Matt Taibbi’s depiction of Epstein as a “moral-mania story” shows how alt media can be captured

Matt Taibbi is not the first prominent alternative media figure to run cover for the perpetrators of child sexual abuse operations. Alexander Cockburn, the founder of the influential alt media publication Counterpunch, argued that 1983’s McMartin preschool child molestation case was utterly absurd. The reason why he could do so without too much pushback, and while being platformed by outlets like the LA Times, is because these arguments are fully in the interests of the ruling-class forces which orchestrate Satanic ritual abuse. Within the narrative sphere that Cockburn had embraced, there is always plausible deniability when it comes to Satanic crimes.

The way that Cockburn framed his defense of the McMartin perpetrators, though, made it seem like this story was nothing but a psyop on behalf of Reaganite austerity policies. This was how he explained the prevalence of such stories: 

Satan-mongering is an industry of sorts, served by repugnant legal stratagems and nourished by bogus experts. But with day-care panics in more than 100 cities, the scare seems to reflect something more than the preoccupations of shut-ins, pay-TV preachers and fundamentalists. Satan may be trying to subvert American families, but so is Washington. Day care is so much in demand because of the rising number of families in which both parents must work. This is at least partly the consequence of the sharp increase in the ranks of the working poor that began with the Reagan era. Some states’ “workfare” legislation actually requires poor mothers to place their children in day-care centers while they work menial jobs. Their benefits are docked if they stay home with their own children, but if they hand their kids over to an institution, they can be paid to scrub floors by the state while the state pays the institution. Lesson: Poor women raising their own kids are lazy welfare queens, but poor women raising somebody else’s kids are gainfully employed, at least until they get hit with the grotesque charges facing the Kellys and their helpers.

It’s this logic, wherein Satanic and pedophilic designs within our ruling class are seen as myths to score political points, which would drive both Cockburn’s later commentary and the recent arguments made by Taibbi. In 2003, Cockburn defended guitarist Pete Townshend from child pornography accusations by saying the prosecution believed that “if you have a photo of a kid in a bath on your hard drive, and the prosecutor says you were looking at it with lust in your heart, that is tantamount to sexually molesting an actual kid in an actual bath.” Cockburn omitted how Landslide Productions, the child porn site that Townshend had accessed, was proven to have specialized in “the torture, rape and sexual abuse of children as young as two.” 

Was Cockburn simply unaware of this detail? We can’t ask him since he’s no longer alive, but his role in steering the discourse away from the reality of ruling-class child abuse is worth looking back on. Because today, we have individuals like Taibbi who are here to continue Cockburn’s tradition. When Taibbi has asserted that the focus on Epstein is a “moral mania,” and that there’s no evidence Epstein has something to do with Zionist blackmail, he’s used the same type of rhetorical tactic that Cockburn employed. He’s portrayed the reality of the Zionist state’s blackmail operations as a conspiracy theory, of the same kind as the “Russiagate” narrative; with the argument being that when we talk about this reality, it serves the establishment, like Russiagate did:

Bret Weinstein suggests we posit that the “cartoon view” of Epstein as an intelligence front is true, in order to ask if the spook services have so much leverage over us that “the democratic nature of our society is a fiction.” Tucker Carlson, whom I obviously also know well, has been outspoken in saying Epstein was part of a “blackmail operation run by the CIA and the Israeli intel services.”…It shouldn’t need pointing out that “who’s really running the White House?” was a common trope of the Russiagate period. So were stories that catalogued “links,” read into tales of “secret backchannels,” or declared people “assets” of a foreign country, all practices coming back into vogue. The Epstein story has more force than Russiagate because it has a firmer floor of compelling facts, both in the tales of sexual abuse and procurement and in the area of Epstein’s political ties. Still, verifiable reports linking these two things are almost totally absent. With Russiagate, deep-seated fears about the communist enemy helped drive the mania. Here, it looks like newswriters are depending on darker attitudes to help audiences to make the needed connections on their own.

Another familiar tactic Taibbi uses is to assert that the accused have plausible deniability, when the circumstances show that such deniability is negligible or nonexistent; Taibbi said in a more recent article that we don’t know whether Epstein trafficked to other powerful men, yet accounts of Epstein having introduced Trump to underage teens are right there. This story keeps repeating itself: the public gets a better sense of how extensively their leaders are involved in pedophilia, then we have supposedly subversive voices who tell us this is nothing but sensationalism.

To understand where these arguments come from on an ideological level, we have to look at how the hegemonic mode of discourse can define the way commentators think—even when they have the sense that they’re independent actors. When Cockburn says that Satanic ritual abuse is a Reaganist bogeyman, and when Taibbi says that Epstein is a largely manufactured scandal, what political paradigm are they arguing in relation to? They’re arguing from the strandpoint of bourgeois “democracy,” with its narrow range of thought. When somebody is trying to win in the game of hegemonic discourse, where everything is made to revolve around the debates the established parties have, they end up picking a side over issues that are truly beyond such tribalist competition. 

Satanic ritual abuse and blackmail are things that one can only really grasp when they’re thinking outside the confines of this game, and investigating the bigger picture of today’s power struggle. This whole matter is larger than partisan politics. Taibbi points to how it’s being exploited by partisan actors, and interprets this as proof that it’s overblown. The reality is that when the Democrats talk about Epstein, they’re trying to manage a crisis that could end up exposing the whole of the ruling class. This is the context you’re missing if you believe the issue is exaggerated because the Democrats use it to attack Trump; Epstein is about something bigger than the Dems or Trump.

There is a long-standing and extensive campaign by ruling-class propagandists to deny the existence of Satanic ritual abuse. Taibbi is only a recent face who’s been put forth to reinforce the denial narratives, which still follow the same script they have in the past but are now being used in a more desperate way. Never before have the masses become so aware of ruling-class crimes against children; this is what Taibbi is truly reacting to when he acts as if this thing has spiraled out of control. The hope of the narrative managers is that this backlash will fizzle out, but America may be headed for a crisis of perceived legitimacy for its government, where the people can’t be placated by a few token recognitions of the evils our rulers have committed.

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The KKE seeks to wreck solidarity with Venezuela’s resistance. We must save the workers movement from this scheme.

William Z. Foster and his movement once faced a parallel situation to the one that communists are confronted with today. One where amid new escalations by U.S. imperialism, one camp within Marxism sought to advance solidarity with the targets of this aggression, while the other side sought to appease the aggressors. Today, the forces of imperial appeasement within Marxism are the Communist Party of Greece and its adjacent political actors, which have assisted the U.S. State Department in slandering Venezuela’s revolutionary government.

This betrayal follows a historical pattern. Following the end of the second world war, and the effort by finance capital to re-solidify its control through the Truman White House, the world was facing an era of expanded U.S. imperial aggression. Washington’s deep state had successfully sabotaged the friendship which America built with the Soviet Union, and launched a new war against Russia to preserve the dominance of international banking. And the American workers movement had been crippled in its ability to fight back against these schemes, because certain communist leaders made disastrous compromises during the war; compromises with the same pro-fascist, pro-Zionist financial institutions that are behind the present war on Venezuela. 

To connect Marxism with the Venezuelan people’s resistance against U.S. aggression, we must look at the tactics that opportunists have historically used to separate socialism from the anti-imperialist cause, and build a solidarity movement that can thwart these tactics.

Among these tactics is the one in which the appeasers encourage complacency amid imperialist schemes, as the American communist leadership did. A central figure within the workers movement’s internal betrayal during World War II was Earl Browder, the Communist Party USA leader who’d implemented a policy of “liquidationism”—effectively meaning the communists ceased to exist as a real fighting force, and tailed behind the “good” wing of the ruling class. The camp which Browder had hitched himself to was the Democratic Party, and this let him keep a superficial image of being pro-worker because FDR was helping the working class. But Browder wasn’t making inroads with the proletarian mass forces which were behind these gains; he was instead seeking to befriend the “enlightened” parts of finance capital. 

Such was the realignment within the communist movement that preceded the CP’s no-strike policy during wartime. It was an abandonment of the mission to lead the workers; and Foster sought to undo that abandonment by re-connecting American communism with the globe’s anti-imperialist forces. Wrote Foster:

In the postwar world, which will face gigantic problems of industrial reconstruction and development, the United States, with its tremendous economic resources, is bound to play a very important role. What Comrade Browder does not see, however, is that if the role of the United States is to help in the realization of the programs of Moscow, Teheran and Yalta, this can only be accomplished if the broad masses of this country, especially the trade union movement, are very much on the alert to see to it that imperialist trends upon the part of our Government and the great capitalists are curbed and democratic policies imposed. The great goals of victory over fascism and the achievement of a lasting peace, laid down at Moscow, Teheran and Yalta, can be realized, but only upon the basis of eternal vigilance by the combined democratic forces of the world. Browder, contrary to this, is quite willing to leave the whole matter to the “intelligence” and “enlightened” self-interest of the big capitalists.

Right now, amid Washington’s drive to destroy Venezuela’s revolutionary government, Marxism is again afflicted with such opportunistic rejections of solidarity. The camp of CPs that align with the KKE have set themselves up against Maduro, who’s falsely depicted as a traitor to socialism within this camp’s narrative. Thereby, these CPs in effect side with imperialism’s war efforts. It’s a kind of crisis that the communist movement keeps facing throughout history, with another example being when the Second International supported World War I on the basis of “defense of the fatherland.”

In the case of the Second International’s betrayal, the communist movement was able to rescue itself from pro-imperialist opportunism. This was because the communists who’d remained principled would go on to create the world’s first workers state, supplanting the outmoded old international communist leadership. In the case of the Browderite problem, the anti-opportunist struggle had very mixed results. What Browder did couldn’t stop the revolutions in China, Korea, or elsewhere, because communism is obviously bigger than the United States; but in the USA, communism still hasn’t recovered, which has majorly set back the revolutionary cause in America and many other places.

How effectively we’ll be able to combat the anti-Venezuela actors depends on how well the workers movement within the “collective west” learns from the liberation struggles of the Global South. We must take example from forces like Gaza’s resistance coalition, whose member the PFLP has said about Venezuela: “the Venezuelan leadership is a legitimate leadership, democratically elected by the Venezuelan people and enjoying their trust in the struggle for sovereignty and dignity.” This statement is so significant because it goes against the lies of the fraudulent, Trotskyist-run “Communist Party of Venezuela,” which last year made a statement repeating Washington’s narratives about electoral fraud:

We alert international public opinion that, just as the government of Nicolás Maduro has stripped the Venezuelan people of their social and economic rights, it now intends to deprive them of their democratic rights. The accusation of an alleged attempt to undermine the electoral system, made by the president of the National Electoral Council (CNE), Elvis Amoroso, far from providing the necessary guarantees for the process, deepens doubts about the results presented to the country. In this regard, we demand that the CNE publish all of the voting records—as established by electoral regulations—as well as ensure maximum transparency in the vote count. The proclamation of Nicolás Maduro as re-elected president under this scenario of uncertainty, in which the results presented by Amoroso openly contradict the prevailing sentiment during the election day, is nothing more than a provocation that paves the way for violent situations.

This is the faction that the KKE’s camp aligns with: a platform for right-wing tropes about Maduro having taken away the Venezuelan people’s “economic rights,” and for the assertions of U.S. officials like Marco Rubio (whose accusation of fraud has been disputed by dozens of American electoral observers in Venezuela). I describe this party as being not just incorrect, but in itself fake, because the authentic militants within the PSUV wrestled back control over their party in 2023. After the Trotskyists had taken over, and anti-democratically enforced an anti-Maduro position, the members who represented the party’s true democratic will successively sued to re-constitute the organization. The group that wrote the statement above is a splinter faction which takes the exact same position as the U.S. State Department, and that’s unsurprisingly received a statement of solidarity from the opportunistic KKE leadership.

This is how we narratively defeat the KKE’s camp: by exposing how it assists in wrecking efforts against anti-imperialist and working-class movements, and by contrasting its positions with those of Global South revolutionary forces like those in Palestine. 

Last month, the KKE said that “there exist communist parties such as the KKE and the CP of Venezuela that refuse to become the tail of the bourgeoisie, that do not identify the interests of the working class and the people with those of anti-popular bourgeois and social-democratic governments, as in Venezuela, and that pursue an independent policy in defence of the working class and its interests.” We can refute this defense by pointing out what the Venezuelan splinter CP has actually done: promote the lies of Rubio, Trump, Machado, and the other Zionist aggressors.

In our mission to prevent the KKE from wrecking the Venezuelan solidarity movement, the most constructive thing we can do is build alternative structures to the old guard which the KKE represents within global socialism. For those of us in the United States, this task is actually easier than it is in Europe, because the KKE doesn’t have an adjacent party here; America’s communist movement was dismantled so thoroughly that we are now having to rebuild from nothing. But on every front within this struggle, even where the opportunistic revisionists have the most control, there is a way of operating that we all must embrace: the mode in which we emphasize adapting the class struggle to today’s era. 

It’s not just that the KKE is wrong. It’s that the KKE represents a mindset of outdated stagnation, where “Marxism” is made to mean blindly following a set of repetitive dogmas. Our goal isn’t merely to combat the KKE, it’s to take Marxism into the future. This present counter-propaganda mission, where we must show why the KKE and its partners aren’t telling the truth about Venezuela, cannot become a circular argument; the actors we’re arguing against are not speaking in good faith, and they’ll never admit to being wrong. The purpose of exposing their lies is to open up new paths within the workers movement, where we show the workers that they must seek out authentic revolutionary alternatives. 

The forces behind this wrecking campaign hope to cripple the workers movement the same way that Browderism crippled it; but if we build those alternative working-class structures, what will follow is a new wave of workers revolutions. Ones that give the global proletariat new leadership and new opportunities for independent struggle, like the revolution of 1917 did.

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Liberal Zionists are behind the “Hamas is Netanyahu’s tool” narrative, & their lies have bled into alt media

This is from the book I’m writing, which will be called “When Tears Can’t Save Them: Why The Pro-Palestine Movement Failed To Stop A Holocaust, & How It Can Still Win.”

In June 2024, the Jerusalem Post published an opinion piece written by Nadav Tamir, one that Ian Carroll would use to make an argument about Hamas being a tool for Netanyahu. The core piece actually went beyond saying Hamas is in league with Netanyahu; it also employed anti-Iran tropes to spin a larger narrative that implicated the Axis of Resistance within this great conspiracy. Tamir began by saying:

Last week, in response to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s statement that “What Hamas did on October 7 has thwarted Israel’s normalization with Saudi Arabia,” Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas said: “The Palestinians are paying the price of the war and Khamenei’s statements make it clear that the goal [of Iran] is “...to sacrifice Palestinian blood. [This] will never lead to the establishment of an independent Palestinian state with east Jerusalem as its capital... what we want is the end of the occupation.”

This exchange of statements clarifying the division of the parties in the conflict illustrates the abysmal gap between Hamas and the jihad supported by Iran on the one hand and the PA on the other, and why the PA has been and remains, even after October 7, the major partner in pursuing the interests of the State of Israel. Absurd as it may be, within our own government, there are those who share the vision of Hamas and Iran, which would mean an endless war of attrition.

This is the worldview of the liberal Zionist faction that’s represented by the bulk of Netanyahu-critical publications within “Israel.” It’s a view which comes from the attitude that if only the two “extreme” sides were to stop agitating for war, then the Zionist entity would be able to reach “peace” with the Palestinians. From this mindset comes the notion that Iran, Hamas, and the other resistance forces are playing into the hands of the “extreme” Zionists (who are portrayed as being utterly distinct from the “good” Zionists which supposedly hold a humanitarian position).

When the biggest “dissident” voices are getting their analyses on Zionism from Zionism’s own controlled opposition, the outcome is that U.S. imperialism’s propaganda gets repackaged for an audience which is seeking real answers. Carroll’s citing this article is only one example, but it does indicate a larger relationship between liberal Zionism and the typical conspiracy-centered perspectives about Palestine. In the absence of a class analysis, of a view that comes from rigorous investigation, you get confusion which the imperialists will exploit.

This is what was happening when Carroll came across the Jerusalem Post’s op-ed, and read the following part from it:

Smotrich is working to cut off the PA from Israel’s financial system, he is using his authority to stop transferring tax payments that belong to the PA and continues to prevent the return of Palestinian workers to Israel – together with his partners in the government and against recommendations of all security officials. As a result of these actions, the security forces are now alerting about the collapse of the PA and the dire consequences for Israel’s security of such a scenario. The economic strangulation of the PA carried out by the Israeli government occurs while money from Iran continues to flow to the West Bank with the aim of promoting terrorist attacks. Smotrich is not stupid, he understands the security dangers in the collapse of the PA’s economy, but this is exactly his goal. His ideological partner, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, also supports the vision of chaos driven by Iran and the efforts to weaken the PA. During Jerusalem Day celebrations Ben-Gvir stated that his policy is that Jews would be allowed to carry out religious rituals on the holy Temple Mount.

After quoting this, Carroll said Smotrich and Ben-Gvir “know that more terrorism, more chaos, more destabilization, though it leads to more violence it also leads to more opportunity.” This is the outcome of approaching foreign policy in a way that isn’t grounded within the actual liberation struggles which are being waged by those resisting imperialism. You end up taking your cues from actors who represent not a revolutionary agenda, but one of the factions within the Zionist/imperialist structure. In this case, the idea these faux-dissident forces have sought to convey is that the anti-colonial resistance simply represents “chaos”; with the implication being that Palestine’s subjugation can be ended not through fighting back against it, but through cooperating with the settler state. Which is why the Palestinian Authority gets held up as a buffer against “terrorism” and “violence” within this narrative.

There is a difference between the subjective intent behind a statement or action, and the objective impact that it has. If we are thinking charitably of the commentators who repeat the narratives about how Hamas and Iran serve Netanyahu, or how October 7 was a false flag, we can assume that these commentators merely intend to expose the corruption within the “Israeli” state. Whatever motives Carroll has, though, the reality is that his propagation of such views acts to strengthen Zionism.

This is the case even though Carroll denounces the settlers and their crimes. Because within the Zionist structure, there are multiple forces at play, extending beyond Netanyahu or the particular camp he represents. And these forces play off of each other to fortify the colonization project; from the start of Zionism, there has been a push-and-pull between the “moderates” and the most nakedly terroristic individuals. The “progressive” Zionists have had the role of winning support from mainstream society, and putting a friendly face on settler-colonialism. 

The Jabotinskyists, Kahanists, and ultraviolent settlers have served to push Zionism’s lines forward at an accelerated speed, terrorizing Palestinians with no semblance of restraint. These different elements within Zionism do have real competing interests, and recognizing this is important insofar as it can let us take advantage of the intensifying rivalries between them. But as soon as you start promoting the opportunistic, pro-imperialist narratives that these forces employ against each other, you’ve set yourself up against the cause for Palestinian liberation.

The problem we face with these narratives is that there’s a very clear line of logic to them, where the believers in the “October 7 was staged” idea seek to connect it with a historical pattern of false flags. In a June 2025 podcast with the “Jewish question” influencer Jake Shields, Carroll explained this reasoning: “When you look at October 7, it fits the exact pattern where they knew about it in advance, Israeli military intelligence…they had multiple reports coming in that Hamas is prepared for a massive thing. They ignored those reports. But then, two days before the actual attack, they moved two whole battalions, a couple hundred men, off the border of Gaza.” 

These facts, along with the parts of the story where “Israel” sacrificed its citizens in the military response and blamed Hamas for the deaths, have often been repeated within alt media. And there is a role for these facts in the rebuttals against the narrative justifying the genocide; but to bring up these points on their own is actually counterproductive.

When you look at the way that such discourses around October 7 are framed, what you notice is that they never come from the perspective of the Palestinian side in this anti-colonial war. The point of view they’re coming from is that of the liberals within “Israel,” and of the Palestinian elites who align with the PA. These are ideological forces which oppose Netanyahu, but will never support the resistance, and therefore aren’t interested in the parts of this history which have been experienced by the Palestinians who are defending their people.

When you start venturing into this aspect of why October 7 happened, you find the context that Gaza was desperate for a way to disrupt its unlivable status quo; that Russia’s Ukraine success had provided new hope for fighting back against the U.S. empire; that the occupier’s latest violations of Al-Aqsa Mosque had created a mandate for the resistance to act. These things are enough to dispel any speculations about October 7 having been the product of some Hamas-Netanyahu conspiracy, because they all point to Hamas having been compelled by larger material circumstances. And since the operation was the product of an organic revolutionary process, the efforts which “Israel” made to exploit the operation were carried out in reaction towards these events. These measures were not all according to plan, because the Netanyahu government’s plans were formulated to try to manage an upheaval which is far beyond its scope.

This is further shown by how since October 7, the Zionist structure has been successfully weakened, meaning the Al-Aqsa Flood operation was a strategically sound action. This structure had already been headed for collapse, largely due to how much Zionism’s internal camps are in conflict with each other. Al-Aqsa Flood only sped up the unraveling, bringing “Israel” into an unwinnable war that’s devastated the colonizer economy and irrevocably taken away Zionism’s narrative dominance.

When these liberal Zionists slander the resistance as a tool for Netanyahu, they’re trying to facilitate a transition that would be Zionism’s best hope for holding on. What they hope will happen is that Gaza remains divided from the West Bank, letting the pro-normalization collaborators in the PA define the project for Palestinian statehood. Of course, for Palestine to gain a state, the resistance would need to win; which is the contradiction that reveals what this collaborationist ideology’s true role is. 

The purpose of “pro-Palestine” politics that opposes the resistance is to dangle a false solution in front of those who sympathize with Palestine. It’s pure diversion, and whether or not this diversion’s participants genuinely believe Palestine can be freed through “peaceful” means, this is the objective character of what they’re doing. The way to counter these insidious tactics is by connecting our political practice with the struggle that’s taking place in Palestine, growing beyond the analyses that look at Palestine from the outside in.

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Marxism faces today’s crisis unflinchingly, while the far right retreats into a world that can no longer exist

The core flaw of Bronze Age Pervert, Nick Fuentes, and all other “rightist” figures is that they frame history as being a personal thing. That they look at the alienation within today’s society, and the civilizational collapse which the “collective west” is experiencing, then conclude that these developments have simply come from a conspiracy. It’s the same explanation that anarchism has for the existence of the state: supposedly, the state’s core basis is a series of myths that a minority have formulated in order to perpetuate the state. And therefore if we were to only shatter these narratives, then the state would disappear.

This is the kind of thinking that the far right has when it comes to escaping our society’s alienation, and there’s absolutely overlap here with anarchism. There’s a reason why certain foundational anarchist thinkers, like Proudhon and Bakunin, propagated the “Jewish question”: they shared the view that our modern social structures are merely the product of artificial designers, rather than of concrete historical processes.

BAP is carrying on this same tradition of thinking, even though he advocates for distancing the right from Nazism or the JQ. We know that BAP’s ideas come from the anarchist lineage because at the foundation of his arguments, there is the notion that modernity didn’t originate from technological advancement and the evolution in the productive forces. And just by denying the significance of the role which these factors hold within social change, BAP fails to correctly assess today’s conditions. This is the shortcoming within every other idealist way of thinking; and the way that these worldviews can be made to appear logical is by connecting their arguments to a feeling which many people may identify with.

BAP asserts that society has come to live under a matriarchy, one which takes away the opportunity to assert individual historical agency. And the feeling this argument speaks to is that especially for those who’ve come-of-age in the post-Covid era, the future we were supposed to have has been taken away from us. For a growing number of people in the “collective west,” it’s become out of reach to own a home, start a family, or even get employment. The way out of this situation, says BAP near the end of Bronze Age Mindset, is to carve out a series of enclaves from which the chosen will re-introduce civilizational strength:

I believe that at some point, before or after the troubles, the superior specimens are going to find each other and leave this civilization. They will form fortresses on the edge of the civilized world, in the tropics, from where they will watch the seas. The era of high piracy will return. Such men will develop above all their physical powers and their ability to wage war. They will offer the nations defense in exchange for a price. Occasionally they will send a great demagogue into the peoples, when this becomes necessary. Such men, perched atop these eagles’ nests, will have the territory of a new frontier again, and a life that suits them. Science will be liberated from the constraints of caring for comfort or entertainment. Great projects in science, the projects of private men, will once again begin. Such fortresses will possess frightful weapons to defend themselves, and will have penetrated deep into the nations their antennae and their many emissaries and watchers.

It’s another version of the path that Fuentes offers, where he urges his followers to infiltrate all levels of professional and political society so that America can be returned to tradition. If “tradition” can be brought back, though, whether it looks like the Bronze Age or any other past era, then why did this past go away in the first place? 

The far right’s anarchistic explanation says that it’s because of conscious designs, which can be undone through different designs. But in reality it was because the material basis for the old world had come to no longer exist. Therefore, these changes cannot be undone, but rather built upon, with humanity progressing to a new stage on the foundations that these evolutionary shifts have created for us.

The question then becomes: how to bring our society’s “left-behinds” to the Marxist view of history, when these left-behinds are experiencing a collective tragedy that couldn’t be more personal? Marxism-Leninism is the only ideology that recognizes history as being non-personal, and if we were to adopt the personalized view, we would be giving up a vital part of Marxist-Leninist theory. Yet we must reach the left-behinds. The solution is to come to a new synthesis of thinking and practice. MLs and their allies need to present the left-behinds with a path forward which accounts for just how badly the 21st century’s upheavals have damaged the old social structures, and what effects this is having on those who’ve been left out of the lucky minority.

This is where it becomes imperative for us to break our movement out of its old dogmas, and take Marxism into the future. A future where, at least within the Global North countries which have become afflicted with imperialism’s internal collapse, the life paths that had once been the default are being taken away. If a return to “tradition” is not the right way to respond to this tragedy, and in fact isn’t even a viable solution, then what alternative does Marxism offer? What it offers is the only route forward: to investigate these conditions we’re facing with rigorous honesty, and act according to these conditions.

This is what Marxism is always supposed to do during any given moment in history. But far too many of the world’s communist parties have fallen into stagnation and complacency, with the outcome being that they’ve come to fall out of touch with the masses. This trend towards staleness has been majorly holding back the global workers movement for a long time, at least since the fall of the Soviet Union; the proof is in the failure by these established communist formations to seriously seize upon the crises of the 21st century. But with the emergence of capital’s latest crises, we have the friction which could shake the movement out from its stupor, and let it rise again stronger than ever. The accelerated disruptions that we’ve been seeing since 2020 won’t bring this success on their own; but if we respond to them correctly, we will see the rewards.

It’s within this mission, where history has tasked us with overcoming inertia, that the left-behinds can find a path which is superior to the far right’s path on every level. The right puts forth the illusion that it’s bringing revolutionary disruption; Marxism actually offers a way to make the system tremble and crumble, then be sublated into a new reality, one where society’s producers are the guiding force. To illustrate why the right represents retreat, while Marxism represents advancement, one can look to what Engels said about the perpetually incomplete nature of knowledge:

…there is absolutely no need to be alarmed at the fact that the stage of knowledge which we have now reached is as little final as all that have preceded it. It already embraces a vast mass of judgments and requires very great specialisation of study on the part of anyone who wants to become conversant with any particular science. But a man who applies the measure of genuine, immutable, final and ultimate truth to knowledge which, by its very nature, must either remain relative for many generations and be completed only step by step, or which, as in cosmogony, geology and the history of mankind, must always contain gaps and be incomplete because of the inadequacy of the historical material — such a man only proves thereby his own ignorance and perversity, even if the real thing behind it all is not, as in this case, the claim to personal infallibility. Truth and error, like all thought-concepts which move in polar opposites, have absolute validity only in an extremely limited field.

We offer a rejection of all such types of intellectual cowardice, where defenders of the established order cling to a frozen concept of reality. The root of our crisis, of our tragedy, is that as a collective we’ve been clinging to “knowledge” which objective reality has disproven. The old ways of operating are no longer working for the average person, and the ramifications of this problem get worse all the time. The circumstances are forcing us to discard our old patterns, and formulate new plans. This is what the true defense against our modern dystopia looks like: a version of the proletarian struggle that’s actually competent and effective, because it’s recognized how much the old reality has been hollowed out. In the face of this situation, our only recourse is to evolve, and to synthesize existing Marxist theory with what the post-Covid generations are experiencing.

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War on Iran & Venezuela is the U.S. banking regime’s attempt to manage an upheaval that’s beyond its scope

If the U.S. empire decides to pursue war with Venezuela or Iran, it will be risking a new level of resistance from the forces of popular revolution. Resistance that builds upon the gains made by the Donbass separatist movement, which has been fighting against Washington’s U.S.-installed coup regime in Kiev; as well as the strategic progress of the Palestinian resistance, whose intensifying anti-colonial war has also catalyzed new anti-U.S. maneuvers by Yemen, Iran, Lebanon, and other heroic nations. It will also follow the recent revolutions in Africa’s Sahel region, which the Russian resistance to Washington’s assaults helped catalyze; and should this next phase of anti-imperialist struggle be successful enough, it will force the hegemon to divert its resources away from fronts like Syria, where a resistance is still fighting and is seeking to reverse last year’s defeat.

Whether these forces do mobilize to that degree depends on whether we put in the work; it won’t happen on its own. But should the imperial enemy expand its aggressions to just one or two more fronts, it will bring about the kind of chaos that Mao said would happen during a third world war. Chaos that Mao believed the working class will absolutely be able to turn in its favor:

People all over the world are now discussing whether a third world war will break out. On this question, too, we must be mentally prepared and do some analysis. We stand firmly for peace and against war. However, if the imperialists insist on unleashing another war, we should not be afraid of it. Our attitude on this question is the same as our attitude towards any disturbance: first, we are against it; second, we are not afraid of it. The First World War was followed by the birth of the Soviet Union with a population of 200 million. The Second World War was followed by the emergence of the socialist camp with a combined population of 900 million. If the imperialists insist on launching a third world war, it is certain that several hundred million more will turn to socialism, and then there will not be much room left on earth for the imperialists; it is also likely that the whole structure of imperialism will utterly collapse.

The imperialists have already launched a third world war, and it began at least as far back as when they started their proxy war on Syria in 2011. This was after Washington had begun its “pivot to Asia,” which made China the new central target and thereby entailed a new wave of regime change campaigns. These destructive efforts have been successful to a much greater degree than the bulk of anti-imperialists had anticipated, and Syria’s fall proved such a deficiency in the strategic understanding we’d previously held. Yet when we look at the fronts in this conflict where the anti-imperialist side has been gaining, and at where the Global South is successfully building up an alternative economy, the path to victory becomes clearer.

We know that Venezuela’s capacity for resistance is stronger than Ba’athist Syria’s had been. This is because Venezuela’s Bolivarian government has managed to build and deepen a relationship with the country’s working masses, enabling it to fortify its armed strength in a way that’s optimal. Insofar as critiques of Assad’s Syria are relevant, among its problems was that it was too far from being a worker’s government, and this weakened the integrity of its armed structures. Revolutionary Venezuela has only been strengthening the government’s ties to the workers, and this has been crucial in the assembly of the country’s vast civilian militia.

The Venezuelan revolution’s strength comes from the same place as the strength of China, and the DPRK, and the other anti-imperialist projects that have continued to fortify themselves amid Washington’s present offensive. These countries could gain such an advantage because they invested themselves within the popular masses, to a degree which has made it so that when the empire picks a fight with the government, really it’s picking a fight with the people. When the banking regime figured out that such popular power had prevailed in China, and China would therefore keep developing on its own rather than becoming subservient to U.S. capital, it decided to start the third world war.

In its effort to manage this global war, and prevent it from bringing a resurgence for socialism, the empire turned towards Azovism—the ruling Ukrainian fascist ideology which synthesizes Nazi anti-communism with woke liberalism. But the media’s efforts to propagate this ideology couldn’t stop the masses from turning against NATO’s Ukraine war, nor could it prevent the breakdown in support for the Zionist entity. Our ruling class has reacted to these developments by pivoting from wokeism towards right-wing “trad” imperialism, which is why the establishment chose Trump as its candidate in 2024. This revival of Reaganist politics forms the core narrative basis for the wars on Iran and Venezuela; yet within these politics, there’s a rift forming. Because the MAGA base is not willing to simply accept another two wars, on top of the two that Americans have already been dragged into during the 2020s.

Rallying MAGA in revolt against the war machine is part of how communists must respond to these developments. Within this story, though, there is a much broader context; one that doesn’t negate the “MAGA communism” thesis, but rather puts it in a larger perspective. This context is that since 2020, our material reality has changed in an unprecedented way, and we must account for this shift in order to rally the other biggest revolutionary element; that being the post-Covid generation.

Finance capital’s project to deliberately mismanage and weaponize the pandemic broke our society, making those who’ve come-of-age after that moment left behind. These youngest parts of the adult masses are as a rule being cut off from the job market, as well as from the strange social arrangement of the “dating market” (which in retrospect was always just waiting to fall apart). Unemployment, the “incel crisis,” and all other disruptions of our era are now being exacerbated by capital’s abuses of AI. The hope of our ruling class is that the American masses will become further atomized by these events, with the “left-behinds” being driven to reactionary violence. Yet among Gen Z, we are seeing an unprecedented will towards solidarity. The solid majority of Gen Z support Palestine’s armed resistance over the Zionist entity, and this has driven the Zionist establishment to take drastic measures.

There is real hope that the American nation will become collectively unified against its ruling banking regime. Such an outcome is a critical part of how the rest of the world will overcome imperialism’s wounds, and for this to happen, we must unite America’s working class with China. There is real hope for this as well; that China managed Covid so well contributed towards a rise in global admiration for China’s socialist model, and now China’s positive uses of AI are creating further inspiration. The gains that China has made in its mission to overcome its material contradictions, and build up its civilizational strength, are having an impact on global revolutionary politics. So are the gains of Palestine, Yemen, and the other countries which have been fighting the armed aspect of the revolutionary struggle. 

For Venezuela’s people to be compelled towards also joining in this part of the fight would represent a pivotal global moment. So would be the case if Iran’s people were provoked in such a way. The world’s working masses will respond to imperialism’s next aggressions, and to the resistance against them, by coming to a clearer sense of where their allies are. There’s no doubt about this. Our task is to lead the people towards importing the revolutionary struggle which they’re witnessing throughout these places, opening up ever-more new fronts in this fight.

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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. 

To keep this platform effective amid the censorship against dissenting voices, join my Telegram channel.