People’s Forum hosts neocons & Democrats, revealing a consolidation of the pro-reformist forces

There is evidence that the “red liberal” tendency within left politics is now being directly assimilated into the Democratic Party itself. We have reason to believe this because the People’s Forum, which is part of the same NGO network as PSL and ANSWER, has hosted three Democrat or Democrat-adjacent figures; those being the pro-Democrat streamer Hasan Piker, the neocon politician Kat Abughazaleh, and the Iran regime-changer Robab Vaziri. This act of class collaboration by the PSL’s circle is something we need to take serious note of; not because PSL itself is the main focus of what I’m saying here, but because this shows us how the pro-imperialist “socialists” are consolidating into a unified front. To rescue socialism from being absorbed into the Democratic Party, we must refute the arguments that the collaborators use to rationalize their opportunism, and to bring developing socialists into the wrong alliances.

One justification that these red libs use for engaging in such collaboration is that Marxists need to make inroads with the DSA crowd. Which is true, but the red libs are abusing the notion of going into the masses. Platforming neocons and reformist gatekeepers has a purely negative impact. Any attempt at building a unified front with those who actively propagandize for the empire’s wars, or who work to funnel socialists into reformism, can only assist in these agendas. Lenin explained why this is:

There can be no unity, federal or other, with liberal-labour politicians, with disruptors of the working-class movement, with those who defy the will of the majority. There can and must be unity among all consistent Marxists, among all those who stand for the entire Marxist body and for the uncurtailed slogans, independently of the liquidators and apart from them. Unity is a great thing and a great slogan. But what the workers’ cause needs is the unity of Marxists, not unity between Marxists, and opponents and distorters of Marxism. And we must ask everyone who talks about unity: unity with whom? With the liquidators? If so, we have nothing to do with each other. 

But if it is a question of genuine Marxist unity, we shall say: Ever since the Pravdist newspapers appeared we have been calling for the unity of all the forces of Marxism, for unity from below, for unity in practical activities. No flirting with the liquidators, no diplomatic negotiations with groups of wreckers of the corporate body; concentrate all efforts on rallying the Marxist workers around the Marxist slogans, around the entire Marxist body. The class-conscious workers will regard as a crime any attempt to impose upon them the will of the liquidators; they will also regard as a crime the fragmentation of the forces of the genuine Marxists.

In accordance with this principle that we need unity between Marxists, the American communists who refuse to tail the Democrats have announced that they’re willing to work with all anti-imperialists inside the different left orgs. We are willing to work with PSL, DSA, or anyone from any other left org that opposes this war; this position of ours hasn’t changed just because of the People’s Forum incident, because we already knew that the leaderships of these orgs were Democrat tailists. The purpose of our calling for unity between socialists is not to appease these opportunist leaders, but to provide allyship to the members of these orgs when their own leaders have betrayed the cause.

It’s because of this contradiction within the predominant American socialist groups, where the leaders can be counted on to go against the anti-imperialist values of their own members, that we can also say today’s reformist U.S. “socialists” have defied the will of the majority. The American socialist movement is at this time much smaller than the socialist movement in Russia from Lenin’s time was, but the bulk of the movement’s card-carrying members are in ideological conflict with the higher-ups. Therefore the higher-ups are going against the wishes of the majority in that sense.

Moreover, there’s a fundamental disconnect between the “soft” Zionist ideology of the bourgeois reformists, and the beliefs of the base that they’re seeking to maintain. Sana Saeed points out how even though certain figures among this reformist camp have gained great popularity (such as Mamdani), no amount of charisma from these leaders can rectify this problem:

By choosing to operate within a political party that oversaw, supported, denied, and continues to obfuscate the crime of genocide in Gaza, Mamdani stands in direct opposition to the movements he once claimed. What grounds that opposition - what renders it a betrayal - is his continued (and unnecessary) acquiescence to the Party’s need to be resuscitated among a base that is increasingly unwilling to engage any elected official who refuses to commit to, at minimum, a total arms embargo on Israel and an end to funding the apartheid state. 

The wave is turning toward the very politics that brought Mamdani to power, even as the Democratic Party works to redirect it. And in that tension, Mamdani increasingly finds himself not as its representative, but as its mediator; he has become a sort of piper, similar to Barack Obama, who not only funnels the disenchanted back into the Democratic Party but also offers electoralism as the best and necessary route of accountability for genocidaires, for fighting against the influence of pro-Israel lobbies and influence.

Will this attempt at redirection succeed? It depends on how many among the pro-Palestine base we manage to show a compelling alternative. This will require the sacrifices that come with staying principled as communists, in a time when state repression is advancing exponentially. Without a doubt, part of why the People’s Forum’s leaders have made an alliance with neocons is because they see how fast the crackdown is happening. This existential peril is the ultimate justification for becoming a class collaborator, and selling out all socialist values is exactly how the enemy wants socialists to respond to the counterinsurgency. 

Our task is to draw the socialist movement’s official ranks, and the broader class-conscious masses, into an organizational effort that will never bow out of fear or corruption. That will lead the masses towards resisting this war, building an independent working-class organizational structure, and overcoming the Washington banker occupation. If we fulfill this mission, the high-sounding phrases of the imperial “socialists” won’t be able to keep the people within the reformist camp. 

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The project to rehabilitate AOC’s “pro-Palestine” image, & the danger this poses to the workers movement

Above: in 2024, protesters shame AOC for the “antisemitism” panel where she affirmed rhetoric vilifying the boycott of pro-Israel institutions.

Among the most important tasks for today’s American Marxists is to expose AOC as a tool for capital before she can rebrand U.S. imperialism as “progressive.” If the “democratic socialist” wing of the Democratic Party replaces the present regime, the anti-imperialist cause will be dealing with a threat that’s more dangerous than the Zionist right, or the neoliberal wing of the Democrats. The socdems pose such a unique threat because they’re willing to center their platforms around economic populism, and thereby draw a large proportion of the workers into pro-imperialist ideology. They’re the force within ruling-class politics that offers the American people substantial social benefits, which at this stage is something which will attract U.S. workers from all across the ideological spectrum.

We have yet to see whether the socdem wing will succeed in rebuilding the American aristocracy of labor, or merely serve as a tool for falsely promising the people such living standard improvements. Whether they do rebuild the labor aristocracy may depend on whether they can sell AOC, who as of now has no peer which could be the socdem candidate for 2028. The socdems may try to run someone like Zohran for the presidency at a later time, but it’s best that we focus on the most urgent battles. And one of these battles is the fight against pro-AOC Zionist whitewashing; against the effort to convince Gen Z, which just turned against the Democrats for the Gaza genocide, that AOC represents a turn towards anti-Zionism.

Part of how we discredit this narrative is by clarifying Zionism’s true meaning. Zionism is not a vibe; it’s not “being outwardly racist towards Arabs,” like false Palestine allies treat it as being. Zionism is the position that Jewish people should have a state of their own, which always and necessarily equates to supporting racial supremacy. This is why Zohran is a Zionist for taking the position that so-called “Israel” should continue to exist, and it’s why AOC is a Zionist as well. When these leaders have refused to side with the struggle for decolonizing Palestine, it follows that they’ll side with the Zionist project whenever they’re met with the most critical choices on Palestine. 

AOC has revealed this by stating that even though she won’t vote for the Iron Dome funding bill, this is only because that particular bill isn’t necessary to fund Israel’s “defense,” which is covered by preexisting U.S. foreign aid policies. Every sign indicates that a president AOC would keep backing the project to colonize Palestine. The problem we are facing with AOC is that within the left, we have a large element which is willing to rationalize this. 

The arguing strategy from this obstinate pro-AOC camp is to repeat AOC’s pro-Zionist statements, wherein she’s justified the Iron Dome as being morally imperative for defending innocent civilians. We know that AOC will never be brought away from this pro-Zionist framework, because the best that pro-Palestine activists have been able to do with AOC is pressure her towards not assisting in the Iron Dome at this particular time. No one who seeks the Democratic Party’s support will break from the positions that “Israel” needs to be defended, that the Palestinian resistance needs to be fought, and that the settlers surrounding Gaza are “innocent” actors. 

The opportunism of AOC and these other “progressives” couldn’t be more obvious, but there is a section of the left that doesn’t care about this opportunism. And this part of the population is apathetic towards socdem opportunism for a very troubling reason: they’re willing to support imperialism in exchange for the material relief that socdems would bring them. 

Decline in living standards does not necessarily bring someone towards revolutionary consciousness. When the bourgeoisie offer a struggling individual a way out of their hardship, and the working-class movement doesn’t offer them an alternative, the logical outcome is that they’ll take a reactionary path. And many within Gen Z have the potential to fall down such a path. 

Gen Z, as a rule, tends not to care about idealistic concepts in the ways that past generations do. A generation that was raised after the 2008 depression, and came of after during Covid, is not going to be compelled by the intentions behind what somebody is doing; what they’re concerned with are the material results. 

For one example of what this looks like: Gen Z’s materialism has translated to a part of our generation being apathetic about climate politics, which doesn’t offer them the immediate material relief that they’re looking for. The Gen Z-ers who were part of the original 2010s teen climate movement, and who continued to believe in the cause, have since escaped the pro-imperialist liberal idealism which had tricked them in the past. Greta Thunberg’s refocusing towards Gaza represents the revolutionary advancement that this minority within Gen Z have undergone. Most of Gen Z, though, are still in danger of being either driven towards apathy or brought to a pro-imperialist position. And the way that our ruling class could turn them pro-imperialist, even though Gen Z has become radicalized on Palestine, is by using Palestine as a tool to advance Washington’s wars. By cultivating a “pro-Palestine” politics that analogizes Palestinians to Ukrainians, Uyghurs, and every other people who the U.S. weaponizes against its targets.

The perfect way for the ruling class to bring Gen Z to this place would be by turning the majority of them into labor aristocrats. This is the most rational path for the capitalists to take. However, we can’t yet be sure if the capitalists will act in such a rational way. In the absence of being able to predict things to that extent, we must look to what history has already taught us. One of these lessons is that when we go beyond the most privileged strata, and build our organizational presence into the deeper mass elements, we’ll succeed. This is apparent from how the Bolsheviks followed such a route, as explained by Lenin:

Neither we nor anyone else can calculate precisely what portion of the proletariat is following and will follow the social-chauvinists and opportunists. This will be revealed only by the struggle, it will be definitely decided only by the socialist revolution. But we know for certain that the “defenders of the fatherland” in the imperialist war represent only a minority. And it is therefore our duty, if we wish to remain socialists to go down lower and deeper, to the real masses; this is the whole meaning and the whole purport of the struggle against opportunism. By exposing the fact that the opportunists and social-chauvinists are in reality betraying and selling the interests of the masses, that they are defending the temporary privileges of a minority of the workers, that they are the vehicles of bourgeois ideas and influences, that they are really allies and agents of the bourgeoisie, we teach the masses to appreciate their true political interests, to fight for socialism and for the revolution through all the long and painful vicissitudes of imperialist wars and imperialist armistices.

The secondary danger posed by the socdems is that through bribing more Americans into becoming pro-imperialist, they’ll drive anti-imperialists into ultra-leftism, and instill in them an attitude of hostility towards the masses. We can avoid such a direction for our movement by going lower and deeper into the masses, and by doing it right now. Not by waiting for a future time where the circumstances may be better, not by entertaining the Democratic Party out of “pragmatism”; by doing all of the work that we can to bring in the workers, as fast as we can. This is our only option. When we have this clarity, we can fight to the best of our abilities.

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The MAGA base’s split from Trump, & how this precludes the rescuing of American civilization

When liberals have compared Trump to Caesar, they’ve unintentionally admitted to the doom of their own social system. Today, this comparison isn’t used nearly as much as it was during the first years of Trump’s political career, and this is because Trump hasn’t embodied the role that the liberal technocrats feared he would. He hasn’t destroyed the Atlanticist order, but rather consolidated U.S. power, advancing the war against Russia while shifting the costs of this onto Europe. Largely for this reason, Trump 2.0 is working out very well for the ruling class. 

Liberal commentators thought Trump would be a repeat of Caesar—who they’ve vilified because he sided with the masses—even though Trump has consistently sided with the U.S. empire over the masses. Within this breakdown of the “Trump is Caesar” narrative, we find the larger trajectory of America’s class war.

The victory of the barbarians will be a good thing

It’s because Trump has taken on this anti-popular role that the MAGA base has been increasingly splitting from him—and thereby bringing America closer to the revolutionary scenario that these liberals have feared when they’ve brought up Rome. We’re headed for an outcome where the republic and the empire have both fallen away, and been replaced by the near-future’s equivalents of the German barbarians. Those being the forces of proletarian revolution.

The split within MAGA is a falling-out between the Zionist right—which by extension is also the Atlanticist right—and the parts of the popular masses inside MAGA which truly desire revolutionary change. These masses were hoping for Trump to be a Caesar, to be a reformer who defies the centers of power from within. But now that he’s been revealed to them as just another Bush, Obama, or Biden, the only way the MAGA base can go forward is by building an independent movement. A movement that can bring about victory for the barbarians, which have long been suppressed by America’s banker regime. 

This gets to the true essence of the “make America great again” idea, which is not to literally bring America back to a specific past time but rather to rescue American civilization. The subject that MAGA seeks to uplift is a latent collective strength within America, one that’s been prevented from emerging by monopoly finance capital. When we overcome this tyranny, America will be rejuvenated by the barbarians, like happened to post-Roman society.

In Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State, Engels identified the barbarians as being the force which could bring back a collective vitality that had been pushed down by the decadent old paradigm. He observed how

The old order of society based on personal ties of blood was destroyed and in its place was set up a new and complete state constitution based on territorial division and difference of wealth. Here the public power consisted of the body of citizens liable to military service, in opposition not only to the slaves, but also to those excluded from service in the army and from possession of arms, the so-called proletarians. 

The banishment of the last rex, Tarquinius Superbus, who usurped real monarchic power, and the replacement of the office of rex by two military leaders (consuls) with equal powers (as among the Iroquois) was simply a further development of this new constitution. Within this new constitution, the whole history of the Roman Republic runs its course, with all the struggles between patricians and plebeians for admission to office and share in the state lands, and the final merging of the patrician nobility in the new class of the great land and money owners, who, gradually swallowing up all the land of the peasants ruined by military service, employed slave labor to cultivate the enormous estates thus formed, depopulated Italy and so threw open the door, not only to the emperors, but also to their successors, the German barbarians.

When the barbarians got this opportunity, said Engels, they were able to return the lost structure of kinship to the underclass, and thereby bring civilization back from the ashes:

If in at least three of the most important countries, Germany, northern France and England, they carried over into the feudal state a genuine piece of gentile constitution, in the form of mark communities, thus giving the oppressed class, the peasants, even under the harshest medieval serfdom, a local center of solidarity and a means of resistance such as neither the slaves of classical times nor the modern proletariat found ready to their hand – to what was this due, if not to their barbarism, their purely barbarian method of settlement in kinship groups?…All the vigorous and creative life which the Germans infused into the Roman world was barbarism. Only barbarians are able to rejuvenate a world in the throes of collapsing civilization. And precisely the highest stage of barbarism, to which and in which the Germans worked their way upwards before the migrations, was the most favorable for this process. That explains everything.

This is the ultimate role of the MAGA base, and of the other elements in America with revolutionary potential: to rejuvenate our part of the world, which has the potential to rise in the same ways that other parts of the world are now rising. When the liberals characterize Trump and his supporters as barbarians, they’re reacting to the unavoidable breakdown of America’s bourgeois order, whose logical conclusion is the triumph of the American barbarians. Because they view the bourgeois order as fundamentally good, they’ve equated Caesar and the barbarians with evil, and made Trump into the scapegoat for the empire’s sicknesses. But the masses can’t be fear-mongered into propping up this system; they’ll continue to seek a route towards popular revolution.

Translating this momentum into victory

We could be advancing in the ways that socialist China is advancing; all that stands between us and this future is the American banking occupation. And as our third world war progresses, growing numbers of Americans are coming to understand this. Compared to pre-Covid times, our culture is now noticeably more pro-China, with Americans all across the ideological spectrum realizing just how far China has gotten. The view of China as a smoggy dystopia became stale a long time ago at this point, and awareness of the PRC’s achievements is expanding.

As our government continues to ramp up its wars, and soon pivots towards directly attacking China, this trend among the masses will continue. The question is whether we’ll be able to guide this spontaneous popular consciousness shift towards an actual proletarian revolutionary agenda.

As Lenin concluded: “the ‘spontaneous element,’ in essence, represents nothing more nor less than consciousness in an embryonic form. Even the primitive revolts [in tsarist Russia] expressed the awakening of consciousness to a certain extent. The workers were losing their age-long faith in the permanence of the system which oppressed them and began... I shall not say to understand, but to sense the necessity for collective resistance, definitely abandoning their slavish submission to the authorities. But this was, nevertheless, more in the nature of outbursts of desperation and vengeance than of struggle.” Such is the character of incidents like the recent revenge arson by an Amazon employee, which has galvanized popular revolutionary sentiment in the way that the Brian Thompson slaying did. These developments are the first step in a process that can’t go any further until we take an active leadership role, and give the people the means to win.

It’s so important to emphasize this because in the case of the U.S. empire, we cannot simply wait for the barbarians to rejuvenate a collapsing civilization, like society could after the fall of Rome. In the absence of working-class organization, of mass education in revolutionary theory, all that will happen is decline without any renewal afterward—at least not after the passage of a long dark age. This is the existential peril we are dealing with: in the capitalist era, civilizational collapse is terminal unless the working masses organize. If we do build this power, though, we will achieve a level of civilizational strength that’s permanent in a way which no past popular victory has been.

The civilizations built by the German barbarians, Genghis Khan, and the other ancient revolutionaries were doomed, because capitalism would come to transform every corner of the globe. However, they provided us with examples in how to overthrow the modern versions of Roman decadence, and realize barbarian construction in its ultimate form—that form being communism. Theirs is the historical tradition that we are following as we wage our present 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. 

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The Epstein fallout, Israel’s collapse, and the inter-elite conflict that will tear the USA apart

The Epstein files didn’t start a revolution, but they did reveal that the conflicts within our ruling class could tear the U.S. empire apart, like Israel is tearing itself apart. This is because the files were released by the “globalist” wing within the U.S. power structure, with the aim of destroying the wing that’s centered in domestic American interests. Epstein represented the tendency within U.S. capital that exists primarily to assist the American big bourgeoisie in particular, rather than global capital as a whole. 

This divergence in material interests between the local and the global is the central dividing line for the U.S. ruling class. And the ever-intensifying conflict between these two forces parallels the conflict between Zionism’s opposing factions, in that this dispute could lead to the Washington banker regime’s downfall; which would make Israel’s collapse represent a prelude to what will happen in the USA.

In fact, it’s a certainty that the fight between globalist and localized capital will be a critical part of what destroys the U.S. empire, because these clashings are the empire’s most serious internal threat at this stage. Trump 2.0 has been going very well for our ruling class, and the empire has been going on the offensive in unprecedented ways; there’s still yet to emerge a substantial working-class organizational presence in the USA, and those in power have been growing more emboldened as time has gone on. Our leaders no longer feel a need to hide their war crimes, and scandals are no longer things to be feared but rather new markers for what’s acceptable. 

This is why the Epstein files haven’t endangered any of the guilty: they’ve served as a means for further normalizing violence against children. Which would mean that the files have merely strengthened the system; and yet behind it all, a deeper unraveling has been playing out. A dispute at the highest levels of power that’s threatening to make the United States no longer viable in its present form, to split our enemies, and to create an unprecedented opening in the class war.

When the Democrats and the globalist-aligned Republicans publicized the files, what they were doing was sending a warning shot for civil war. They were making it clear that if the Trump wing tries to obstruct the next designs of international finance capital, then the globalist-aligned wing of our deep state will carry out more operations like the July 2024 Trump assassination attempt. They’ll also orchestrate new levels of unrest within our cities, activating their fed-managed “antifa” forces so that they can divide-and-conquer America. 

This does not mean we should side with the Trump wing in the civil war, any more than we should side with either of the rival Zionist factions. It means we must build a working-class force that can outmaneuver both of our warring foes, going into the parts of the masses that will be radicalized by the growing chaos.

By “radicalized,” I mean alienated from both of the ruling capitalist parties, to the effect that we can bring them out of falling back into the duopoly. Right now, more and more of the MAGA base are gaining in revolutionary consciousness, because Trump 2.0 has been fully revealed as a source of false hope. Now the “progressive” Democrats are trying to pick up these disillusioned conservatives and independents, using economic populist rhetoric that may indeed gain them support from these parts of the masses. 

This represents a danger to the revolutionary cause, because if communists don’t reach these disillusioned Americans before the social democrats do, they’ll be brought into a pro-imperialist politics. Such is the plan that the globalist wing has to fortify the imperial system: bribe Americans with social benefits so that they’ll get behind Washington’s effort to ramp up its wars.

There are many obstacles to this plan’s realization, though, and we must take advantage of these problems our enemies are facing. Right now, the biggest obstacle is that the domestic wing will do all it can to stop the globalist wing from implementing these social reforms. Peter Thiel and those who share his philosophy want accelerationism, where capitalism’s contradictions become heightened as fast as possible; there’s no way to reconcile this goal with expanded social benefits. Therefore Thiel, and the parts of the deep state that align with him, are going to wage an offensive of their own. 

One weapon they’ll likely use in this campaign is cyber warfare; it’s become clear that quantum computing is on its way to overcoming present digital security tech, and Palantir’s heads will try to take advantage of this in order to strike back against their rivals. When these advancements start bringing unprecedented cyber-attacks, expect the battles between our enemies to play a central role in these disruptions.

The other obstacle towards fortifying the imperial structure comes from the American people, who’ve already been greatly radicalized and will continue becoming more radicalized as conditions grow worse. Even if the globalist wing succeeds in enacting these social reforms, our living standards are going to get worse before they get better; Washington’s determination to keep aggressing against Iran and its allies ensures that the oil crisis will be long-term. The response from the people will be to keep looking for answers, and for ways to fight back against our banker regime. 

This is why communists must build an anti-Epstein popular coalition: it’s how we can prevent the mass reaction towards Epstein from becoming neutralized, and translate  awareness of Epstein into renewed working-class organizational strength.

As our rulers try to fight off both the world’s anti-imperialist forces, and each other, they’ll work to condition the people into a traumatized stupor. They’ll use mass shootings, false flags, and other tools to terrorize Americans, as well as turn us against our neighbors. The goal of all of this is to prevent the American people from following in the example of the Palestinians, and resisting occupation. 

We need to understand the banking regime as an occupier, existing to serve the interests of our class enemies. And to defeat this dictatorial force, we must understand exactly where our enemies lie. The dividing line in America’s coming class confrontation will be defined by whether somebody is fighting on behalf of our ruling elites—whether the globalist wing or the domestic wing. This is an optimal way to define the boundary of demarcation, because if we merely say we’re fighting against “the globalists,” we’ll be falling for a psyop by the Trump/Thiel wing.

It is useful to employ the phrase “Epstein class” in agitating for the class war, but we must do so while accounting for the context in which Epstein emerged. Finding this context goes deeper than saying “the Epstein class is just the bourgeoisie”; because many lower-level bourgeoisie are capable of joining with the proletariat, as they have in past revolutions like China’s. The true character of the Epstein class is that they’re bourgeois pedophiles, or bourgeois associates of pedophiles; which is a category that encompasses both the Trump/Thiel camp, and the larger Davos/Bilderberger assemblage that often comes into conflict with the domestic U.S. capitalists.

The role of Epstein himself was to predominantly serve and draw wealth from domestic U.S. capital, which made him a figure who the Mossad sought out for furthering its blackmail operations. Epstein also came into the circles of the Rockefellers and the Trilateral Commission, which are of course tied in with domestic U.S. capital and Israel; yet as the system has gotten closer to collapse, these different factions in the power structure have found themselves at odds more and more. The logical conclusion of this is for the Israeli collapse to repeat itself in Washington, with our enemies entering into a bitter struggle between each other like is happening between the Zionist factions. The question is whether the American people will take control amid the chaos, and end our imperial system.

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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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To bring the post-Covid generation to Marxism, we must fully break from the “academic leftist” model

The starkest contradiction between academic leftism, and the reality of today’s conditions for the youth, is how academia itself increasingly cannot offer upward mobility. The members of higher education tend to think in a socially progressive way, and they often identify as leftists or give credit to surface-level Marxian ideas. Yet due to the nature of bourgeois academia, the very structure of these educational institutions is growing ever-more hostile towards the students. 

For the Gen Z who’ve come of age post-Covid, post-graduate unemployment is unprecedented in its scale, and in the degree of hopelessness for this trend to end. These students are also experiencing the fallout from a systematic campaign to dismantle higher education as we know it, with the worst consequence from this being growing student homelessness. For the younger Gen Alpha, these problems will no doubt be at least as severe. To bring the post-Covid generation into the class war, Marxists must properly unpack academic leftism, and understand where it lies within today’s material conflicts.

The contradiction we must confront

Academic leftism is a mindset, a mindset where “socialist” intellectuals preach to the masses rather than actually leading the proletarian struggle. This way of relating to the people as a “Marxist” is a holdover from the period of bourgeois revolutions, where after the people overthrew the feudal order, there appeared “right” and “left” wings within the new capitalist parliament; with the right being on the king’s side, and the left existing in negation towards the king. Because the concept of a political left came out of bourgeois politics, there has always been a contradiction between identifying with the left, and identifying as a communist; “leftism” is something that the capitalist ruling class has been able to incorporate into its core ideological makeup, making leftism compatible with the notion of a “progressive” imperialism. 

Part of this is apparent in how all of Washington’s color revolutions have involved backing leftists who hate the governments the empire wants gone. The problem goes much deeper than this, though, because the left isn’t merely something that imperialism has co-opted; when we recognize proper definition of what “the left” is, that being a wing within bourgeois “democracy,” it becomes clear that communists must escape from leftism in order to become truly independent from bourgeois politics. 

This is where it’s so important to grasp the nature of the ideological conflict within leftism, and within the academic institutions that utilize leftist ideology. Because even though communists seek to rebuild an authentic left, to reconstruct the working-class institutions that were destroyed in the 20th century, all the while we must remain prepared to combat the problems which will inevitably arise out of leftism. These problems being the unprincipled, imperialism-compatible behaviors that are embraced by the leftists who support Washington’s color revolutions. 

Inevitably these behaviors will manifest in the form of attacks against those who seek to rebuild America’s workers movement, because leftism without dialectical thinking is pure negation. It’s the ideology that you can use to cancel any working-class organizer for not being woke enough. This is why Haz Al-Din concludes that leftism’s logical conclusion is to serve the very most destructive and malicious designs of imperialism. 

He phrases this by calling leftism the heir to fascism, which sounds counterintuitive when you’re looking at these ideologies on the surface level; yet no matter how bombastic it seems, the reality is that we have seen leftists across the globe rallying alongside fascists in Washington’s color revolutions, with Ukraine being one of the foremost examples of this. 

The defense from these left fascist collaborators is that they came towards their views based on their own lived experiences, and have their own reasons for hating the U.S.-targeted governments which they live under. And this is what reveals the contradiction between leftism and Marxism; because indeed, these collaborators represent a political camp that emerged out of real material factors, independently from U.S. imperialism. Where their politics came from, though, was not class consciousness; it came from petty-bourgeois and lumpen resentment, which invariably becomes targeted at the proletarian forces. This is why Haz describes leftism as fulfilling the same anti-proletarian role which fascism does:

The true heir of fascism, is none other than Leftism itself. Fascism, like leftism, establishes the dead form of modernity as a pinwheel - a swastika - actively and voluntarily preserving it at the expense of its own real technomic premises, and therefore emanating an affect of revolutionary change. If there is any model worthy of representing the ‘political spectrum’ (which does not actually represent political difference, but rather the political homogeneity of the modern state), it is precisely that of the swastika, as it cannot tilt right without also moving left. The dead form of modernity cannot be preserved, without also emanating the veneer of change. This shocking fact is already self-evident throughout Europe and Ukraine. To call leftists fascists would be superfluous, for leftism is already far more fascist than fascism could ever possibly have been. All the genocidal intent, violence, terrorism and bestiality of fascism is amplified, with far more viciousness, brutality and efficiency in leftism, a fact which is sure to become evident to all in the years to come.

These are the activities that our ruling class hopes to draw the lumpenized students or former students into: ultraviolent adventurism, efforts to terrorize the actual working-class forces, libidinal release to cope with one’s alienation. This is why “antifa,” as it actually exists today, mirrors the Brownshirt model of recruiting from the unemployed youth. And these anti-worker “counter-gangs” grow out from academic leftism; the identity politics ideology behind them is taught to these unemployed youths by the academic/NGO networks. This infrastructure has laid the groundwork for a new wave of counterinsurgency, wherein the adventurist wing of ultra-leftism escalates its assaults against working-class organizations.

Rescuing the left-behind youths

Such is the role that ultra-leftism will play in this next stage of the class war: weaponizing the most disaffected among the post-Covid generation against the proletariat. To draw these youths away from ultra-leftism, or from its far right counterpart, we must fully break from the academic leftist model. We must reject the mode of practice that the bourgeois revolutionaries have passed down onto us, wherein the members of the revolutionary intelligentsia merely talk at the masses in hope of rousing them towards revolution. 

There is a difference between trying to lecture the masses into becoming revolutionaries, and building a collective organization for these masses which can give them practical experience within the class struggle. Only with the latter model can the population’s level of class consciousness truly be raised. Because there’s been no left in America for a long time, during this first organizational stage we have needed to look for class consciousness within the ideological realm; to identify which parts of the masses are most disillusioned with the liberal order, and go into them. The proper definition of class consciousness, though, is when the working masses come to participate in working-class organization itself. This is the context we must consider while we follow Lenin’s call to raise the consciousness of the workers:

There can be no talk of an independent ideology formulated by the working masses themselves in the process of their movement…This does not mean, of course, that the workers have no part in creating such an ideology. They take part, however, not as workers, but as socialist theoreticians, as Proudhons and Weitlings; in other words, they take part only when they are able, and to the extent that they are able, more or less, to acquire the knowledge of their age and develop that knowledge. 

But in order that working men may succeed in this more often, every effort must be made to raise the level of the consciousness of the workers in general; it is necessary that the workers do not confine themselves to the artificially restricted limits of “literature for workers” but that they learn to an increasing degree to master general literature. It would be even truer to say “are not confined”, instead of “do not confine themselves”, because the workers themselves wish to read and do read all that is written for the intelligentsia, and only a few (bad) intellectuals believe that it is enough “for workers” to be told a few things about factory conditions and to have repeated to them over and over again what has long been known.

When we truly grasp what Lenin meant by this, we can address the contradiction between leftism and Marxism, which is reaching a heightened point of conflict at this phase in the decline of our social order. Because of how extensively our ruling class has engineered society’s decline, the college pipeline as a rule no longer offers a path towards employment, or towards starting a family. And this breakdown of the boomer societal model is forcing those within left politics to confront an existential question for their cause. They’re having to answer: should we keep modeling our practice after academic leftism, or should we pursue the alternative route? That alternative being to wage the class war in a way which is truly responsive towards the conditions we’re facing today.

These are conditions where the foundation for “normal” life has been dynamited. If trends continue as they are, for the most part the post-Covid generation will not create a new generation after them; their familial connection to the future has been severed. Never before has humanity seen such a level of alienation, and therefore no attempt at mass politics that’s unwilling to confront this alienation can survive; not as a truly independent force, at least.

Leftism provides a cope for the post-Covid left-behinds, in the form of boundless negation; it tells them that humans are a virus, and therefore it’s a good thing for us to stop having children. It also preaches national nihilism, Clavicular-style, to the effect that leftists can avoid caring about the American family’s destruction. Of course these arguments can’t placate everyone, though, and their real purpose is to cultivate a niche political ideology. Among the left-behind youths who are seeking concrete political answers to the problem of familial decline, right now the main ideological influences are coming from the right. This is largely because it’s the right-wing “Jewish question” commentators who are talking about this problem in the first place. They’re the ones who are making the connection between the decline of American patriotism among the 30-and-under crowd, and the disappearance of opportunities for starting families; which aren’t things that leftism even recognizes as being bad.

Because leftism was designed to negate mass politics, in the Trump 2.0 era it’s lost its former relevance, and we shouldn’t be treating it as the central threat. I focus on leftism here for the purpose of contrasting anti-mass politics with the politics which Marxists need to embody; we know what the opposite of an effective communist movement looks like, and this lets us avoid the idealist errors that keep our movement stagnant. If the essence of academic leftism’s problem is that it’s about preaching to the masses, then we know that raising the consciousness of the masses can’t happen without actual popular organization. It can’t happen without unemployment councils, or party-building, or the other essential elements that are demanded by a Bolshevik practice. And when we use these tools to let the post-Covid generation fight its existential battle, then we can earn this generation’s respect.

The post-Covid generation’s fight is existential in nature because if they lose this fight, then they will become outmoded amid capital’s next technological phase. Gen Z, and those younger than us, see where things are headed unless we assert our interests. Recognizing this is part of how Marxists can convince the left-behind youths that we deserve to lead them. Academic leftism and its radlib outgrowths don’t even pretend to offer the post-Covid generation a solution. The far right offers them a false solution. We offer the authentic solution, but we must understand what our own goal is before we can speak or act credibly. 

Within Marxism, there is a battle for ideological control, where the leftist negationist side is in conflict with the dialectical side. This battle has been happening for centuries, and it will continue for centuries more; but the fact that it’s lasting this long shows the necessity for Marxism to evolve. To be effective as a Marxist, you have to reinvent yourself according to each new historical reality. As Gen Z and Gen Alpha fight to remain vital amid unprecedented existential peril, this is the mode of operating that we must impart onto them.

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