The KKE’s “Israeli people are also a victim” position, and what we gain from combating it

As communists, the thing we gain from countering the KKE’s labor Zionist position is to put to rest a highly damaging, anti-Palestinian trend within our movement. This is the trend towards believing that even though the Zionist right-wing is Jewish supremacist, the “left-wing” Zionists still fundamentally represent a part of the workers movement. As the Zionist entity prepares for new escalations, and the imperial narrative managers seek to get Gaza out of the discourse, those who seek to popularize labor Zionism pose an urgent threat. If we expose the dishonesty of their position, though, we will make communism into a much greater force within the pro-Palestine movement; which will connect the workers struggle with Palestine to a much greater extent.

The labor Zionist view, born from the idea that Palestine’s colonizers can be proletarians despite them truly being a slaver class, was embraced by the Soviet Union up until 1967. The USSR’s leadership came to the pro-Zionist position in spite of Stalin, who decried Zionism as inherently reactionary; when the vote was held on whether to create a Jewish state in Palestine, Stalin was outvoted, and the communist movement went in an unfortunate direction which we’re still trying to pull it away from.

Prior to the Holocaust, Zionism had been a fringe ideology, relegated mainly to the Jewish bourgeoisie. When the Zionists exploited Hitlerism’s crimes, though, many within the workers movement became won over by the Zionist arguments about “Jewish self-determination.” Massive parts of the global communist movement would reject Zionism the whole way through, with Mao’s China and socialist Korea having stood with Palestine from the start. But plenty of other communist formations got brought into labor Zionism, and the reason behind this was that these formations had fallen into a crude economist mindset. They’d embraced the economistic attitude that reduces everything to a narrow set of fights within the workplace, whose logical conclusion is that as long as somebody works, they’re automatically of the proletariat. By this reasoning, the Jewish colonizers who worked were proletarians, and they deserved solidarity.

This is the exact view that the KKE’s leadership has articulated in regard to the supposed Israeli “proletariat.” In the KKE’s statement on October 7, it frames the colonizers as victims, ones whose interests are supposedly in great contradiction with those of the settler-colonial capitalist class:

The USA and the EU found their much-needed ally in the Israeli bourgeoisie and in its state, which gave them the right of arbitration together with the other bourgeois classes of the region, which also wanted to enhance their position. This geopolitical game, which has been played out in even more dramatic terms since the overthrow of socialism in the USSR, has as its victim an entire people, the Palestinian people, who have been promised a homeland all these years but whose dream remains unfulfilled. The people of Israel are also paying the prise because they are victims of the policies of the Israeli bourgeoisie and its state…The KKE has expressed its full solidarity and support for the Palestinian people, for the need to have their own state and to be masters in their own land. At the same time, it emphasized that the Israeli people are also a victim of the policies of the bourgeois state of Israel and the reactionary Netanyahu government. 

This statement was met with hostility by certain forces of the “World Anti-Imperialist Platform”, which do not recognize the existence of the state of Israel, nor the existence of the Israeli bourgeoisie and the Israeli people, calling it a US base that must be destroyed. These forces refuse to see that the root cause of everything that the peoples are experiencing is the barbaric exploitative system in its current stage, the monopoly one, where the struggle between the monopolies and the bourgeois classes is intensifying and is being waged by all means, for the exploitation not only of the workers of their countries but also of other countries for raw materials, transport routes for the commodities, geopolitical footholds and market shares. And the bourgeois state of Israel and its bourgeoisie is such a geopolitical foothold for the USA and the EU and not only a military base.

When you understand which historical tradition the KKE draws its ideas from, it makes perfect sense that the KKE would take this stance. When the KKE says it upholds the Soviet Union, it isn’t taking its guidance from Stalin, no matter how much it may assert that it does. Instead it’s taking guidance from the opportunistic, economistic political actors who voted to create “Israel” in 1948, and who then carried out Khrushchev’s “de-Stalinization” campaign. The great irony is that while these charlatans posthumously stabbed Stalin in the back, they were dependent on him, even after his death. Even though this faction within the Soviet leadership was against Stalin and “Stalinism,” at the same time it took advantage of the worldwide love for Stalin, using his image to justify the effort at assisting in Palestine’s colonization. 

It was Stalin who had won the war, and led the USSR to reach its unparalleled achievements; so when the USSR’s leadership sought to persuade other communist formations towards the notion of a “progressive” Israel, they were relying on the goodwill which Stalin had built up among the world’s exploited peoples. In order to sell their pro-colonial agenda, they needed to pass their position off as Stalin’s, even though privately Stalin was in conflict with them. Stalin couldn’t speak up, because publicly denouncing your party’s decision is against the rules of democratic centralism; so the propagators of crude economism could act as if labor Zionism is synonymous with Stalin. Which is the same thing that the KKE’s camp within the communist movement is doing today. 

Of course the proponents of the “Israelis are proletarians too” position are glad to align themselves with Stalin, and to put forth all the rhetoric that’s associated with Stalin’s legacy; yet they’re really carrying forth the agenda of those who tried to destroy this legacy from the inside.

It’s this context, wherein the crude economists adopted a method for cloaking their anti-Leninist agenda, that lets us understand what kind of opponent we’re dealing with in the KKE. It shows why the proponents of labor Zionism lack an authentic connection with scientific socialism, even though they wear the faces of history’s great Marxists. And when we see that labor Zionism is disconnected from the science of Marxism-Leninism, it becomes easier to see the true roots behind its ideas. This is a trend that comes not from serious investigation into the conditions as they are, but from a shallow and superficial notion of what “workers struggle” means. 

In this view, anyone who works is necessarily a proletarian, no matter what role they actually play in relation to production. It doesn’t matter that the entire basis for “Israeli” wealth is theft from the Palestinian people, and that all of those who enjoy full rights within the Jewish supremacist state therefore are direct benefactors of the Palestinian slave economy.

That the KKE promotes the labor Zionist view is a significant problem for the workers struggle, because the KKE controls numerous other communist parties around the globe. And as long as the KKE maintains this status, the global workers movement is going to have a barrier towards becoming connected with the Palestinian struggle. This is the kind of problem within the communist movement which can be exploited by those who argue that the workers don’t need communism, and that we can somehow win the class struggle while discarding Marxism (with the next step in this reasoning being that we should give up class struggle itself). A version of the communist movement that’s been captured by opportunists is one which will only keep failing. To rescue the workers movement, we must bring back Marxism as it was actually practiced by Lenin and Stalin—which is to say a Marxism that comes from constant learning. 

The KKE is not interested in learning. It recycles a narrative about “progressive” Zionism that came from the most ideologically deficient elements inside the Soviet leadership, and repeats a position about returning to the 1967 borders that has absolutely no practical usefulness within today’s reality. This position of course was also never sound from the perspective of basic international solidarity, as the pre-67 borders were themselves a violation of Palestine’s rights. But inevitably the Zionist entity would attack again, and these borders would change, because Zionism’s nature is to aggress. 

The KKE paints a picture of a Zionism that’s compatible with the revolutionary struggle, which is a very dangerous thing to do. However, it also makes the KKE so far removed from the Palestinian liberation struggle that no one who’s connected with this struggle would follow the KKE. The danger is not that the KKE will de-radicalize the pro-Palestinian working masses, but that it will keep the communist movement relegated towards an opportunistic little corner within politics. When we free Marxism from the KKE, we’ll be able to make Marxism into a dynamic force inside the Palestinian struggle, giving Palestine organized assistance from the world’s workers.

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Hamas has won, and this has thrown the entire world’s power balance into question

The triumph of Hamas, and of the other orgs within Gaza’s armed resistance coalition, has implications for all fronts in the global class struggle. That Palestine’s armed resistance has stopped the Zionist occupier from colonizing Gaza, and thereby accelerated Zionism’s collapse, represents a shift within the entire balance of power. It proves that even when the ruling force has the most advanced surveillance and policing systems, a resistance will be able to break through these systems, and deal a blow that speeds up the structure’s unraveling. This is a lesson that the members of all the world’s revolutionary organizations need to internalize, and apply in accordance with their own conditions. Palestine’s recent strategic and tactical victories have lessons for all of us; ones which we’ll be able to fully apply in time.

Right now, most places are far from being in the kind of strategic situation that would allow for us to get as far as Palestine’s resistance has. Moreover, Palestine is fighting for liberation in a very specific set of circumstances, one where a people are facing colonization in modern form. Yet in all areas of the worldwide class war, the shockwaves from Palestine’s victory are being felt. It’s left the imperialists and each of their proxy forces in a more weakened state, even if these proxies have lately been having successes on certain fronts. 

For a resistance movement to successfully force one of Washington’s proxies into a retreat, after the U.S. has sacrificed so much of its international standing in order to fight this resistance, is enough to call everything into question. Everyone who’s connected to the Palestinian struggle sees the vulnerabilities which have been exposed within their enemy. And however much the enemy tries to hide these weaknesses with PR rhetoric about wanting “peace,” these destabilizing factors are only going to have a bigger impact as time goes on.

The objective conditions for a new revolutionary wave have absolutely been improved by the events of these last couple years. This widespread nature of the strategic shift comes from how in order to strike a blow against the Zionist occupier, we within the imperial sphere have needed to strike blows against our own respective governments. The purpose of these efforts has been to assist the Palestinians in their fight against annihilation, which takes precedence over all else; in the process, though, we’ve advanced the wider class struggle, which is itself essential towards building an effective movement for Palestine. 

As the workers movement has become more connected with the Palestinian cause, as the consciousness of the workers has shifted against Zionism, our ruling class has become less able to manage organized labor. And if we take this break from Zionism to the next level, building independent worker organizations that can continue fighting for Palestine even amid a full union crackdown, we’ll come to a stage where the struggle is much more advanced. Where these revolutionary organizations have become capable of defending the people from the violence of the ruling class. This is how the successes of the Palestinian resistance could start spilling over into other popular struggles. For this to happen, though, we first need to ensure that the lessons from Palestine’s fight will be absorbed by the ranks of the workers movement. Which means building a platform for the pro-Palestine movement, and for the workers movement, that truly stands on its own.

The efforts by the Zionists to get us to “debate” them is how they’ve tried to prevent us from attaining this independent platform. The notion of engaging in dialogue with Zionists is a trap, and this is something that those within the pro-Palestine movement have increasingly been realizing. The only way we can successfully aid the Palestinian struggle is by creating the platform ourselves, and reject all arguments which normalize the occupation. The more of Palestine’s allies understand this, the more we become aligned with the resistance, which by necessity has taken the position that there can be no compromise with those who seek Palestine’s annihilation.

In response to the latest fraudulent peace proposals, the People’s Front for the Liberation of Palestine has said that “The top priority at this stage is to halt the holocaust being inflicted on the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip, who have made and continue to make enormous sacrifices in defense of their land and identity and in loyalty to their national cause.” It spoke of the “necessity to reach a unified position on the American proposal, and the political and existential risks contained in some of its provisions, which could be exploited to reshape the situation at the expense of established national rights.” There is great hope that the PFLP will succeed in its goal of unifying multiple Palestinian factions behind such a pro-resistance stance, because these factions are operating within the heart of this violent campaign. A big question is whether those of us within the Zionist-aligned countries will manage to unify our own organizations behind the resistance, and bring our anti-colonial fight to the next phase.

The most practical way we can advance this fight is by expanding BDS, and this will have to mean keeping the pro-BDS momentum going amid the reformist efforts at capturing the movement. Zohran Mamdani, who’s become a major face of BDS, has shown himself to be compromised to an extent that should make us seriously worry if he can implement it. Unless the fanatical Jewish supremacists who hate Zohran manage to stop him from winning, it looks like he will be the next mayor of New York City, and if NYC boycotts “Israel” then this will catalyze a much larger trend. Amid all of the warning signs we’ve seen around Zohran, though, what we must do is redouble our efforts at constructing a Palestine movement which is truly independent. 

A reality we need to internalize is that even though the conditions have greatly shifted in our cause’s favor, we’ll still be thwarted if we leave the fight up to the reformists. The next actions we take must not be ones which are sanctioned by the pro-normalization figures within Palestinian-aligned spaces; these actions must be guided by advice from the actual resistance within Palestine, and they must involve a serious effort to bring in the masses. These are the missions that we’ve been mandated to carry out; if we fulfill these missions, we will further turn the power balance against the pro-colonial forces.

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Let the countryside die, turn the cities into prisons: the elite’s plan for depopulation & social control

The technocrats are engineering a lose-lose situation for us, and it’s when we understand the extent of the crisis we’re facing that we can find the path out of it. There are reasons behind every aspect of the catastrophes our society is facing; by studying these driving factors, we can figure out how to mount an effective resistance against the forces which created our present conditions. This is how we make sense of the unemployment crisis, the decline in birth rates, the inflation crisis, and all other facets of the breakdown we’re experiencing: by tracing these developments back to their sources. 

The central factor behind our civilizational collapse is finance, which is what forms the core foundation for capitalism in its monopoly era. Finance was what made the economy become terminally depressed in 2008, starting off a process of unraveling that’s now lasted almost a generation. When our ruling class used this breakdown to consolidate power, and then used the pandemic to accelerate the fascistic transition, it created the conditions for the engineered destruction that we’re now seeing unfold. 

These events magnified a “great divergence” in opportunities, one that had already been in motion but has since become impossible for anyone to deny. We’ve reached a level of inequality where the bulk of those who’ve recently gone through college are unemployed, with this trend undergoing a very rapid rise in the last couple years alone. This is the outcome of a post-pandemic plan by bank executives to have the Fed tighten the job market through raised interest rates, making for a “low hiring, low firing” policy among employers that’s frozen the labor market.

It can’t be overstated how significant this is to the future of our societal stability, because it’s clear that these trends are not temporary moments which will go away in time. This is supposed to be an era where the economy has been in recovery, yet seemingly out of nowhere, a rapid job market collapse has been unfolding. It’s not from out of nowhere, though, it has a clear origin. It’s part of an effort to manage the breakdown of the United States, and make us transition into a police state that will ultimately take the form of degenerated warlordism. That is, if the masses don’t manage to build the counter-force which can throw off financial rule. And a critical part of this mission is to wage workers struggles which unite the different regions within America, making it so that as the urban and the rural are attacked in their own different ways, they come together to fight back.

Playing the urban and rural against each other, both culturally and economically, is a central part of this elite war against the masses. What they’ve done is create a vicious cycle, where the countryside gets left behind and the urban areas get superficially propped up. (It’s superficial because the cities have only been getting gentrified, while their internal poverty and inequality have continued growing.) They are creating a civilization where prosperity is only allowed to exist within the zones of the “creative class,” with everywhere else experiencing a slowdown that’s now reached seemingly terminal levels. Within this “creative class,” there is a political culture that looks down upon the rural, viewing its people as ignorant and backwards. This divide-and-conquer game involves creating a grotesque imbalance of power, where one side is conditioned to view the other as lesser.

Due to this imbalance, the young Americans who were born within rural areas are increasingly feeling a pressure to migrate to the cities. They’re seeing that they’ve been left with the least opportunities; and since wealthy boomers are the ones whose interests are aligned with the establishment, many of these younger rural people also feel they lack political representation. What this could easily lead to, and may have already led to in certain ways, is an equivalent scenario to that of south Korea’s birth rate crisis. Within U.S.-occupied Korea, the career incentives have been set up for people to live in the capital. And since the capital has been set up to optimize the ruling-class policy of enforced overwork, so many of those who are in the age range to have children find themselves unable to start families. 

The bourgeoisie are shrinking people’s options throughout the rural areas, while trapping those within the metropolitan economic centers. The outcome is that south Korea has come to be on the path towards effectively going extinct, which is a fate that I believe America will only avoid due to the prevalence of its religious communities and their still-high birth rates. Outside those communities, around half of today’s young people are absolutely not on track to start families; which is something that the Malthusian depopulation enthusiasts love to see.

In the United States, we’re also seeing the elites set up traps for the masses after pressuring them to move into the metropolitan centers; except here, these traps involve a scheme to make the cities actually resemble prisons. They’re trying to engineer a scenario where the American people—mainly the younger and lower-income Americans who hold the most revolutionary potential—have become much easier to socially control. They want us to concentrate in the urban centers, where the state has by far the greatest policing and surveillance advantages, so that they can make techno-tyranny more effective. This is how the elites hope to neutralize rural America, which they view as a massive threat towards the future of capitalist rule. They see how populated rural America is, and how large it is; and their goal is to make the cities prevail, so the cities can then themselves be subdued.

Our class enemies are trying to turn America into south Korea or Japan—which are two of the countries with the greatest birth rate crises—so that America will fail to fully come together as a national project. This is the Malthusian, anti-human scheme we’re being subjected to, and it’s our task to fight back against it. We can’t expect the workers movement to end the birth rate crisis or reverse the “great divergence,” at least not until the workers have gained state power. What we can do right now, though, is construct organizational networks which are capable of giving the masses the tools for overthrowing the ruling class. 

We’re seeing a great consciousness shift among both Gen Z, and also among the parents of Gen Z; this country’s working families are turning against “Israel,” against Ukraine, and against the other things our rulers want us to stay loyal to. They’re increasingly unified in opposition to our economic system, and this is what the centers of power are reacting to with all of their attacks against the masses. If communists keep aiding our communities, keep acting to lead the workers in their struggles, and also gain the means for defending against the state’s counterrevolutionary terror, we will thwart the enemy’s attempts at rendering us helpless. We have critical leverage in this power struggle, and we must use that leverage.

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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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Socialist China got this far by testing political practice, & this is how the workers will win everywhere else

In the face of the momentary defeats the anti-imperialist struggle has seen in Syria, Nepal, and Bolivia, we need to study the ideas that have let our cause succeed. One of these universally applicable ideas is Juche, the model for revolutionary self-sufficiency that socialist Korea gave to the world. Another is Mao Zedong Thought, the political philosophy that brought China to its incredible level of advancement. The thing which these and the other provenly effective revolutionary approaches have in common is that they test which practices work. That they’re willing to discard the ideas which hold the struggle back, and apply the dialectical philosophy of treating political struggle as a science. The workers movement’s ranks must respond to the present crises within our struggle by studying this science, and becoming skilled in how to apply it.

This is how we lean into the strengths that our movement has at this moment in history, which are many. Even amid the last year’s successes for the imperialist forces, overall the world continues to change in favor of the revolutionary side. China’s rise is something that the capitalists have no way of effectively responding to, because the PRC’s gains are built upon a foundation of rigorous dialectical science. And when such science is put into practice, while the balance of forces allows the revolutionary project to keep advancing, there’s nothing that can stop the working-class forces. Mao wrote of how it’s these factors that will eventually go together to ensure our cause’s success, even when this success is delayed:

Generally speaking, those that succeed are correct and those that fail are incorrect, and this is especially true of man’s struggle with nature. In social struggle, the forces representing the advanced class sometimes suffer defeat not because their ideas are incorrect, but because, in the balance of forces engaged in struggle, they are not as powerful for the time being as the forces of reaction; they are therefore temporarily defeated, but they are bound to triumph sooner or later. Man’s knowledge makes another leap through the test of practice. This leap is more important than the previous one. For it is this leap alone that can prove the correctness or incorrectness of the first leap in cognition, i.e., of the ideas, theories, policies, plans or measures formulated in the course of reflecting the objective external world. There is no other way of testing truth.

This is the reality of historical struggle that we need to keep in mind, not just to maintain optimism in our efforts but also to keep ourselves focused on refining these theoretical skills. The recent setbacks must act as a call for us to reorient our movement, and rescue it from the danger of becoming stagnant in its thinking.

An example of such a dogmatic mindset within the workers movement comes from Greece’s KKE, which (among other harmful positions) promotes the “inter-imperialist warfare” view of the present global conflict. A struggle against the KKE’s warped view of imperialism is necessary for us to wage, and the KKE in particular is at this moment the most relevant problem within international Marxism. Something we always need to consider amid this struggle, though, is that it’s not enough to be against a harmful idea or organization. We need to offer the ranks of the KKE-aligned parties, and the broader working class, an alternative path that we can show is viable.

Chinese socialism, with its spectacular achievements, greatly aids us in demonstrating that our politics represent a path to a better future. So do the accomplishments of the workers states in Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, and Laos, as well as the gains which the other anti-imperialist countries have made for their people. Showing these examples to the people in our own countries can absolutely bring more places closer towards revolution. For such agitation propaganda to be effective, though, we must do more than prove that many countries are building better social systems. We must demonstrate the dialectical method that the peoples of these countries have utilized in order to escape American financial domination. 

It’s when we teach this skill, the skill of being creative in one’s political practice, that the things we say and show about revolutionary theory take on a truly substantial quality. Communists have never won over the people by talking to them about Marxist theory; they’ve swayed the masses by showing them that our cause offers a path to a better future. This requires giving material aid to the people, successfully leading workers struggles, defending our communities from the violence of the class enemy, and other acts in which we become servants to the masses. We must do all of these things; but throughout each step in the mission, we have to avoid simply trying to copy what others in the struggle have done. We need to be testing what works for our situation, and bringing the people into this testing process. This was what Mao assessed as being the essence of political practice:

Marxists hold that man's social practice alone is the criterion of the truth of his knowledge of the external world. What actually happens is that man's knowledge is verified only when he achieves the anticipated results in the process of social practice (material production, class struggle or scientific experiment). If a man wants to succeed in his work, that is, to achieve the anticipated results, he must bring his ideas into correspondence with the laws of the objective external world; if they do not correspond, he will fail in his practice. After he fails, he draws his lessons, corrects his ideas to make them correspond to the laws of the external world, and can thus turn failure into success; this is what is meant by "failure is the mother of success" and "a fall into the pit, a gain in your wit". The dialectical-materialist theory of knowledge places practice in the primary position, holding that human knowledge can in no way be separated from practice and repudiating all the erroneous theories which deny the importance of practice or separate knowledge from practice.

There are countless theories of these kinds. The KKE’s distorted idea of Marxism-Leninism; the modern Trotskyist trends that have been working to undermine Venezuela; the growing ultra-leftist elements that advocate for adventurism; we’re facing a wide host of enemies that seek to attach themselves to the “communist” label. For there to be so many problems within the movement certainly makes it harder to combat the broader ruling-class forces, and this can become overwhelming on a personal (and thereby organizational) level. When one has come to the right mindset, though, patience within the struggle becomes no longer an issue. 

This mindset is the one which comes from applying the dialectical method towards one’s own mind and life, detaching from the desire to force one approach into working out. If there is an obstacle in the struggle, then the struggle changes. This is the only way we can go forward. We need to communicate this principle to the people, showing them how it can bring them towards victory even as they face countless obstacles.

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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 NGO left’s decline, boutique America’s collapse, & the chaotic reality our ruling class has created

Boutique society, the hipster layer in the imperial power structure, is going through a slow-motion unraveling. It’s not going to simply vanish, but it’s becoming increasingly irrelevant as a force that can actually influence history. The “No Kings” demonstrations, where the Democratic Party has mobilized its remaining base behind NATO, are not capable of reversing this decline. Our ruling class has undergone a cultural shift towards the right, choosing to promote “trad” politics above the wokeness that it had previously emphasized; the political pendulum likely isn’t going to swing back around to the Democrats, because their support has shrunk far too much. We can expect to keep living in Trump’s America for as long as the U.S. empire continues to exist. 

This is the immediate outcome of the boutique left’s collapse: only the right and the far right have a truly meaningful presence in ruling-class politics anymore, making for a confrontation between fascism and the authentic left. Whether this development brings about a good outcome depends on who wins the new phase in the class war.

The NGO left retreats

When Phil Neel wrote his American materialist analysis Hinterland in 2018, it was already apparent that the Democratic Party and its appendages were not going to define the next era. Neel observed how much the established left orgs had isolated themselves, and given up any real project towards class struggle:

The left is neither strong nor stable. Liberals ignore these areas because low-output, low-population regions very simply do not matter much when it comes to administering the economy—and that is, in the end, what liberalism is about. The far left, on the other hand, has long been in a state of widespread degeneration. It has retreated from historic strongholds in the hinterland (such as West Virginia, once a hotbed for wildcat strikes and communist organizing) to cluster around the urban cores of major coastal cities and a spattering of college towns. One symptom of this more widespread degeneration has also been an inward turn, mass organizing replaced by the management of an increasingly minuscule social scene and politics itself reenvisioned as the cultlike repetition of hollow rituals accompanied by the continual, self-flagellating rectification of one’s words, thoughts, and interpersonal interactions. Theoretical rigor has atrophied, and the majority within the amorphous social scene that composes “the left” only vaguely understand what capitalism is. This condition tends to blur the border between left and right, as both will offer solutions that lie somewhere between localist communitarianism and protectionist development of the “real economy.”

Humboldt County, the area where I live, is a case study in this process of retreat for NGO leftism. Only a few years ago, the Party for Socialism and Liberation was largely running the protest scene here by proxy, using its front org the Peace and Freedom Party to stage demonstrations on Democrat-compatible issues like Roe V. Wade. Then, when the PFP Humboldt shut down in 2023 due to internal dysfunction, the PSL’s presence completely vanished from the area. It didn’t even get involved in the Cal Poly Humboldt Gaza protests. It’s apparent that the only reason why the PSL ever focused on our college town was because it viewed this place as a secondary investment; it didn’t act determined to maintain relevancy here after encountering one minor obstacle.

This is part of a larger decline that the PSL has experienced, wherein it’s come to lose its former respect on the left (especially after the irresponsible actions it carried out in this summer’s ICE protests). These developments certainly represent a victory for the communist forces which oppose PSL’s Democrat tailism; but as long as ruling-class politics get to shape our communities unchallenged, NGO leftism won’t be replaced by anything better. Without efforts to build revolutionary organizational projects, the masses will only become further disempowered. And a critical part of this constructive mission is to reach the rural masses, which the boutique left has refused to do.

Discarding the communities outside the economic center

It’s rural America that’s being left behind the most. In Humboldt, and the other places like it, capitalism has deteriorated to a more severe degree than average; this is something that Neel describes in Hinterland’s section on my area, which assesses just how long the economy here has been in collapse. It’s this bleak state of the hinterlands that speaks to the deeper issue: the NGO left’s abandonment of the rural is an extension of how our ruling elites treat the rural. Neel wrote of how

Overall, cities accounted for 90 percent of total economic output in the United States in 2011, with New York’s urban area alone producing a Gross Metropolitan Product the size of Canada’s entire GDP. Concentration is particularly strong among high-end services, such as the FirE (Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate) industries, producer services (like law firms or marketing agencies), and the slew of high-tech and professional positions staffed by the “creative class.” This produces a “great divergence,” in which the population becomes increasingly segregated across cities and regions, signaled by trends in everything from voter participation to income and life expectancy.’ Cities farther down the chain compete to reinvent themselves as international metropoles in their own right, attractive to both the high-tech, high-finance crowd and the sensibilities of the new hipster urbanists. Local governments pay premium fees to hire quasi-mystical consultants promising to reveal the rituals capable of attracting “creatives,” whose exotic millennial culture seems somehow so far beyond the ken of the polo-wearing city administrator. Meanwhile, slums are demolished to make way for “walkable” neighborhoods peppered with cafés, CrossFit gyms, and cupcake shops.

The outcome of all these imbalances in our civilization is for chaos to increasingly replace the old hipster order. For these decadent structures to fall apart as time goes on; and give rise to forces of violent criminality, ones that the ruling “law and order” party can use to justify ever-greater state violence. When I talk about a rise in violent criminality, I’m not claiming that the organic crime rate has massively grown in recent times (this is a psyop that ruling-class media has been heavily pushing). I’m talking about a kind of criminal chaos that’s arisen inorganically, as it’s been synthetically cultivated by the state’s intelligence centers.

This is what “antifa” actually is: not an organization, but a psyop that’s being pushed by the ruling class in order to rally leftists towards reckless acts. When the feds can steer radical politics into mindless adventurism, they’ve gained the perfect narrative justification for the militarized crackdowns that we’re seeing. And the growing contradictions within boutique society, where Gen Z students find themselves often unable to even gain employment after being promised a path into the creative class, have created many more alienated young people who could be brought into such destructive activities. Of course, these very same disaffected young people could just as easily be brought into a serious revolutionary project; but in the absence of authentic revolutionary organizations, the predatory adventurist cults will be what prevail.

“Antifa” is one aspect of this emerging chaos; an even darker aspect is found within the online, post-ironic ideologies that lead people to become mass shooters. These ideologies are designed to target the young people who haven’t just become alienated, but also socially isolated. And there are potentially millions of individuals in this demographic, largely located in the many rural areas which have been robbed of their former social fabric. It’s these elements that the feds target for indoctrination into Nazi and Satanic cults, which these days people enter into through online rabbit holes; such cults are absolutely being run by the intelligence centers, and their purpose is to make shooters. The more left-behind someone has been by society, the more susceptible they are to such manipulations, which is why we must investigate how these people have become left behind.

What we need to understand about these hinterland communities is that they weren’t always places where it’s hard to form social bonds, as they increasingly are today; small communities are historically the most close-knit kinds of communities. But that connectedness has been going away, and inhabitants of these places are becoming as atomized as if they were in one of the sprawling cities which weren’t designed with community in mind.

The explanation for this is the “great divergence,” which has entailed a stark cutoff in opportunities for those who live outside the favored zones. These zones are shrinking as capital contracts, making for ever-more people who are isolated, impoverished, or “lumpenized” (as in made to subsist outside of traditional employment). These shared experiences of being ripped away from prosperity or happiness are what unite rural America with the many urban areas which have been undergoing an equivalent decline. The hinterland keeps growing, and with it America’s revolutionary potential. 

To take advantage of that potential, and throw off our ruling class, we must separate the workers movement from boutique society—which is to say we must make it a real workers movement, rather than a petty-bourgeois radical movement. To make this separation, we must understand where boutique society is located in the collapsing imperial structure, and what tactics it will use to try to hold on to power.

Ultra-left adventurism as a weapon for the age of decline

Humboldt is at the intersection between boutique society and the hinterland. In the midst of Northern California’s great expanses of forested and farm territory, where MAGA has quite a substantial presence, the Humboldt Bay area is host to a large layer of boomer leftists. This is the part of the state where the “back to the landers” moved to amid the failures of 1970s radicalism, and two full generations later, the outcome is a miniature version of the metropolitan gentrification. 

Especially in the walkable historic hippie town of Arcata, there are plenty of boutique establishments, which largely exist in the absence of stores that offer practical necessities. It’s this spot where the State Department and the intelligence agencies have concentrated an extraordinary amount of energy and resources around, with the university being a top recruitment college for the Peace Corps. This is indicative of a larger culture, where woke pro-NATO ideology has been very actively nurtured; and the fact that this culture is so prevalent helps explain why the pro-Palestine movement here has experienced so many setbacks, despite CPH having experienced a major Gaza student occupation last year.

One thing which can happen when social movements keep failing is that their participants become alienated from society as a whole, and resort to adventurism. Humboldt saw this at an Arcata City Council meeting a few months ago, when the ultra-left elements within the Palestine movement adopted the tactic of publicly screaming for minutes at a time. The state views such mistakes on our movement’s part as a good thing; this could explain why the police didn’t do anything to stop the disruptions, and why the mayor let the meeting become dominated by public comments. 

I find that incident fascinating, because it was a movement sabotage operation done on a micro scale; the state successfully weaponized the ultra-leftists to harm the image of the mass movements they claimed to speak for, letting these activists promote their messages of pure anger and alienation while creating spectacular chaos. With the NGO left in retreat, the only way that wokeism can react is by lashing out, and the state is happy to accommodate this behavior.

These are the tactics that our enemies are going to employ within the locations where boutique society still dominates, and where the wokeist elements are still prevalent. It’s the enemy’s secondary mode of attack in our era, with the primary mode being an effort to weaponize the far right. When I say the far right, I mean the kind of neo-Nazism that’s post-ironic in nature, and therefore really represents an amalgamation between wokeness and Hitlerism. This is the ideology behind the 4Chan-inspired shooters, who’ve never taken their guidance from traditional right-wing ideology like the media has often portrayed it. The shooters we’re seeing emerge in our age, like this August’s Minnesota church attacker, are the types of people who will write down both Nazi references and trans references. This is an aspect of today’s reactionary violence that doesn’t fit into liberal framework of analysis, and that can only be properly grasped when one understands the present chaos through a class-based lens.

When we see the class dynamics that are at play in today’s America, all of the alarming social phenomena we’re seeing make sense. We are experiencing the slow death of many of the layers within imperialism, where elements in petty-bourgeois society which used to have a sturdy foundation are seeing the ground shake underneath them. Liberal propaganda promises that everyone can become urban professionals if they just go through university, but this propaganda keeps clashing with reality in an ever-more brutal way.

The modern right has largely sold itself to Gen Z by pointing out this contradiction within high education; now the far right is trying to bring conservative Gen Z-ers towards Hitlerism by appealing to their broader alienation from the capitalist order. Yet there’s an inherent weakness in the Hitlerite argument: it depends on steering people away from class struggle, which is the only practical way for the people to advance their interests. In the absence of a path towards class struggle, all that Hitlerism can offer the workers is a promise about how class collaboration will bring shared prosperity. Which is a fundamentally liberal notion, and we need to expose its absurd idealism to the masses. If what we’re tasked with is a battle against the far right, then we need to ensure that we offer the people a real program for popular, working-class victory. 

Unlike the ultra-leftists, with their anti-people adventurism, we must present a route towards triumph over monopoly finance capital. This has always been our only way forward; but after how much American capitalism has devolved, many past illusions have been shattered, and the nature of our task has been made much easier to see.

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