Since 2016, the American people have been on an accelerated journey to find how they can assert their class interests. The lack of a recovery for the workers after 2008, which compelled Americans to seek out new paths with Trump and Sanders, would soon be followed by far greater disruptions. And these shocks demanded a radical turn away from the duopoly, which many Americans undertook by embracing 2020’s trend in conspiracism. This trend was filled with diversions and false consciousness, but it represented a turn towards anti-systemic politics that would come to impact people all across the ideological spectrum. The logical conclusion of these consciousness shifts—even though it hasn’t yet been reached by most—is that only workers revolution can save America.
The American people are already of a mindset that’s compatible with overthrowing their banker dictatorship. This became true during the time between when Washington’s provocations caused the Ukraine proxy war to escalate in February 2022, and when it became clear to most Americans that their government is committing genocide against Gaza’s people. These were the moments that led Americans to abandon the culture war mentality that had reached its peak in 2020, and unite with their neighbors in anti-government anger. 2020’s culture war psyops were the only thing that delayed this newfound counter-hegemonic unity; when our leaders launched new wars after their people had been devastated by the events of 2020, cultural division would no longer be as effective at blunting revolutionary consciousness.
With the discrediting of Trump 2.0, and the MAGA base’s growing desire to escape the duopoly, the only thing holding Americans back from asserting their interests is lack of a cohesive working-class organization. This was always essentially true; it just happened to be that because the working-class infrastructure got wiped out decades ago, the war on the workers was allowed to intensify, causing the masses to embrace a revolutionary position on their own.
It is necessary to clarify that the masses are already compatible with revolution. Understanding this reality doesn’t mean worshipping spontaneity, as Lenin warned against. There is still a way for Marxists to worship spontaneity under conditions like these ones, though: by backing one wing of the ruling class, just because this wing has managed to recapture the proto-revolutionary sentiments within bourgeois politics.
This is what Geese magazine did in a recent article, which praised AOC for making statements that spoke to proletarian patriotism:
In a conversation with David Axelrod at the University of Chicago, AOC talked about how the need to “restructure power to where it belongs” is an aspiration that is found within the heritage of our country; that the American Revolution was a fight against “the billionaires of their time” waged by the toiling masses, which expanded our understanding of democracy significantly from where it began. She ends by saying that it is “the most American thing in the world to be fighting for the working-class” and that it is patently un-American to roll back the democratic gains of the people and “transform our country into a land of kings and landed gentry.”
What AOC articulates well here is that the political project of the working-class must be rooted in the democratic traditions of our country. However, she does this while avoiding the pitfalls that Browder fell into in his handling of this question. Browder focused on and centered the bourgeois democratic figureheads of these movements, which erased the role of the working-class in these struggles, flattened the class struggles that defined these movements and moved them forward, and obscured the class character of their bourgeois ideals. On the other hand—perhaps because of her position as a woman of color representing the populist center-left—AOC prioritizes the historic struggles of the multiracial working-class as the primary movers of history toward a more complete democracy, connecting this momentum to the current fight of today’s American working class against Trump and the billionaire domination of our political system.
This seemingly contradicts the reasoning Geese has put forth for voting Democrat, where supposedly we need to elect Democrats so that they can discredit themselves in the eyes of the masses. This reasoning is consistent, though, with the notion that figures like AOC or Zohran are “moving the overton window,” which the passage above effectively argues. And both ideas are disproven by the events of the last decade.
Sanders is the only social democrat in this era who’s moved the overton window, and this is because he was the one to release the initial popular left-wing energy. Since that moment, every campaign from the socdems has had the effect of neutralizing the workers movement. The positive developments from the “democratic socialist” movement have depended on outside efforts at bringing the disillusioned socdem base into revolutionary politics. And you’re never going to be able to provide such an alternative when you’ve made it your goal to assist the socdems.
The way that Geese argues these two aims are compatible is by pointing to how the socdems are appealing towards the most advanced ideas among the masses. But where have these ideas come from? Who introduced this synthesis between American patriotism and class struggle into the discourse? The Democrats didn’t come up with this rhetoric on their own. They’re copying it from the most successful part of the communist movement, that being the current which grew out of “MAGA communism.”
We know that the Democrats are studying our methods in this way because since the start of 2026, they’ve been devoting special attention towards our movement. They’ve been waging an artificially boosted smear campaign against us, and this is part of a wider effort to destroy all of today’s anti-imperialist voices. (Hasan Piker being the biggest target.) At the same time, they’ve begun closely echoing our ideas about how we need to build on the American revolution.
If reformists need to copy Marxists to stay in touch with the nation, then Marxists must recognize the particular strength we possess in order for our enemies to want to emulate us. And we must therefore understand that we don’t need the reformists as allies, since this strength comes from our own ability to analyze the nation. They’re only appropriating our analysis. If the masses are ready for revolution, then the only role the “progressive” Democrats can have is to keep them away from this. They’ve been sent in to transform today’s revolutionary ideas into tools for strengthening the empire.
The next main conflict among Marxists will be about whether proletarian patriotism should mean supporting Democrats, or mean building an independent political force. I find Geese worth arguing with because they represent a current within socialism that holds real relevance during our era, as like MAGA communism, it’s based in the working-class patriotism that’s arisen among the American masses. By adopting the language of this patriotism, the socdems are trying to capture these same radicalized masses. They aren’t trying to appeal to the woke leftists, who’ve lost their former relevance; they’re trying to expand the socdem base into the independents and MAGA voters who are receptive towards patriotic economic populism.
The argument of Geese is that we need to uplift these socdems so that they can expose themselves to the masses. But if this strategy were beneficial towards the workers movement, we would have already seen the socdems have such an impact since they became mainstream over a decade ago. The only path forward is to build our own infrastructure, on the basis of our own politics.
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