective ownership, and ending the anarchy of production under capitalism, the Chinese people were able to throw off the old constraints on their potential. The liberals who claim it was capitalism that made China rich cannot win this debate against us; not if we argue with a real understanding of Marxism-Leninism.
We must avoid the reductive statements that “progressive” liberals use to advocate for socialism, where they portray “socialism” as being nothing more than “making the economy democratic” or “having no rich and no poor.” We are communists because we want everyone to become rich, and we see that the factor preventing this is the presence of a parasitic system. Communism is not simply “more democracy,” but a process of civilizational development, one that reveals the true potential within a given society.
That communism has revealed so much of Chinese civilization’s potential does represent an opportunity for getting more people behind communism. Communists do not win, though, by talking to the people about Marxism; they’ve always won by showing the people the tangible ways their lives will be improved by joining with the revolutionary project. This is the only way we can actually “sell” communism to the masses, to the extent that this is necessary; because communism is fundamentally about revealing what’s already there, all we’re truly doing is leading the people towards what they were always capable of.
This is the central part of our mission, and it’s what can give real credibility to all of our analyses about what communism is doing around the globe. It’s necessary for us to talk about China’s story with communism; we should also inform the people about how Russia’s communist party pushed for the Ukraine operation, and how it took this position due to a need for defending the Donbass from an ethnic cleansing plan. The task of educating people about Korean socialism is essential too, and not just because it lets Americans inoculate themselves against war propaganda; studying Korea’s Juche idea is indispensable towards knowing how to build socialism here, because Juche is universal. To get a Socialism with American Characteristics, though, we will need to take an active role in the struggle.
The communists in these other countries have provided us with unprecedented opportunities for advancing this fight. China’s rise weakened U.S. capital, and threw countless variables into the geopolitical situation; Russia brought this multipolar shift to the next stage, while forcing the global communist movement to choose which side it’s on; in Korea, Palestine, and the other small countries the empire is attacking, the revolutionary forces are refusing to let capital win, which aids the struggle in all places. We will fulfill our own obligations in this fight, and make communism into the weapon that smashes the heart of the empire.
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