I have chosen to emphasize the MAGA movement, and to use imagery which relates to that movement, because this is necessary for breaking Marxist discourse out of the standard leftist model. When class struggle is discussed, by default this happens within the framework of liberal identity politics, which our academic institutions have successfully used to co-opt Marxism. Therefore, we need a means for freeing Marxism from this type of elite capture. And drawing attention to MAGA’s role in the class struggle is an effective way to do this.
The next step for the MAGA movement, and for the rural lands that it largely makes up, will be a series of direct confrontations with crimes of our ruling class. Confrontations that will take place on both a national and local scale, with the residents of the rural having a particular kind of advantage; in a place with a low population, it’s easier to win over a larger proportion of the masses where you live, and this is something our worker organizations will be able to leverage. That is, if these orgs do the work of training their rural members and associates in the class struggle, as Lenin said communists must do:
You must firmly remember that you are not only propagandists and agitators, but also representatives of the state; you must not destroy the existing apparatus, or interfere with it and muddle its organisation, but must organise your work so that, as efficient instructors, propagandists and agitators, even after a brief period of work in the rural districts, you will leave your mark, not only in the papers of the peasant Communists you have educated, but also in the minds of the people whose work you inspect and guide, and to whom you give assignments, demanding that every teacher and military commissar should work in the Soviet spirit under all circumstances, that he should know that this is his duty, that he must remember that if he does not perform that duty, he will lose his job; they should all sense and see in every agitator a fully empowered representative of the Soviet government
In the modern American context, the presence of MAGA is a highly relevant factor to account for, because only when we understand MAGA’s role can we truly understand rural organizing. Any version of rural workers struggle that views the MAGA base as enemies is one which will inevitably fail to live up to its purported tasks; when an org tries to win the rural masses while being hostile towards the MAGA base, what this ends up looking like is a narrow and self-defeating strategy, where the aspiring organizers mainly focus on the student elements within the college towns. Consequently, they fail to build an actual organization, instead focusing on mobilization efforts that can’t create a sustainable community presence.
This is the problem that the workers movement in Humboldt County, my home area, finds itself needing to face before it can go any further. As long as the standard practice for a rural activist group remains centered around the campuses, its reach will be limited by the tactics of the local ruling classes. These tactics involve dividing the campuses from the broader community, and therefore confining organizers to a small physical space. The way that higher education is set up within the imperialist order makes universities separated from the working masses; they are by their nature bourgeois institutions, dependent on funding from a government that will cut them off for not suppressing speech hard enough. It’s partly for this reason that even though Cal Poly Humboldt is one of the universities which experienced a major Gaza occupation last year, the momentum from this event went in many different directions, lacking a unifying vision.
This vision that we need for the pro-Palestine movement, and for the class struggle it’s connected with, is one where organizers come to expand their practice into labor. Where they bring the workers, both union and non-union, into new frontiers within the class war. This is how we graduate from simply being “activists” to being professional revolutionaries, and this is how we close the gap between the left and MAGA.
Humboldt’s present situation illustrates why this task of overcoming cultural polarization is so important, not just where I am but everywhere else. I don’t say this because Humboldt’s masses are starkly divided between left-wing students and MAGA people; when one goes into the masses here, they find that the political and cultural demographics are much more nuanced than that, as is the case throughout the rest of America. There are many boomer or Gen X Trump voters, and there are many Gen Z leftists; but in between this, there’s also a layer of working families who aren’t necessarily MAGA, yet have gone on a class-conscious journey that’s similar to the one the MAGA base has been headed down. These other Gen X Americans used to be at odds with the MAGA base, and vice versa; they used to be fighting with them over masks and BLM and social issues. Yet within just five years, they’ve come to be united with MAGA supporters in righteous anger towards our government.
For those of us within Gen Z, something highly productive we can do within our political work is learn from our Gen X parents on how to view MAGA, and by extension on how to view contradictions. Our parents have already made the leap from being invested in the culture wars to seeking unity with their former cultural enemies, and prioritizing the fight against their real enemies. (Those being the financial interests which rule our government.) We must take example from them on this, and build a movement that’s based within such a dialectical way of operating. One in which somebody responds to new developments as they come, and adjusts their views in order to take the most forward-thinking, beneficial actions.
This is the insight that I seek to apply while approaching the class war within my own area. It’s only when we recognize the revolutionary potential within the MAGA base that we’ll be able to wage this struggle effectively, and properly navigate the conditions in which we’re operating. It’s an inevitability that as the ruling class intensifies its assaults against the people, we’ll see reactions from the people, regardless of their preexisting partisan or cultural affiliations. For these reactions to bring about victories for the people, though, the professional revolutionaries will need to open up new fronts in the struggle, and expose capitalist crimes which most don’t yet know about.
In Humboldt, this looks like showing the community how the workers aren’t allowed truly safe conditions, which led to a severe burn injury at a biomass plant in the town of Scotia earlier this year. It looks like exposing the top-down nature of ventures like the Terra Gen project, the offshore wind power construction plan that we’ve been falsely promised will lead to substantial improvements in our conditions. It looks like contrasting the anemic economy we have today, where employment is even worse here than in the average American region, with the past industrial strength which America was robbed of. This shows the effectiveness of the “Make America Great Again” idea, even in a place like Humboldt where the majority aren’t MAGA per se; the masses already have the sense that they’ve lost a prosperity which they could still possess, and many of them have already come to identify finance as the culprit.
The route forward is to overthrow our financial dictatorship, and implement a re-industrialization project; one that’s run by the workers, and therefore won’t force them to work in unsafe conditions or leave our communities behind. This is a program that’s quite simple, and the masses are absolutely ready to accept it. The missing step is to organize the people around such an effort, and therefore put them in place to fulfill their role as the arbiters of revolution. In both urban America and rural America, doing so will require making Marxism into something which wholly encompasses the popular masses, meeting their needs and giving them revolutionary training in a way that’s truly broad-focused. This is the direction that we can give to MAGA, and to the other elements within America which seek liberation from the grip of finance.
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