Fighting ecocide doesn’t look like liberal “degrowth” schemes. It looks like the Palestinian resistance.

Palestine’s resistance shows what it truly looks like to fight for one’s land, as opposed to the “climate movement” that billionaire NGOs have created. The Palestinians are waging a real struggle to save their water, farmlands, and homes from all-consuming violence. Their fight leaves no room for the misanthropic views of western “climate politics,” because this fight is an existential war for the survival of an entire people. In this conflict, there is no layer of separation between human beings and the planet, like there is within the world of western “environmentalism.” The struggle’s participants don’t feel a need to make arguments like “humans are the virus,” because the connection between the land and the humans who live on it couldn’t be more clear.

This is one of the lessons from the Global South’s liberation struggles which we must internalize as we fight against the data centers, and against the broader ecological violence that’s being multiplied in scope. The nature of these struggles makes them incompatible with the western climate movement’s “degrowth” thinking, which negates class analysis in favor of a “humans vs. the planet” equation. The left within the imperial sphere can afford to ignore the wellbeing of the working masses, because it’s a privileged element that gets its activism resources from finance capital. Within these conditions, it can make sense to further drive down the people’s living standards as a supposed environmental solution. It can never make sense under the conditions of an actual, immediate battle for collective survival.

As our ruling class expands and intensifies its destruction of our lands, and our fight becomes more existential in nature, a danger is that the movements opposing this destruction will operate according to the degrowth logic. We cannot underestimate how much the western left has internalized the thinking of finance capital’s “environmental politics,” and been trained to see humanity or industry as diseases which must be defeated. The west’s “climate movement” has created a large layer of individuals who hold self-hatred for being human, or hatred for civilizational progress; which often translates into a belief that unrestrained adventurist violence is justified by the magnitude of the fight before us.

To the leftists who advocate for adventurism, we can respond: indeed, this fight’s magnitude is overwhelming. It was overwhelming during Lenin’s time too; all of history has been a history of class struggle, with the underclass always being engaged in totalizing battles. And during the battles he was fighting, Lenin had the same analysis on adventurism that today’s serious Marxists do. About the “Socialist-Revolutionies” who promoted terrorism, he observed how

the Socialist-Revolutionaries do not realise that their predilection for terrorism is causally most intimately linked with the fact that, from the very outset, they have always kept, and still keep, aloof from the working-class movement, without even attempting to become a party of the revolutionary class which is waging its class struggle. Over-ardent protestations very often lead one to doubt and suspect the worth of whatever it is that requires such strong seasoning. Do not these protestations weary them?—I often think of these words, when I read assurances by the Socialist-Revolutionaries: “by terrorism we are not relegating work among the masses into the background." After all, these assurances come from the very people who have already drifted away from the Social-Democratic labour movement, which really rouses the masses; they come from people who are continuing to drift away from this movement, clutching at fragments of any kind of theory.

This is the real origin of the ultra-left mentality that we need to embrace spontaneous violent action: a lack of willingness to build a mass movement, and gain the strength that comes from winning the people to your side. The Extinction Rebellion logic that we have to commit provocations against the masses due to an urgency for saving the planet is only a cover for this deficiency.

We can fix this deficiency, if we truly learn from the Global South rather than pretend to learn from it. Since October 7, these same ultra-leftists have portrayed their adventurism as being in tandem with the Palestinian resistance. This is specifically true for the wing within the NGO left that’s genuinely illiberal in its thinking, and whose members have sought out the most radical ideas and activities. 

Unlike the left actors who condemn Hamas to fulfill a gatekeeping role, these ultras represent a rebellious current, one that the liberal institutions are now increasingly seeking to exclude from their circles. Even as these ultras are being shoved out of the liberal sphere, though, they are still liabilities to the revolutionary cause. And one of the things that makes them so harmful is how they claim to be aligned with the world’s popular liberation struggles, while projecting their own destructive libidinal impulses onto these struggles.

Gaza’s resistance couldn’t be more different from the west’s ultra-left. One is based within its nation’s popular masses, while the other is hostile towards the masses. While the Palestinian resistance forces use militancy in a strategic way, the ultras use “militancy” as justification for forsaking strategic thinking. For a Palestinian resistance to even exist, it must be intelligent. It must act with consideration for the conditions that it’s navigating at every given moment, and it must act according to the interests of the people it’s fighting for. There’s no room for infantile errors when you’re facing the threat of annihilation, and any mistake will cost you everything.

The majority of Gen Z Americans now support the Palestinian resistance. This means we have a millions-strong pool of people who could soon enter into the class struggle, while already having a strong anti-imperialist consciousness. It’s our task to provide them with organizational structures that have really learned from the Global South’s struggles, rather than ones that functionally assist finance capital. The danger from the ultra-leftists is that even though they represent a rebellious split from the institutional left, and they truly believe these liberation forces must be supported, this partial consciousness cannot stop them from being destructive. Without our intervention, they’ll lead the next Gen Z movement recruits astray, and get many people arrested or killed while marginalizing revolutionary politics.

At this stage, the most effective thing that we can do to combat the impacts of our systemic crises is provide aid to our communities. Not mutual aid, but aid that’s distributed on behalf of working-class organizers for the purpose of building alternative political power. Through this work, we’ll provide the masses with sources of support that they can rely on as our ruling class continues to engineer a collapse. 

In terms of fighting for an end to this manufactured destruction, the actionable path forward runs primarily through the anti-imperialist struggle. This is something that Greta Thunberg realized after shifting towards the fight against the Gaza genocide, and breaking from the NGO-industrial complex: to defeat the institutions that are destroying humanity’s means to live, we have to fight against the most direct and extreme manifestations of capitalist violence. We have to act in tandem with the Global South’s masses, assisting them in battling against the primary enemy: U.S. hegemony. 

This clarity about what must be done lets us escape the psychological damage from finance capital’s propaganda about climate. As a child, Thunberg became overwhelmed by the fear that the world was going to effectively end due to global warming, a fear that our hegemonic media put great effort into spreading during the early 2010s. But this kind of mental terrorism from our ruling class becomes ineffectual when you enter into a tangible collective struggle, and join in helping people who actually are fighting against their own extinction. It’s by becoming familiar with what such struggles really look like that somebody can overcome terrified paralysis, as well as the fear-based impulse to “take action” without thinking for yourself. If we make our movements connected to the Palestinian struggle, and the other efforts by those fighting off imperial domination, we’ll successfully separate our efforts from the financiers.

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Anti-Zionist MAGA will get a third party, whether from Thomas Massie or from other dissident forces

AIPAC’s war on Thomas Massie has created new hope for the third party movement, hope that had seemed unrealistic until quite recently. And if communists properly navigate this moment, we’ll be able to give the American people the third party that they desperately need.

Even if we don’t get a third party that’s formed by Massie himself, communists are now in position to provide such a party ourselves. It would look different from a Massie-created party, but it would still fulfill the role of an anti-duopoly force that brings in those who share Massie’s politics. When I talk about such a communist-created alternative for MAGA, I don’t just mean the American Communist Party; the ACP is essential to this project, as it’s the only Bolshevik-type U.S. party that was born out of a desire to build upon MAGA’s proto-revolutionary momentum. But it would represent the nucleus of this mass effort, rather than the org that most of these disillusioned conservatives get directly involved in. 

The party has already recruited the bulk of the people who, at this stage, will be willing to become part of actual cadres. The way that we can go into the masses at this point is by building an anti-Epstein popular coalition, one which brings in the Massie sympathizers who’ve just been burned by his defeat against the Zionist lobby. Such a coalition cannot be formed on the basis of top-down communist control, and can only exist in the form of a popular front. A front that the communists are instrumental in constructing, but that’s compatible with all of the mass elements which share an interest in its goals. This was how William Z. Foster said we would need to build a mass labor party: as something that’s an entity unto itself, distinct from the communist party and therefore able to include the non-communist majority.

Foster said this in 1935, at a moment when the American people were increasingly unified in opposition to the capitalist order but the global working class was facing a fascist offensive. Foster pointed out the obstacles that the communists would need to overcome in order to build such an alternative mass organization:

In the building of an American labor party, the growing Communist Party confronts a huge task. It will have to do the bulk of the work. Upon it rests the chief responsibility of convincing the masses of the need to build a mass labor party, exploding the fascist demagogy and of overcoming the opposition to a labor party among the reactionary trade-union leadership, of building up the necessary united front among the various labor organizations, etc. And, even more important, especially will it fall to the Communist Party to prevent the new labor party itself from falling under reactionary leadership and thus becoming an instrument of fascist reaction; and to make of it a force that will lead the workers along the road to revolutionary struggle. Hard tasks are these, and they will test all the Bolshevik strength and leadership of our Party. 

The third party movement’s obstacles today are much like the ones it faced in 1935, but they’re also different in important ways. Chiefly in how the project that the communist party was tasked with then, where the imperative was to build a labor party specifically, isn’t the same as the third party that we’re tasked with building now. We don’t yet know whether this party will take the form of an organization that’s started by Massie, in which case the communists will have the role of making an alliance with it; or if the ACP itself will need to effectively become the third party that Massie’s base increasingly desires.

The possibilities for what this third party will look like are so open because right now, the U.S. labor movement is far from being sufficiently rebuilt, and therefore the main avenues for mass movements exist outside of organized labor. The proper definition of class consciousness is when the workers have become directly involved within the class struggle; but in the absence of strong organized labor, you need to look for “class consciousness” in the ideas that the masses hold. The American masses already hold revolutionary ideas, Massie’s popularity is proof of this. All that stands in the way of these Americans asserting their interests is how we haven’t yet created a means for collective mass organization.

There is a difference between mass organization and electoral campaigns, and more of the people are coming to understand this. The consistent ruling class electoral sabotage of dissident leaders could push Americans to build a popular force outside the duopoly. This depends on whether the trained cadre members provide them with the tools to do this.

The first major steps in this project will have to be an anti-Epstein coalition, assistance to anti-Zionist MAGA’s third party efforts, and the other political projects that the masses can engage with in the present stage. The masses would also love to organize against their employers, but it will take longer for us to provide them with the infrastructure for doing so on a giant scale; putting together an anti-Epstein coalition or a third party are both easier than reconstructing American labor’s institutional power, which will require skills that U.S. communists are only beginning to re-learn. The constraints we have don’t come from the American masses not being advanced enough; they’re far more advanced than Marxists have typically given them credit for. The constraints come from how we haven’t yet done nearly enough of the revolutionary work that should have been done decades ago. In the present phase, our main task is to correct this problem.

This moment, where the anti-Zionists in the MAGA base have been confronted with electoralism’s limitations, represents a potentially massive opportunity for us to expand the revolutionary struggle. This doesn’t mean the party’s membership will multiply, at least not for the time being. But it does mean the party will be able to gain allies among libertarians, independents, disillusioned MAGA, and alienated Democrat voters—that is, if we seize this opportunity. The conditions have made our task abundantly clear, and we must fulfill history’s demands.

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Reformism in paralysis: the “democratic socialists” can’t properly respond to the Global South’s revolts

The “democratic socialists” haven’t come out in support of Bolivia and Kenya’s workers because reformists always flounder during revolutionary moments. They present themselves as the allies of the working class, yet whenever the working class asserts itself, they don’t know what to do. This is especially true when a popular revolt appears in the Global South; the left’s gatekeepers cannot coherently respond to threats towards imperial control. And those of us within the imperial extractive countries can take advantage of this unavoidable weakness the social chauvinists have. We must respond to Bolivia and Kenya by exposing how our “socialist” bourgeois leaders lack solidarity, and lack the initiative to lead the workers in our class war.

In waging this campaign against the opportunists, we also have an opportunity to bring the U.S. communist movement towards a position that can let it rebuild working-class power, and reconnect with the masses who it’s long been cut off from. The “Marxists” in the imperial sphere have long isolated themselves from their own people, while using the excuse that these people are supposedly too invested in imperialism to embrace revolutionary politics. The most explicit version of this attitude is the “third worldist” position, which minimizes or even fully dismisses the role of the workers outside the Global South. This kind of thinking is dangerous to the working-class movement, and it gives the bourgeois reformists greater opportunities to deceive the masses. To make the communist movement go on the advance, and expand its relationship with the people, we must clarify the role that the imperial sphere’s workers have within global class battles like the present one.

In French Intellectuals and Democrats and the Algerian Revolution, Frantz Fanon spoke of the workers in the “Global North” as having great potential to ally with the struggles of colonized peoples: “One of the first duties of intellectuals and democratic elements in colonialist countries is unreservedly to support the national aspirations of colonized peoples. This attitude is based on very important theoretical considerations: … the community of interests between the working classes of the conquering country and the combined population of the conquered and dominated country.” 

Fanon talked about how the pro-imperialist left rationalizes forsaking solidarity with Global South liberation struggles. He described how the French imperialists portrayed the freedom fighters as bloodthirsty terrorists, and how these left-wing imperial gatekeepers refused to support any part of the Algerian struggle associated with the alleged “terrorist” elements. He described how others within the imperial left simply hid behind silence, remaining neutral on the most relevant battle in the global class war. He also articulated an appeal by Algeria’s liberation fighters towards the imperial working-class leaders, still urging them to take on an anti-imperialist leadership role despite all their failures:

The FLN addresses itself to the French Left, to French democrats, and asks them to encourage every strike undertaken by the French people against the rise in the cost of living, new taxes, the restriction of democratic freedoms in France, all of which are direct consequences of the Algerian war. The FLN asks the French Left to strengthen its action in spreading information and to continue to explain to the French masses the characteristics of the struggle of the Algerian people, the principles that animate it, and the objectives of the Revolution. The FLN salutes the French who have had the courage to refuse to take up arms against the Algerian people and who are now in prison. These examples must be multiplied…

Such appeals are ways of testing those who claim to be the deserved leaders of the working class, and seeing whether they’ll do the right thing at the critical junctures. If they don’t do the right thing, then the only recourse is to expose them and out-organize them. But it is important to note how Fanon and the Algerian fighters made sure to first give the French left a chance, and make it be known that they’d extended this request for friendship. These kinds of requests will be rejected by the “socialist” leaders who are paid to assist capital, yet they’ll be received by all the workers who are already developing an anti-imperialist consciousness. It’s these proto-revolutionary masses who make up the real target audience of calls for solidarity.

Without sufficient pressure, the reformists will always remain inert on matters related to imperialism, foremost preferring that safest path of silent neutrality. It’s likely that we won’t hear anything about Bolivia or Kenya from the “democratic socialists” unless the Trump White House outright launches military interventions against these countries, and the reformists will have an opportunity to appear antiwar. This is how the opportunists use hollow phrases to keep up a faux-dissident aesthetic; we’ve seen it with Palestine, Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, and every other country where imperial violence has become impossible to ignore. It’s in moments like the present one, though, where the globe’s masses are in revolt yet the “democratic socialists” are inert, when we can draw attention to how ineffectual this “dissent” truly is.

Amid the latest U.S. escalations against Cuba, the discourse has seen much new frustration around the left’s utter failure at stopping Washington’s aggressions. These conversations are by nature internal to the left-wing sphere, but we have an opening to bring our ideological struggle into the broader masses. The message we need to put forth to this wider audience is that change can never happen inside the duopoly, and that our only path forward is to build an independent popular front against the banker regime. 

We must bring the revolutionary momentum that’s spreading across the Global South into the heart of the empire, leading the USA’s masses like Kenya and Bolivia’s revolutionaries are leading their masses. It’s no surprise that when our era’s great revolt against banker rule began, it would start in the Global South. The correct takeaway from this is not that the imperial center’s masses aren’t compatible with revolutionary politics, but that we haven’t yet done the work to give them the means for joining the revolt. When we put in this work, the balance of power will undergo a fundamental change.

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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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Amid the Zionist right’s narrative defeat, “progressives” will be the ones to sell Palestine’s colonization

The fall of Ben Shapiro marks the Zionist right’s cultural defeat, yet it also marks the moment when the “progressive” Zionists are about to swoop in. Now that the Netanyahu wing of Zionist settler-colonialism has lost out within America’s popular consciousness, it’s Zionism’s liberal faction that’s becoming the main anti-Palestine propaganda tool. 

This is what anti-Zionists must understand about the enemy that we are facing: just because the most openly ethnic supremacist Zionists have isolated themselves, doesn’t mean Zionism itself has been defeated. Our ruling class is going to pivot to a different means for selling occupation, settlement, and extermination; one where supposed friends of Palestine promise that they’re going to reform the Zionist entity into being a humane state, while the Zionists simply carry on with their crimes.

To identify the deceptive tactics that the “progressive” Zionists are using, we must look at the class forces that support the project at “reforming” the Zionist project. These forces consist of an alliance between the more cosmopolitan colonizers who share an “enlightenment” colonial mindset, in which the settlements are viewed unfavorably but Jewish supremacy is seen as basically good; and the Palestinian bourgeoisie within the occupied territories, who as a rule collaborate with Israel in attacking Palestine’s working masses. 

This is the partnership that was warned about in Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine, the 1969 work by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The PFLP pointed out how unless we account for the class interests of the actors within this conflict, we’ll be fooled by those who seek to disguise colonialism as something progressive: “The revolution is science and scientific thought looks for tangible facts. We will not be misled by deceptive mottoes and slogans which are at variance with the facts and which are launched by certain class forces in defense of their interests. The Palestinian bourgeoisie that now lives in Palestine under Zionist occupation is not among the forces of the revolution although it has not manifestly associated itself with Israel and will in reality remain the class force through which the enemies will always try to defeat the revolution and stop it in the middle of the road.”

Right now, the liberal Zionist PAC J Street is using Palestine’s capitalist class as just such a tool for gatekeeping the pro-Palestine struggle. J Street is advancing a program where the Palestinian Authority, the collaborationist force run by Palestine’s comprador bourgeoisie, partners with the Arab states to form a demilitarized Palestinian state. Which is to say a “Palestinian state” that’s not a real state for the Palestinians at all, because it wouldn’t have any means to protect itself against the colonial forces. Within the liberal Zionist narrative, after these reforms are enacted Israel will surely stop all kinds of aggressive actions, and will surely end its internal apartheid policies. Which is pure and absurd fantasy, but it’s the fantasy that groups like J Street need to sell to fulfill their role in the colonial project.

J Street says that in order to disarm the Palestinian resistance, and thereby make way for such a “Palestinian state,”

the US should maintain pressure on Qatar, Turkey, and Egypt to convince Hamas to hand over its heavy weapons and to transfer responsibility for internal security in Gaza to an alternative force. The timing and mechanics for implementing such an arrangement are subject to further negotiations, as is a potential program through which Hamas and other militants would hand over their small arms and be reintegrated as civilians into Gazan society. Parallel to disarmament, the role of maintaining internal security within Gaza – previously carried out by Hamas-aligned police forces – must be transferred to an alternative force. The early deployment of the International Stabilization Force is essential to bolster the ceasefire and to support the training of an alternative Palestinian police force, which would operate in coordination with the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG).

It’s J Street’s promotion of the NCAG that gives away the true intentions of the “progressive” Democrats towards Palestine. The NCAG is a tool for managing the Gaza genocide, created by the Trump White House as part of its colonial governance project the “Board of Peace.” Writes Yara Hawari from Al-Shabaka about how the NCAG is being used in practice:

The NCAG was established under the oversight of US President Donald Trump’s Board of Peace (BoP) as part of the second phase of the ceasefire deal, which the Israeli regime has repeatedly violated. The BoP’s composition and mandate remain unclear, despite its endorsement by UN Security Council Resolution 2803 as the primary body overseeing reconstruction and interim administration in Gaza. Yet, according to its draft charter circulated to prospective member states, Trump, as BoP chairman, is granted sweeping authority to shape membership, control subsidiary bodies, and exercise decisive influence over strategic policy and implementation…Gaza is in urgent need of immediate relief, recovery, and reconstruction, some of which the NCAG might facilitate. Yet it is also in need of a political solution that ends the genocide, siege, and occupation. Without a political solution, the NCAG will serve as a mechanism of genocide management and a political instrument that entrenches the very conditions that made it possible.

The liberal Zionists do not offer a solution that would change the character of these instruments for colonial violence. The genocidal nature of the NCAG and the BoP would not go away under a “progressive” U.S. president. We know this because J Street—whose program absolutely represents how a “democratic socialist” administration would realistically act—outright states that it wants the U.S. to facilitate the disarming of Palestine’s resistance. To render the Palestinians without any way of defending themselves against the occupier, which we’re supposed to believe will suddenly give up its genocidal goals if a “progressive” colonial leader replaces Netanyahu. 

Moreover, the “Hamas needs to disarm” position is in itself pro-genocide; it props up the core narrative justifying the genocide, which says that Israel has to be supported in defending against “terrorism.” The “progressives” have used this idea to rationalize various degrees of support for aid to the Zionist entity, like with AOC’s statement that Washington must fund the Iron Dome as a moral imperative. This is how the “progressives” corral their followers into being anti-resistance, and supporting the Zionist entity’s normalization.

The experiences of Palestine’s liberation struggle show us how to resist these manipulations. When we study the literature of those who’ve been resisting Palestine’s destruction, we gain the skills to stop our own popular movements from being corrupted by this “friendly” colonial agenda. 

“Progressive” Zionism is going to be what the empire presents as a substitute for the Trump-Netanyahu breed of anti-Palestinian racism. As time goes on, we’ll witness developments that are made to seem like decisive victories for Palestine, like the decline of AIPAC; while also seeing a rise in prominence for forces like J Street. We must separate the liberal Zionists from international solidarity organizing, not letting them gain legitimacy as “allies” of the Palestinian cause. 

These actors are entrenched within the unions due to the Democratic Party’s defining role in organized labor, but we can go into organized labor without enabling liberal Zionism. The key is to build institutions for struggle that are independent from the Democratic political machine, letting us operate upon a foundation of principled anti-imperialism. The Palestinian resistance doesn’t act as if the Palestinian Authority is the only viable avenue for gaining power, and tail after it out of “pragmatism.” This is what the occupiers and the collaborators want the resistance to do, but the struggle’s participants won’t capitulate. If we refuse to give up our independence, like Palestine’s revolutionaries have, then the imperial co-optation forces won’t be able to touch us.

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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 USA’s attempt to crush Bolivia’s workers revolt is about stopping a new revolutionary wave

Bolivia’s indigenous anti-austerity revolt is happening in the context of a revolutionary retreat, where the globe’s working-class forces have mostly been getting crushed. Outside of Asia, the overall situation during Trump 2.0 is one of growing desperation for the besieged revolutionary governments, and for the popular movements that exist under increasingly repressive capitalist regimes. Bolivia could make the power dynamic flip, though. And it’s the desire to stop such a global upheaval that’s compelled Trump’s White House to plan for kidnapping Evo Morales, as well as for massacring his movement’s members. If we rally the workers movement behind Bolivia’s revolutionary forces, and combat the “progressive” reformists who’ve betrayed Bolivia in the past, we’ll be able to consolidate our forces behind stopping these schemes.

Bolivia’s workers, and the world’s workers, are struggling to overcome an existential peril for the revolutionary cause. Venezuela, both due to internal weaknesses and the objective strengths of its foe, has now been compromised so much that Rodriguez is handing Alex Saab over to the U.S. Because Washington could get away with facilitating mass starvation in Gaza, it’s engineered a humanitarian catastrophe in Cuba, and is now using this as a stepping stone towards invasion. Whether Cuba and its partners will pressure the empire away from invading has yet to be seen. Amid all of this direness, though, a new source of hope has appeared in Bolivia.

Bolivia’s uprising has the potential to become the next great blow to the hegemon, the act of resistance that reverses the present balance of forces. For the revolt to have such a big effect, it will firstly need to be successful in ousting the country’s far-right government, and secondly need to catalyze a larger wave of rebellions against neo-colonialism. Such a chain reaction is plausible because across the broader region, the recent accelerations in austerity have been creating great mass discontent, as shown by the reactions to Milei’s extreme economic shock policies. 

The right has felt confident in waging total war on Argentina’s working class because within Argentina, the imperialists have made major progress in solidifying a bourgeois and pro-Zionist culture. Argentina is the place where the Zionist settlers plan to build their new hub as Israel’s collapse continues. But all of these reactionary designs will be thrown into disarray if Bolivia’s workers revolt spills over into the wider region.

Bolivia is the first country to undergo such an uprising during the post-Milei era because its indigenous movement is immensely strong. This has created a pattern where every time the reactionaries take power in Bolivia, they’re met with popular mobilizations that overwhelm the state. For workers in places where the reactionary state is strong, especially the Global North, it’s essential to learn from these successes by our counterparts in places like Bolivia. We also need to struggle against the opportunist forces within the left that seek to separate our own workers movements from the Global South, while promoting a pro-imperialist “socialism.”

We must not forget that when the U.S. orchestrated a coup against Morales in 2019, the “progressive” AOC met with organizers who were explicitly involved in the effort to oust the working-class leadership. AOC hid behind the pseudo-progressive rhetoric that the coupists used to launder their neo-colonial agenda, establishing a relationship with the “environmentalist” anti-Maduro org Standing Rivers. As AOC cultivated these ties with the regime change NGO network, her office stonewalled anti-imperialists who presented it with a petition from activists and academics, who urged AOC to take action against the coup. 

In both the discourse and on an institutional level, the “democratic socialists” worked to undermine solidarity with Bolivia. No doubt they’ll do this again. But when you look at the larger arc of history, it becomes apparent that such fake socialism will be no match for what the hemisphere’s working masses are going to build.

When South America’s proletarians win the decisive battle, the socialism that they construct will be the strongest version of socialism that the Americas have seen by far. The pivotal factor will be when they kick the Zionists out of the region, thereby taking away what’s become imperialism’s essential buffer force against working-class victory within Latin America. An indication that they will succeed in this is how U.S. imperialism has collapsed throughout not just much of Asia, but now also in many of Africa’s Sahel countries; which partly fulfills the prerequisites for a Latin American revolutionary victory described by Kim Il Sung:

When Latin America groans under imperialist yoke, the Asian and African peoples cannot live in peace and when U.S. imperialism collapses in the Asian and African areas, a favourable phase will be created for the national-liberation movement of the Latin American peoples, too. The militant unity and close ties of the Asian, African and Latin American peoples will multiply the anti-imperialist, anti-U.S. revolutionary forces several times, scores of times and will become an invincible force which can frustrate successfully the aggression of the imperialists and the united front of international reaction. Therefore, the peoples in all regions where U.S. imperialism is entrenched should pool their strength and strike it hard.

The anti-imperialist successes that we’ve recently seen don’t mean we aren’t in a state of retreat right now, but they are a sign that this situation could soon change. It depends on how well-equipped the world’s workers are to fight the next battles, which may come sooner than anyone could have anticipated. The world wasn’t thinking about Bolivia prior to when this latest uprising appeared, like the world wasn’t thinking about Palestine prior to October 7.

Bolivia could become the variable that ends a period of darkness, but only if the rest of the world takes up the task that Bolivia has presented us with. The task where we must unify the global workers movement behind Bolivia’s workers, which is a harder mission than one may assume; the chauvinists and opportunists are still capable of doing damage, and splitting the globe’s workers at a critical moment. This is why exposing the “progressives” must be part of our response to the Bolivia development: they’re the ones that could sabotage our ability to assist Bolivia’s masses, and make room for Trump to carry out another intervention.

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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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Russia & the DPRK are fighting for the right side in World War III. The workers movement must join with them.

To know how the workers movement should respond to our third world war, we must look to Kim Il Sung’s guidance on waging joint anti-imperialist struggle. Guidance that’s now being followed by socialist Korea, which has provided the maximum amount of assistance in Russia’s war against U.S.-backed Ukrainian fascism. The effectiveness of this assistance is limited by the circumstances, in which Russia and the other biggest anti-imperialist states won’t create a joint military formation for the foreseeable future. But if the world’s workers movement follows in the DPRK’s example, and builds the international solidarity structures which are required for beating Washington’s offensive, we will turn this war into an unprecedented wave of revolutions—which in turn will enable the resistance forces to win the war itself.

What Kim Il Sung did was provide a practical route towards making imperialism’s aggressions backfire. Mao believed that imperialism’s next big war would catalyze capitalism’s final defeat; he expressed an optimism about the third world war that made sense during the historical moment in which he was speaking, but that we shouldn’t uncritically apply to today. Since that time, the Soviet Union has been destroyed, and the global communist movement has yet to rebuild itself after this foundational blow. Therefore if we are to turn Mao’s prediction about the third world war into a reality, we’ll first need to carry out such a rebuilding process. Russia’s anti-fascist war has created better conditions for us to do this, and Iran’s war of resistance has made these conditions better still. But we have to actually do the work.

Wrote Kim Il Sung about the necessity of actively seizing upon the opportunities that history presents to revolutionaries:

For a revolution to take place, the subjective and objective situation should be created for it. The revolution in each country should be carried out to suit the specific realities, in which the objective revolutionary situation is created. This, however, by no means signifies that the revolution can develop or ripen of itself. The revolution can always be advanced and brought to maturity only through an active and hard struggle of the revolutionaries. If an active struggle is neglected, only waiting for a favourable situation to arise by reason of the arduousness of the revolution, revolutionary forces cannot be fostered. Revolutionary forces cannot be prepared spontaneously without any struggle, they can be fostered and strengthened only through a hard struggle. If preparations are not made to meet the decisive hour of the revolution by preserving the revolutionary forces against the enemy's suppression and, at the same time, constantly accumulating and building them up through a positive struggle, it will be impossible to win victory in the revolution even when the objective situation has been created.

This is the working-class movement’s role in our third world war: to organize the masses, within our respective countries, towards confronting the global capitalist ruling class and its puppet states. To translate the fallout from imperialism’s growing military conflicts into a galvanization of workers power. After the anti-fascist war began in 2022, the globe’s socialist parties were given an opportunity to take on such an active role. They were given the choice to take a pro-Ukraine or “neutral” position on the conflict; or to side with the working-class forces that had compelled Russia’s bourgeois government into confronting the hegemon. 

Many of these parties failed this test by forsaking solidarity with the anti-fascist resisters. But as Washington continues to expand its aggressions, and this keeps provoking more of the world’s peoples into counter-offensives, these kinds of tests for our movement will keep appearing. And if we continue to build up strength for the working-class forces which reject imperial opportunism, we’ll be in a better position the next time a pivotal act of resistance occurs. 

We must reconstruct the workers movement on the foundation of the solidarity principle that Kim explained, in which communists unify with all who are working to defeat the primary enemy:

In Asia, Africa and Latin America there are socialist and neutral countries, and big and small countries. All these countries except the puppet regimes of the imperialists and their satellite states constitute anti-imperialist, anti-U.S. forces. Despite the differences of state socio-political systems, political views and religious beliefs, the peoples of the countries in these areas, as the oppressed nations who were suppressed and exploited by the imperialists and colonialists, have the common goal and aspiration to achieve national independence and national prosperity against imperialism and old and new colonialism. The differences of state socio-political systems, political views or religious beliefs can by no means be an obstacle in the way of joint struggle against U.S. imperialism. All countries should form an anti-imperialist united front and take anti-U.S. joint action to crush the common enemy and attain the common goal.

This statement is the ultimate refutation of the argument that we can’t support anti-imperialist countries if they have bourgeois governments. When we entered into World War Three, it was inevitable that this would become a prominent talking point among the dogmatic opportunists, who’ve so far had notable success in holding Marxism back during our new geopolitical era. But the more new fronts open up in the resistance to Washington’s siege, the more these opportunists will expose themselves, and the wider the struggle’s potential will grow.

With the war on Iran, this kind of imperialism-compatible “Marxism” has appeared again, though in a different form than it did with Ukraine. The Tudeh Party, the tool for Zionist psyops that claims to speak for Iran’s working class, has come out with a series of poisonous statements—the worst of which blames the victim, saying that Khamenei “drove the country to the brink of war and destruction.” And dozens of communist parties around the globe, many of which took the position that Ukraine is an “inter-imperialist war,” have endorsed a separate statement that repeats Zionist narratives about Iran’s response to the protests—with Tudeh being the source the statement cites for these narratives. The hegemon’s latest maneuvers against Iran have revealed how many CPs give credence to Tudeh, and have thereby given us a better sense of where we must turn to for anti-imperialist solidarity.

One of the places where such solidarity can be found is the new socialist international, which was founded last month in Moscow by the American Communist Party and other allies of the struggle. Something important to note about these other allies, as it pertains to Kim Il Sung’s point about unity, is that they include parties which describe themselves as “social democratic.” This is the case for A Just Russia (abbreviation SR); SR is social democratic, yet it’s joined with this new international, because in practice it’s more revolutionary than those Tudeh-aligned CPs. 

SR is an example of the historical phenomenon where “social democracy” has come to mean completely different things within the countries resisting imperialism, vs. the countries that benefit from imperial extraction. Social democrats in the United States or Europe are as a rule complicit in Washington’s world war, and in the genocide against Palestine. But when you’re a social democrat in a country whose working masses are engaged in active combat with the hegemon, or are being exploited by the hegemon on a neo-colonial level, then the only way to even have a popular presence is by being anti-imperialist. Within the primary battle that’s being fought, whether you embrace Marxism-Leninism is a secondary matter. We’re also seeing this in Bolivia’s Movement for Socialism party, which isn’t Marxist-Leninist yet is playing a pivotal role within Bolivia’s new popular anti-austerity revolt.

When the workers retake power in Bolivia, the dogmatic opportunist “ML” parties will no doubt find a reason to oppose the people’s government, as they’ve found a reason to oppose Venezuela’s revolutionary government. And the communists who truly understand what Marxism-Leninism means will continue exposing these traitors, while offering the world’s people an alternative path. This is the path that Kim Il Sung explained we would need to take in order to defeat the enemy we’re facing. We will embrace the role that communists were meant to have when the third world war began; the role where we unify with the other forces that are resisting the United States, and thereby show communists to be deserving of leadership.

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