Zionism has ushered in an American Nazi regime, & we must be prepared to fight back against what it’s planning

If our solidarity movements are going to survive, they’ll need to prepare for a scenario where the state has fully activated its tools for violence. Where the United States and the other countries that back the Gaza genocide have implemented the “Jakarta Method,” the model for political mass murder that was embraced by Indonesia’s U.S.-installed dictatorship. Gaza is the most substantial and dire form of capitalism’s violence right now, and we need to treat Gaza with the most urgency; but the prospect of an American Jakarta is something that we in the United States also must turn our attention to. These things are completely connected; if we can’t defend our organizations against what the state plans to do soon, the Palestinians will see some of their most important allies crushed, setting back liberation struggles worldwide.

We know that an American Jakarta now looms so close because during these last couple of years, the U.S. empire has gone into unprecedented crisis mode in its efforts at rescuing the Zionist entity. The U.S. ruling class, enamored with a worshipful obsession around “Israel” and desperate to continue this idolatry, has implemented a dark cultural shift within our ruling institutions; a shift where the government has taken on openly Nazistic rhetoric and practices. This shift was already well underway with NATO’s backing of Ukrainian Nazis, but even moreso in the Trump era, Washington has embraced a policy of openly assisting fascists around the globe. 

Our government no longer cares about hiding anything, least of all the fact that “Israel” is a Nazi state; when the illusions of liberal “democracy” and “humanitarianism” have been completely exposed by Gaza, the imperial state’s next resort is to turn its own crimes into points of pride. The president and his cabinet members share videos of the U.S. bombing entire crowds of civilians; Trump says the plan is to ethnically cleanse Gaza, instead of pretending to have humane intentions; the State Department deploys actual Nazi groups, like the Infidels biker gang, to assist in the extermination of Gaza’s people. We need to be taking serious note of actions like these, and using them as references in our efforts to fight back against the state’s violence.

Our class enemies have put together an apparatus that would let them murder large numbers of political targets, just like Indonesia and other U.S. puppet regimes did. And with the normalization of open state violence that our rulers have carried out, a domestic version of these operations would no longer need as much of a narrative justification as used to be the case. This is the new level of danger for everyone that the Gaza genocide has brought about. There are still limitations on the imperial state, though; limitations that come from the blowback it may bring upon itself if it attacks the people. Our government is no longer concerned about looking righteous, but it has to consider how effective of a resistance the popular masses could mount. So for an American Jakarta to happen, its architects will need to find a way to break up any efforts at fighting back.

The strategy they’ve adopted for this is to give up the pretenses of bourgeois “democracy,” while using engineered terrorist acts to fortify support for this dictatorship. We are seeing ruling-class politics shift in a “trad” conservative direction, perhaps permanently; and this effort to freeze the political pendulum in place is being sold as a way to protect against left-wing violence.

In Portland and the other cities targeted by Trump’s National Guard deployment efforts, the White House is doing a trial run for this operation to crush the masses under the pretext of defending them. For this crackdown to be implemented without unifying the people in defiance, the state will need to orchestrate many more false flag attacks, with the violent acts all being blamed on “the left” despite whatever evidence to the contrary. This demagogic message, primarily designed to vilify the pro-Palestine movement, will need to be repeated endless times. When the people have become so disillusioned with both imperialist parties, the only way to prevent them from uniting is by sowing profound confusion. By convincing Americans that their neighbors are part of a movement to commit terrorism, so whatever retributions that come upon them are justified.

This was how Indonesia’s dictatorship rallied many regular people to participate in the killings of suspected communists: by fabricating stories about the communists engaging in sick acts, and putting out calls to combat this supposed threat. In modern America, though, the problem the Jakarta Method has run into is that the people aren’t nearly as polarized as they used to be. The bulk of the people have become united in their anger at our government, with much of Trump’s base becoming increasingly disillusioned and looking for an alternative. Most people have rejected the culture war baits, and have come together in opposing the violence that the ruling class is bringing upon our society. Only an anti-social minority are willing to start taking part in this violence. So for an American Jakarta to be viable, the state will need psyops that conflate its political targets with the anti-social forces; that depict communists or Palestine supporters as Antifa terror agents.

As we build up the organizational structures for surviving a purge, a role we must take on is to show the people that the struggle we’re carrying forth represents the opposite of the ultraviolent elements. We’re the force that’s here to defend the people against this chaos which our elites are bringing onto them. We’ll prove this by staying disciplined in the face of culture war provocations, and by expanding our efforts to aid the communities that are being impacted by the country’s collapse. The state will respond by trying to destroy us, but if we keep fighting for our democratic rights during every step of the crackdown, these attacks will be seriously impeded. 

The key is that we warn the people about the threats to their freedoms, as well as organize them. The latter aspect is something that’s being neglected even by many of the biggest voices speaking out against the crackdown; for example, Tucker Carlson has been warning about the Trump White House banning free speech, but from commentators like him there’s a lack of clarity on how to fight back. We need to provide the people with the means for collective organization, or they’ll be helpless against the highly organized governmental assault that’s only just beginning.

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The scheme to engineer our unemployment crisis, & the counter-force to this that Luigi represents

What we all must understand about the Luigi movement is that its class origins and motivations are fundamentally different from those of the ultraviolent left. The leftists and liberals who glorify political violence for its own sake are not coming from a working-class perspective, unlike the pro-Luigi masses are. Petty-bourgeois radicals, lumpen chaos agents, and professional-managerial class liberals are where we’re seeing the sentiments that say it’s okay to murder someone just for thinking differently. From the Luigi supporters, though, the message and the intentions are not the same. In their case, the sentiment isn’t even really about celebrating violence; the focus is on the victims of the violence that our economic system inflicts, and the movement’s participants are unified behind among the most positive of goals: to fight back against what our ruling class is doing to us.

This is the kind of social phenomenon that emerges in response to the crisis the elites are engineering, where as part of a deliberate design by the Federal Reserve and the banks, more and more people are being thrown into desperation. After the pandemic recovery created a brief period where job seekers held the leverage, Wall Street executives stated in a memo that they sought for the workers to lose this power, which would require increased unemployment. The Fed raised interest rates, putting on the pressure that would lead employers to reduce head count; now even according to the absurdly under-reported official unemployment numbers, there are more unemployed people than there are job openings. (With much of these supposed job openings being “ghost jobs” that companies falsely list as available.)

The mass will to resist this assault on working Americans is there; the Luigi movement proves it. To know how to organize the masses in their present conditions, where the ruling class is increasingly taking away their ability to work, we must look to history. We must look to William Z. Foster’s solution for countering the bourgeoisie’s attempts at dividing the employed from the unemployed:

The question of the unity of the unemployed with the employed, especially during periods of deep industrial depression, is a matter of the most vital consequence in the working out of a successful strike strategy. The policy of the employers in this respect is simple and brutal. They try to drive a wedge between the unemployed and the employed, to make the unemployed a hunger-driven mass ready to take the jobs of the employed when they venture to strike in defense of their standards of living.

As usual, the reactionary trade union leaders, with their traditional policy of abandoning the unemployed to their own devices, assist the employers in using them as a weapon against the employed workers. Many a strike has been lost from this cause.

A task of the strike strategist is to unite the unemployed and the employed in a common fight against the employers. But as in the case of so many problems of strike strategy, work on the solution of this task must be started long before the outbreak of a particular strike, and even before the growth of the industrial crisis produces its vast army of unemployed. It must be a settled policy in the unions to identify the interests of the employed with those of the unemployed. There must be a whole series of measures fought for, such as the shorter work-day and work-week, equal division of work, etc., which tends to eliminate the number of unemployed.

These are the next steps that the Luigi movement—or rather the workers movement—must take in order to turn this revolutionary energy into something materially impactful. The core of the Luigi movement’s base is the proletariat, and there will always be a proletariat under a class society. But with America’s de-industrialization, the proletariat has been reduced in its numbers, with the displaced former working-class people then forced to take on different class roles. These roles don’t make them into class enemies of the proletariat; but as long as ruling-class politics defines which messages the masses are exposed to, and which political tendencies they’re able to access, the unemployed or otherwise de-proletarianized masses will be separated from the proletariat.

The Luigi phenomenon and other class-conscious trends like it provide a counter towards these tactics of division, because such trends are able to unify all kinds of exploited people around the idea of justice. We should place great value in this benefit that comes from anti-systemic movements which function memetically, and cut through the anti-solidarity propaganda that our ruling class targets the masses with. It’s these movements that can unify people amid manufactured culture war dramas, or lead people to form bonds of solidarity rather than treat each other like competitive objects, or commit to the class struggle when they would otherwise stay on a passive path.

When it comes to the workers struggle in particular, one of the biggest obstacles towards progress that we see in the post-industrial “gig economy” era is when workers lack a sense of permanence in their current employer, so don’t see a reason to fight for long-term benefits. This also has to do with how in conditions where hiring is becoming more and more rare, those who do have work are scared to rebel; which is a mentality that the bosses have very deliberately cultivated. One of the biggest reasons companies have adopted the “ghost jobs” practice is because this makes their employees feel replaceable, adding another layer to the sense of precarity among the workers. Our class enemies want the employed workers to be psychologically controlled by the threat of becoming jobless, and want the jobless to react towards their desperation by turning against their class allies.

The desperate turning against their class allies looks like mass shooters murdering fellow community members, lumpenized individuals gravitating towards ultraviolent counter-gangs, or people with no economic prospects embracing a criminal lifestyle. Part of the element that we’ve seen wantonly celebrating political violence is this lumpen current which feels alienated from society, and has therefore stopped having respect for life or for death. 

There certainly are anti-social forces within our society, ones that the feds are doing everything they can to nurture. A good sign, though, is that these forces have not been able to co-opt Luigi, because it’s against the interests of our ruling class for Luigi to stay in the discourse. We saw this when a Blackstone CEO was targeted by a vigilante attack in July, and the media buried the story to avoid sparking a new conversation about Luigi. The ideas behind the Luigi movement have the power to overthrow our capitalist dictatorship. If we use the image of Luigi as a way to rally the masses, and connect these masses with the history of working-class organizing, we will build a movement that no ruling-class tactics can thwart.

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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 KKE opportunists want us to de-mobilize amid imperialism’s offensive. We must go on the advance instead.

“All forces to the defense of the city of Lenin!”—1941 poster

When the Communist Party of Greece and its associated organizations promote the “neither Washington nor Beijing” stance, they’re engaging in the equivalent kind of opportunism to that of Trotsky during the first world war. This is the opportunism where, in a situation of imperialist war, a self-described socialist sidesteps their duty to back the revolutionary forces. Today, this practice looks like the KKE portraying the present third world war as an inter-imperialist conflict, and posturing as the true revolutionary camp. In Trotsky’s time, wrote Lenin, it looked like Trotsky refusing to support the defeat of one’s own government:

To desire Russia’s defeat, Trotsky writes, is “an uncalled-for and absolutely unjustifiable concession to the political methodology of social-patriotism, which would replace the revolutionary struggle against the war and the conditions causing it, with an orientation—highly arbitrary in the present conditions—towards the lesser evil” (Nashe Slovo No. 105). This is an instance of high-flown phraseology with which Trotsky always justifies opportunism. A “revolutionary struggle against the war” is merely an empty and meaning less exclamation, something at which the heroes of the Second International excel, unless it means revolutionary action against one’s own government even in wartime. One has only to do some thinking in order to understand this.

The modern political actors who’ve taken on Trotsky’s role are the ones which don’t desire defeat for the U.S. imperial hegemon; which depict all of Washington’s adversaries as themselves having imperialist tendencies (like the KKE does), and thereby opposes taking action against the actual imperialist forces. In the post-war world, when the United States has become the center of global capital and all the world’s capital exists peripherally to it, the U.S. is the only country that can properly be called imperialist. Even the European colonial powers are now just satellites to Washington, with their capitalist ruling classes being only extensions of American capital. Therefore, to be against both Washington and the countries it’s attacking is to do what the opportunists of World War I did, and effectively side with the capitalists in opposing revolutionary struggle.

In the historical context that Lenin was navigating, the correct strategy to apply was one of aiding in the defeat of his own government—which was imperialist at the time—to create an opening for workers victory. In our circumstances, the correct strategy for revolutionaries in all countries is to mutually aid in the defeat of the U.S. government. To stand against this project is to stand against national and class liberation, as Lenin observed the Second International was doing:

Those who stand for the “neither-victory-nor-defeat” slogan are in fact on the side of the bourgeoisie and the opportunists, for they do not believe in the possibility of inter national revolutionary action by the working class against their own governments, and do not wish to help develop such action, which, though undoubtedly difficult, is the only task worthy of a proletarian, the only socialist task. It is the proletariat in the most backward of the belligerent Great Powers which, through the medium of their party, have had to adopt—especially in view of the shameful treachery of the German and French Social-Democrats—revolutionary tactics that are quite unfeasible unless they “contribute to the defeat” of their own government, but which alone lead to a European revolution, to the permanent peace of socialism, to the liberation of humanity from the horrors, misery, savagery and brutality now prevailing.

The KKE’s camp justifies opposing the victory of the anti-imperialist states by pointing to the capitalist elements within China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, and so forth. If capitalists still exist in these countries, this camp argues, then siding with them means choosing one imperialism over another. But which role do these capitalists have in relation to the hub of global capital? Are these capitalists truly independent from the United States, as the KKE’s narrative says? They’re certainly not independent. In order to advance their interests, they’ve needed to do the best they can to connect with U.S. capital, because today it’s solely U.S. capital that has the ability to not be dependent. This is what it means to have global monopoly financial power centralized in one country: everywhere else, the bourgeoisie have to act subordinate to that country’s capital.

This reality alone disproves all assertions about imperialism coming from China or its partners, and it shows where the strongest of today’s revolutionary forces are. Inside the imperialist countries, the revolutionary momentum can be found among the class-conscious masses, and the workers parties or other institutions that these masses hold control over. China’s ruling communist party has successfully made the capitalists subordinate; Russia’s communist party has pressured the bourgeois government into waging the war against fascist Kiev; and even without any communist party being a real player within Iran, the Iranian economy has numerous socialist aspects that could only come from the proletariat’s influence.

This doesn’t mean the capitalist forces within these countries pose no danger. In Iran most of all, there is a real risk of the national bourgeoisie pushing aside the working class. For which purpose, though, are these capitalists seeking to gain more influence? It’s not to carry out a parallel imperialist project, because that’s not feasible under the present global financial system. It’s to sell their countries out to U.S. finance capital. This is the only thing that they would be in any position to do if they were to win: expand the power of the one imperialist power which still exists.

By creating confusion about the character and role of the states that are opposing the hegemon, the KKE’s lackeys are acting to de-mobilize the revolutionary forces at a critical moment. They’re getting much of the world’s non-ruling communist parties to repeat the Second International’s error, and seek neither-victory-nor-defeat in this anti-imperialist war. We within this struggle must respond by furthering our advance; by fighting against the hegemon’s global offensive much more ferociously than we are now.

Part of this means combating the KKE, whose role as a backer of numerous CPs makes it the largest problem within international Marxism at the moment. Our main task, though, is constructing a real alternative to the stagnant, backward “socialist” politics that the KKE represents. Our cause can only succeed on the basis of rebuilding the global workers movement, and using the proletariat’s unique economic leverage to undermine the hegemon. For the communists in the anti-imperialist countries, this means furthering the ability of the workers to make their governments resist the imperial aggressor. For those of us in the imperial sphere, this means organizing the workers towards sabotaging the war machine, and working to overthrow their governments. We know which roles we have; if we can stop the KKE from obscuring these roles, we’ll be able to advance our mission much faster.

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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 Zionist entity wants to take America down with it, & the USA’s people are waking up to this

The Zionist lobby is relevant not because “Israel” controls the United States, but because our ruling class has been irrationally seduced by the lobby’s ideology. For generations now, the bulk of the U.S. empire’s elites have been enamored with the myth of “Israel”; a myth that has no truth to it, and that therefore will utterly distort somebody’s sense of how the world works. Most of our class enemies believe their own propaganda when it comes to “Israel,” which is an error that comes with an ever-heavier cost to the imperial structure. The Zionist entity is in unprecedented existential danger, and so is trying to start a regional war with the hope of saving itself; which has entailed new inter-elite conflicts, and new divisions that the revolutionary forces can exploit.

Our political establishment is facing a reckoning on “Israel.” It’s being confronted with the reality that today, when Washington has already gained the loyalty of almost all the Arab states, the Zionist project is a liability for imperial power. The imperialists started on the project to colonize Palestine because at the time, Palestine was the most important piece of land in West Asia for them to prioritize. But when the Arab states normalized relations with the Zionist entity, “Israel” itself became no longer as necessary as it once was; the empire had succeeded in flipping the balance of power. Which means that all of the blowback Washington experiences due to the Gaza genocide, and all of the military resources Washington feels obliged to concentrate around “Israel,” does not come with sufficient benefits to the hegemon. 

We need to understand that the imperial elites do not necessarily behave rationally; to act like they do is to give too much credit to our enemies. The reality is that most of these elites have bought into Zionist myths about “Israel” being exceptional and indispensable, and have consequently created strategic weaknesses within their own system. They’ve sworn their allegiance to a death cult, one that would rather launch nukes via the “Samson option” than see its ethno-state end. And since even nukes can’t save “Israel,” its followers will settle for inflicting terror upon the United States. This is what the colonizers in occupied Palestine will do when Palestine is freed, and they move to imperial hub countries like the USA: join paramilitary organizations, and murder the people who they feel caused them to lose. 

These vigilantes are a rogue element within Zionism; but their mentality is shared by the elites, both in “Israel” and the United States itself, who are willing to assassinate anyone they see as an obstacle to the Zionist crusade. The logical conclusion of this thinking is a violent mass purge of political dissidents, which we’re increasingly close to seeing; but the lack of unity among the elites is something we could use to lessen the effectiveness of this purge, and bring victory for the people. 

“Israel” is becoming such a source of elite disunity because even though the Zionist cult has many powerful adherents in the United States, there are also many who recognize the absurdity of “Israel first.” There is nothing exceptional about “Israel” that makes it uniquely important to the imperial hegemon, compared to other nearby U.S. proxies like Turkey or Saudi Arabia. “Israel” has been elevated in its perceived importance by both the pro-Zionist fanatics within our ruling class, and the Chomskyite leftists who dismiss the Zionist lobby’s importance. To treat “Israel” as indispensable for America is to validate the ideology of the Zionist fanatics, whose dogmas do not match with the strategic reality.

One of these true believers is RFK Jr, who’s argued that if “Israel” were to disappear, this alone would enable China, Russia, and BRICS+ to gain control over 90% of the world’s oil. This may sound revelatory, but it’s another Zionist lie, designed to sell Americans on why the U.S. supposedly can’t do without an “Israel.” RFK propagates lies like this not because he’s been blackmailed, as some observers of the Zionist lobby have falsely concluded, but because RFK and the Kennedy family are profoundly pro-Zionist in their convictions. They’re part of the majority within the capitalist class who sincerely believe the narratives that Zionism has constructed. And for as useful as these narratives have been to the empire, the widespread elite desire to uphold them at all costs has produced desperation. Desperation that’s leading “Israel” to intervene within U.S. politics in extreme ways, creating tensions between the elites that may escalate into civil war.

“Israel” and its U.S. mercenary collaborators are seeking to eliminate any leaders, particularly within the conservative movement, who challenge the Zionist mythology. I personally suspect that Tucker Carlson will be one of the next targets in this Zionist campaign of recriminations, especially if he runs for president. This doesn’t mean we should support one wing of the imperial establishment over the other; it means we should observe how these conflicts will impact our conditions, and intervene accordingly.

When these kinds of violent inter-capitalist confrontations happen, this prompts the masses to react with grave concern, because the instability of the system has been revealed. It’s clear that the government isn’t able to do even the bare minimum, because its leaders are too busy fighting each other. When the masses see this, many of them will react by siding with one wing within the capitalist class, because under our conditions bourgeois politics are the default; and this pro-bourgeois tendency among many of the people is a problem, but it’s absolutely something that can be overcome. That is, if we understand what motivates the masses.

The Americans who’ve picked sides in this DC shadow war are actually among the most advanced members of the masses. They’ve already made the leap of seeing that our government is controlled by transnational interests, and they desire to take part in a mass movement for defeating these interests. When they see Tucker Carlson or Marjorie Taylor Greene speak out against the Zionist lobby, it makes sense that they would get behind these figures. The problem these radicalized masses are going to keep coming up against, though, is that no bourgeois populist leader can ever succeed in bringing revolution.

As long as the masses who oppose Zionism lack collective organization, and the leadership that a workers party provides, whatever resistance there is against the Zionist lobby and its deep state allies will be ineffective. The lower levels of capital are not capable of defeating monopoly finance capital; at least not on their own. Either this resistance will be led by the proletariat, or America will be prevented from saving itself. 

The United States is collapsing; which our ruling elites wish wasn’t the case, but see as an inevitable situation that they need to manage. The Zionist cult is working to actively speed up this collapse, and introduce ever-more violence and chaos into our society. The only way to combat this chaos is by giving the American people the means to overthrow their monopolist dictatorship, and build a workers state that can defend against these sabotage attempts.

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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 Davos scheme to end the 1st & 2nd amendments, and how we can defend against it

Right now, the nationless forces of global capital are using American patriotism to justify destroying what’s left of the U.S. constitution. The propaganda which is coming from our government says that in order to save the American nation, we need to expand the censorship of “violent” or “hateful” speech, so much that the First Amendment will no longer apply. And because our freedom of speech and assembly will be crushed if this scheme succeeds, the liberal technocrats will then better be able to kill the Second Amendment as soon as they come back into power. 

The present campaign to take away the people’s rights is being presented as a defense against this technocratic, anti-human agenda, but really it’s what will create the conditions for this agenda to be taken much further. None of these censorship policies we’re seeing are patriotic, or even native to America; this is all part of an operation by trans-national capitalist power centers, such as Davos and the City of London, to manage America’s collapse. To make sure that as the United States falls apart, its people will react by turning against each other on a racial or cultural basis, rather than unify behind the class struggle. 

I name Davos as a critical player behind the designs to kill the 1st and 2nd amendments because according to the World Economic Forum’s own analysis, by 2030 all of the peoples under its control will no longer own guns—nor will they own anything else. The famous phrase that the WEF published in 2016 was “you will own nothing and be happy,” which summarized a vision for the near future where everyone in the metropolitan areas have come to live under a technological dictatorship. 

The analysis implies that the bulk of the masses will accept this dictatorship as an alternative to the crises the world is now experiencing, with the rural masses being described as the obsolete minority who’ve refused to embrace progress: “It was only at the last minute that we found out how to use all these new technologies for better purposes than just killing time,” says the narrator in the fictional story that the article is framed around. “My biggest concern is all the people who do not live in our city. Those we lost on the way. Those who decided that it became too much, all this technology. Those who felt obsolete and useless when robots and AI took over big parts of our jobs. Those who got upset with the political system and turned against it. They live different kind of lives outside of the city. Some have formed little self-supplying communities. Others just stayed in the empty and abandoned houses in small 19th century villages.”

To carry out this social engineering project, the elites need to sell the American right-wing as the answer to the violence and chaos we’re seeing, even though the right is fully part of this destructive process. The main narrative we need to combat now is the one about how in order to be patriotic, you need to support our government. This is the essence of the justification for these efforts at banning dissent, and the leaders of the anti-democratic push are depending on Americans to go along with it. But this logic of “super-patriotism,” as Michael Parenti called it, has always been very easy to take apart. 

When Parenti refuted the narratives of super-patriotism, he provided us with arguments that we would be able to use in a moment like this one, when our government is trying to criminalize dissent on a “patriotic” basis:

Opponents of US foreign policy are still accused of blaming or hating America. Once again, the protesters are made the issue instead of the policies they are protesting. In response, we must repeatedly point out that those who criticise the particular policies, leaders, or social conditions of their country do not thereby manifest a deficient loyalty. If the test of patriotism comes only by reflexively falling into lockstep behind the leader whenever the flag is waved, then what we have is a formula for dictatorship, not democracy. 

We critics of US policy are not directing our protests against that entity known as America but against particular US leaders who, we feel, do not represent the interests of the American people or any other people, but who advance the goals of a privileged coterie. We are not being anti-American when we criticise the president's policies, no more than we are being "anti-Middletown" and lacking in community spirit if we oppose the policies pursued by the mayor of Middletown, or whatever community. Quite the contrary, our opposition arises out of concern for what is being done to—and in the name of—our country or community. By the same token we are not being anti-Semitic if we criticise the Israeli government for the incursions and settlements in the occupied territories and for mistreatment of Palestinians.

These arguments are already compelling to the bulk of the American masses. Since the original War on Terror era, the country’s conditions have absolutely changed; the conservative base has largely turned on “Israel,” Gen Z has become radicalized into supporting the Palestinian resistance, working families have broadly become sick of U.S. foreign policy, and there is no reversing these trends. 

The best that our rulers can do is try to instigate new conflicts among the people; which they have partly been succeeding in, but amid all of the recent bitter culture war fights, there are other forces at work. Among most of the American masses, there is a growing sense that we need to come together against the ultraviolence which our government has been propagating. They see how our ruling class, and the global imperial apparatus that it runs, are working to turn us against each other. They also see the connections between “Israel” in particular, and the dark mercenary forces which have been acting to foment violence in this country.

In the face of these contradictions, the super-patriotic position cannot successfully persuade the bulk of the masses; not when it comes to the question of “Israel,” and certainly not when it comes to the question of the U.S. war machine. Because of how much of the public has correctly blamed “Israel” for the USA’s recent chaotic events, it’s doubtful that the Trump White House will be able to sell its war with Venezuela; first it would need to find a counter-narrative that overcomes this anti-imperialist consciousness shift.

Speaking truth to power alone won’t be enough to stop what the ruling class has planned; but the masses have been turning against the empire of their own accord, and this creates potential to organize them against the next anti-popular assaults. The purpose of using Parenti’s arguments against super-patriotism in the present moment is to galvanize this proto-revolutionary momentum, providing a way to bring the people into such collective efforts at defiance.

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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 global workers struggle has changed, but the KKE’s camp doesn’t want to recognize this

Above: a rally by the participants in Venezuela’s Bolivarian revolution.

One of the most famous critiques by Michael Parenti is from Blackshirts and Reds, where he pointed out how the rejection of existing socialist projects objectively harms the working-class cause:

The pure socialists' ideological anticipations remain untainted by existing practice. They do not explain how the manifold functions of a revolutionary society would be organized, how external attack and internal sabotage would be thwarted, how bureaucracy would be avoided, scarce resources allocated, policy differences settled, priorities set, and production and distribution conducted. Instead, they offer vague statements about how the workers themselves will directly own and control the means of production and will arrive at their own solutions through creative struggle. No surprise then that the pure socialists support every revolution except the ones that succeed.

The KKE, Greece’s communist party, absolutely embodies this problem. It’s called socialist China an imperialist power, basing this narrative off of the “imperialist pyramid” theory where every country supposedly has imperialist tendencies. Even more consequently, it’s participated in the smear campaign against Maduro by Venezuela’s Trotskyists, promoting their lies about how Maduro has sold out the country’s workers. This betrayal has been so impactful because the KKE, through its efforts to fund numerous global communist formations, exercises influence over many of the world’s class-conscious workers. 

It’s because of the platform the KKE and its beneficiaries provided to the Trotskyist wreckers that their deceptions could be so effective; the anti-Maduro smears created a splinter within the global workers movement over the question of Venezuela, and crippled the Venezuelan communist party’s popularity. (Though the authentic militants within it have retaken control, and are building it back up.) So we know that by advancing the agenda of the “pure socialists,” the KKE has done very serious, material harm to the proletarian cause.

Yet at the same time that the KKE has launched these attacks against the socialist and anti-imperialist movements, it’s articulated the exact arguments which discredit the “pure socialist” view of class struggle. In its resource Theoretical Issues regarding the Programme of the Communist Party of Greece, the KKE said that

Any attempt to determine the character of revolution with criteria other than the ones that arise from the character of the era and the maturity of the material preconditions is not an objective one. In the Essay on the History of the KKE, volume 2, 1949-1968, there is the following reference:

 

“The character of the revolution, as the basic element of the strategy of a communist party that acts under the conditions of capitalist power, cannot be determined by the existing correlation of forces, but by the maturation of the material preconditions for socialism. The latter determines its necessity and timeliness. The minimum necessary degree of the maturation of the material preconditions exists even if the working class is a minority of the Working Age Population, from the moment that it becomes aware of its historic mission through the establishment of its Party. The social alliance of the working class with the popular strata and every form of its political expression ought to serve the strategic goal of working class power that expresses the interests of the majority of the people”[10]

 

It is important to stress that Lenin wrote “Under a false flag” in order to highlight the issue that if the proletariat in a specific historic period assumes duties that do not correspond to this specific historical era and mechanically transfers the experience from previous periods, then it cannot fulfil its contemporary duties, and will always be dragged behind the bourgeois class, placing itself under a false-for its own class interests- flag.

If the KKE understands this reality about how workers movements must not remain stagnant, and adapt to the conditions as they change, then why do the KKE and its connected groups attack the Bolivarian revolution? Why have they sided with the Trotskyist wrecker faction in Venezuela’s communist party, who base their entire argument off of applying an unfair standard to the revolutionary government? We know that these left-wing anti-Maduro actors have employed lies in order to make their case; a major tactic of theirs has been to omit the impacts that Washington’s sanctions are having, and foist the blame for the country’s crises on to Maduro. To spin this narrative, the KKE’s camp has needed to pretend as if Venezuela’s workers have different duties than the ones they do during the present era; that they aren’t facing the conditions which exist today.

It’s a weaponization of dogma for opportunistic purposes, where these ultra-left wreckers have cloaked the infantile nature of their analysis behind orthodox Marxist rhetoric. One aspect of the KKE’s argument against Bolivarianism is that Venezuela’s revolutionary leadership isn’t a Marxist-Leninist one; which actually reveals how the KKE’s camp isn’t truly Marxist-Leninist, because MLs do not care about people’s ideology. The thing we foremost care about is whether an individual or leader has been proving themselves as a positive contributor towards the class struggle, which is certainly true for Maduro; he is responsible for continuing to lead the people into mobilizing for armed defense against the hegemon, and no Trotskyist rhetoric can dispute this. 

Moreover, to attack Maduro is to attack the revolutionary masses of Venezuela; who, as the Venezuelan communist party’s president Henry Parra has said, are the ones behind the sacrifices that got Venezuela this far:

The difference that I may have with Comrade Maduro or with his government can never be put above the revolution, of us surrendering ourselves to imperialism, to the very same discourse of imperialism. We cannot hand this process to the right wing. We are forbidden to turn back, because what is at stake here is not only Venezuela, but Venezuela, Latin America and the world. Venezuela, like Cuba, is the hope of the insurgent people. This is an insurgent people, who have rebelled against the biggest and most powerful empire that humanity has ever known, US imperialism. A communist party cannot betray the actions of a people who have sacrificed themselves for such a cause. If anyone has sacrificed themselves in defending this revolution, it is not the leaders of the revolution, it is the people. They are the ones who have sacrificed and resisted.

On this basis alone, the KKE’s camp is in the wrong. To propagate the lies of the wrecker faction, and thereby create new fissures within the working-class movement for the sake of purity politics, is inherently a treacherous act. But the problem goes deeper than the anti-Maduro camp being purists; it’s not that they focus too much on secondary problems, it’s that they’ve fabricated a problem by depicting Maduro as “neoliberal.” In 2023, when the Trotskyist wreckers were starting to get majorly exposed, Thierry Deronne helped refute their core deceptions. Deronne pointed out how much Washington had continued waging war against the alleged neoliberal sellout government, which in reality was resisting neoliberalism harder as the aggressions mounted:

According to Venezuelan analyst William Serafino (2), if Maduro were a neoliberal, not only the state-owned company Petróleos de Venezuela, SA (PDVSA), but also the many state-owned enterprises such as the Caracas subway, electricity, telecommunications and water supply companies, to name a few, would already be in private hands. The current policies against corruption in the strategic spheres of the economy, the slow recovery of the productive apparatus–which is leading to better financing of the state through taxes on large companies, the reconstruction of public services deteriorated under the blockade, the transfer of non-US technology to circumvent the blockade, policies reinforced by the rebound in the price of oil and multipolar alliances, show the absurdity of the claim…If Nicolas Maduro had become a neoliberal, how can it be understood that the imperial harassment continues against him? The main characteristic of the Maduro government’s policy in the face of such economic warfare is that it has, on the contrary, resisted and rejected the formulas of privatization and abandonment of the population.

When the wreckers call the Bolivarian revolution neoliberal, they’re seeking to discredit the very idea of working-class politics in the modern era—and this applies not just to Venezuela, but to everywhere else where the workers are carrying out organic and effective struggles. The mentality of these dogmatic opportunists is to look at a country’s proletariat doing what it absolutely must do in order to survive imperialism’s attacks, and see this as betrayal because the proletariat isn’t acting as it would under past conditions (or the past conditions that the dogmatists imagine). Supporting the Soviet Union is an essential part of the KKE’s tradition, so it used to not play the role that it does today; yet because of the antagonistic turn that the party has taken, it can now only claim to uphold the USSR while distorting what existing socialism means. 

No revolutionary project would be able to succeed while following the criteria that the KKE has set, where even when a revolution resists capital harder, this is seen as capitulation. It’s a nonsensical position to take, and it would seem like a very strange thing for a historic ML party to do. But the KKE’s deterioration exposes a reality about how parties can fall into opportunism: when their ranks haven’t been given a consistently rigorous education, and aren’t encouraged to keep constantly investigating the conditions, they will be susceptible to opportunistic nonsense. All who seek to advance the workers movement must internalize this lesson.

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