The growth of the lumpen, the rise of “nomad” workers, & what reorganizing the masses will have to look like

I’ve talked many times about how U.S. communists must learn from Haiti’s popular revolution in response to the lumpenization of our society. Haiti shows that you can organize a population which has been largely de-classed, and this is heartening amid our own situation. Mass unemployment has become terminal, while the unionist culture of the 20th century has been replaced by an overwhelming mass of nomadic and unorganized workers. Yet we can see that a path forward exists, even in a society whose collapse is much more advanced than ours. We can’t copy Haiti’s revolutionary model for different conditions, but we can apply a critical lesson from its story: when the circumstances change, so must your means for waging the class war.

All the dogmatic versions of “Marxism” are made irrelevant, even more so than they were already, by the practical realities that we’re facing in the lumpenization era. Capital is on the offensive right now, the revolutionary forces are on the retreat, and the momentum is towards a new level of dispossession for the working masses. In the American hemisphere, the only exception to this retreat is the Haitian front, which represents a prelude to what the inevitable working-class resurgence will look like. In ways that vary for the different countries, this revival will take the form of a hybrid between “conventional” working-class organizing, and projects to organize those who’ve been pushed out of the working class. 

This new iteration of the proletarian movement will be utterly incompatible with the economist dogmas that focus on narrow workplace struggles, while forsaking every other aspect of the struggle including basic class solidarity. Those who are part of the working class proper have allies within numerous other strata; this is part of what William Z. Foster conveyed in his calls to organize the unorganized:

The question of organizing the unorganized, especially in the basic industries, must be put in the sense that it is indispensable for liquidating the present crisis as well as for the eventual building of powerful labor organizations. Definite contacts can and must be made with the progressive elements on the basis of organizing the unorganized. The unions must be saturated with movements to draw in the unorganized. Meanwhile the movements for independent organization must be intensified in those industries where the existing unions are too weak or reactionary to serve as the basis for unionizing the workers. Developing wage cuts in various industries will render greater masses ready for organization and struggle. Our aim must be to bring into the mainstream of the labor movement such unions as are organized on an independent basis. The question of organizing the unorganized must be raised to a major issue throughout the labor movement. In connection with it must be emphasized as vitally important the amalgamation and democratization of the unions.

Foster wrote this in 1928, when the U.S. proletariat was still in its phase of ascendancy as an economic element. The ultimate outcome of the depression was that our ruling class decided to lift up the bulk of the workers into the labor aristocracy. When this period of unprecedented capitalist stability inevitably ended, and the incentive became for U.S. corporations to move manufacturing jobs to the Global South, the proletarian positions got replaced by “bullshit jobs”—the office work that used to be the stereotypical American career path. The 2008 collapse forced this model to be replaced by nomadic gigs and retail, and after 2020 the financial centers decided that hiring needed to be forced into a long-term decline. 

It’s in this context that we’ve seen the rise of the DSA’s new iteration. During this era, the old Bernie Sanders working-class base has been disregarded, in favor of a politics that centrally appeals towards urban petty-bourgeois professionals. When these well-educated activists mobilized behind Zohran, and thereby became the main faces of the left during this moment, they of course were not equipped to organize the growing lumpenized “precariat.” And their movement is already seeing certain consequences from this weakness; the inevitable split inside DSA isn’t in the future, it started when Zohran came into office and fully showed his reactionary role. This repeat of the disillusionment over Obama provides a critical opportunity for bringing the masses into revolutionary politics; genuine revolutionary politics, where we’re building the independent working-class institutions that petty-bourgeois activists can’t create on their own.

This is not to say the petty-bourgeoisie have no part in the class war. There are many potential class allies among these politically impassioned individuals, we just need to have an organization that understands what roles different class allies should have. We can’t entertain petty-bourgeois “working class” LARPing, and any project to organize the lumpen by people who aren’t lumpen themselves would fail. We have to apply Mao’s logic about finding where our friends are among the different classes, while not letting the organization become something other than proletarian; i.e. organized for the purpose of bringing the productive laborers to power. 

Concluded Mao: “our enemies are all those in league with imperialism--the warlords, the bureaucrats, the comprador class, the big landlord class and the reactionary section of the intelligentsia attached to them. The leading force in our revolution is the industrial proletariat. Our closest friends are the entire semi-proletariat and petty bourgeoisie. As for the vacillating middle bourgeoisie, their right-wing may become our enemy and their left-wing may become our friend but we must be constantly on our guard and not let them create confusion within our ranks.” 

Like with Haiti or any other example, we have to translate the foreign model to our own circumstances. We don’t have much of an industrial proletariat anymore, and the destruction of this class has set our cause back. However, we must remember that the industrial proletariat’s numbers were also limited in Russia, China, and the other underdeveloped countries which underwent revolutions. The nature of their capitalist and semi-feudal system made for massive amounts of people who couldn’t become part of this class, yet the communist parties triumphed. Now that the Global South’s conditions are increasingly being replicated inside the United States, we can see a parallel path emerging for us. 

Part of what we need to do is free Marxism from the ideological prison that it became confined to when dogmatists misinterpreted it as a fixed belief system, unable to adapt to the processes of history. Those within my own tendency of communism have done well in combating this kind of dogmatism. What we need to strengthen is our practical work. We have to keep ourselves set on rebuilding the institutions our cause lost in the 20th century—including ones dedicated to organizing lumpenized workers, like the unemployed councils. Right now a big obstacle to this is lack of resources, and we will need to rectify this. (Providing such funds is one way that the petty-bourgeoisie in particular can contribute to the struggle.) Though we can only do so much at the present stage, and the DSA’s tendency has a much larger pull than ours for now, we will keep picking up more support if we do the things DSA can’t. On the question of labor leadership, on the question of organizing the unorganized, the reformists are by their nature lacking. We have to prove ourselves as the alternative.

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The next war escalations will create new ruptures for DSA’s coalition, & open up more fronts in the workers struggle

It’s clear that the European governments desire an expanded conflict with Russia, as shown by their recent efforts to prime the region’s people for this. In the working-class movement’s response to the next big war, one area we need to pay attention to is the conflicts within the DSA’s camp, which will be brought to unprecedented severity by whatever geopolitical rupture comes next. Because it’s exactly this kind of development, where our ruling class has multiplied its own troubles and can no longer rule in the old way, that will force the reformist organizations into a direct split; a split that sees those who side with opportunist pro-imperialism remain above-ground, while their principled counterparts are forced into direct confrontation with the state.

This confrontation is inevitable because for anybody who opposes these next war escalations, the penalties from the imperial state will be greater than anything we’ve seen in our lifetimes. This is what will happen if and when we get a proper third world war: our rulers will throw out the constitutional rules, and imprison or kill a large number of people. In this scenario, the members of DSA factions like Marxist Unity Group will have to either acquiesce or break from the DSA, and enter an alliance with those who are building a communist party outside the Democrat umbrella. 

It will be the logical conclusion of the conflict within DSA that happened after the “progressive” Democrats assisted in Biden’s 2022 rail strike breakup, and MUG responded by clarifying its intention to build an actual workers party:

We recognize that forging an independent path will take time and effort on all our parts, and we are prepared to begin laying the groundwork ourselves. The Marxist Unity Group is determined to build an independent socialist movement. In the leadup to DSA’s 2023 convention, we are working with our allies to build a pro-party coalition in DSA. We held a panel on April 8th to discuss this project and another on May 20th. We hope that these will be the first of many public events. We have already submitted convention resolutions (see here) to begin transforming DSA into a principled, self-reliant, democratic membership party. 

When the circumstances become far more urgent, and people with left-wing positions start being frequently detained or assassinated, the inherent flaws in this strategy will become much easier to see. But we shouldn’t wait until after the most dire stage to start bringing movement members out of the reformist trap. We also shouldn’t join or carry water for the DSA, as if assisting the enemy would somehow help our cause. The real path forward is to relearn the mass organizational skills which communists lost during our movement’s retreats in the 20th century; the skills that were explained by the great trade unionist William Z. Foster.

What we have to do, starting now, is expose how the reformist “socialists” are already actively allying with the right; this became undeniable when Sanders began working with Steve Bannon against AI. We must put forth an alternative for the activists and unorganized workers who won’t accept this kind of betrayal, as Foster explained during a parallel situation in 1928:

The characteristic of the present situation is that the right wing and the degenerated progressives (Hillman, Fitzpatrick, etc.) flounder further to the right, bankrupt in the face of the offensive of the employers, while growing numbers of confused but sincere progressives tend to break with them and to develop a program of resistance. This tendency is exemplified typically by the growing opposition to Fitzpatrick in the Chicago Federation of Labor. The general tendency will increase as the crisis, intensified by the growing industrial depression, sharpens in the trade unions and among the unorganized workers. 

In the deep crisis following the shopmen’s defeat the right wing was able to demoralize and capture the progressives with its glittering “higher strategy of labor” which it put forth with blowing trumpets as a saving panacea. But in the present still greater crisis, they have nothing substantial to offer. Mere whipping up of their discredited intensified class collaboration program and clinging terroristically to union control will not prevent the breaking away of the more sincere and militant progressives. The trend of these is towards the left. To give them a program and to draw them and their extensive following under the general leadership of our Party and its auxiliaries is a basic task in the present situation, a major consideration for halting the capitalist offensive, for preventing the disintegration and devitalization of the trade unions, for organizing the unorganized, and for giving our Party a real mass following.

The MUG people, and the other DSA members who identify as Marxists yet persist in staying with DSA, use the defense that they’re opposed to the reactionary actions of the socdem movement’s leadership. To which we can say: if you’re against the leaders, why are you in their movement? When a tendency is clearly opposed to what you fundamentally stand for, the logical move is to leave. The disillusioned former Trump supporters understand this, as evidenced by how many of them have stopped calling themselves “MAGA”; the recently resigned former PSL members understand this; the communists who formed my party (the ACP) understood this when they left CPUSA, and refused to keep appealing towards a leadership which will never respect their democratic will. We’re three years into an extermination that the DSA’s tendency has still failed to oppose in a sufficient way, and I suspect many of the anti-Zionists in DSA would share this assessment. So why stay inside of it?

A big reason why many of them haven’t left DSA, which we need to be fair about, is that they don’t see anything else going on where they are. This is partly our fault; we should have started building local collectives before we did anything else, because a party’s foundations are the strongest when you already have dual power within your communities. But many of us within the party had needed to find our way out of radlib orgs which didn’t treat this task seriously, so of course we would be behind. To avoid wasting time, like many of us did during that era, we’ll need to apply Foster’s practices to our present conditions. 

We’ll need to bring the unorganized working masses, and the people in these lame orgs who desire a workers party, into projects that build the independent working-class strength they’re looking for. And we absolutely can do this in the age of transient workers, even though Foster was writing for an industrial era when unions were much bigger. It’s a matter of going into the traditional unionized spaces that still exist, while organizing a broader population that’s increasingly de-classed. 

It’s these lumpenized, purpose-lacking individuals who our government is tailoring its army propaganda to, and it’s their continued atomization that the ruling class relies on to advance its goals without popular backlash. To reach them, we’ll need to do more than point to the hypocrisy of the “socialists” who are collaborating with the right-wing; for those who are detached from political organizing or discourse, revolutionary appeal comes from showing how to coalesce against the establishment. Because these declassed masses already want to do this; the bulk of the people have now gotten behind anti-imperialist and anti-regime views, they just don’t have any institutions for fighting back. We must use every bit of time we still have to build this institutional power, providing an alternative to the false working-class leadership in the way that Foster’s tendency did.

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Russia’s anti-fascist fight, the prospect of a new war across Europe, & the workers struggle’s next course of action

The correct position on the Ukraine war, the one taken by the Sovintern-affiliated orgs, is that this is a war of resistance by the working class against U.S./Banderite aggression. Should the European governments push Russia into expanding this resistance, as they’re increasingly trying to do, our position will have a chance to become popular among the broader working masses. But this will only happen if we wage our ideological struggle in a way that we didn’t after the conflict’s last big escalation four years ago. 

Back then, at least in the United States, the groups that took the right stance on Russia treated this matter as being only an ideological struggle. This was because they only knew how to embody the ideological form of the communist movement—which had long been destroyed—and they didn’t have the practical insights about what it means to build real working-class power. They didn’t seize upon this moment to intervene within organized labor, to grow their efforts at agitation among the masses, or to build themselves up organizationally. This is a critical self-criticism we must apply to ourselves, and use to correct our practice as the next geopolitical ruptures occur.

The European governments are taking massive measures to prepare for a larger war right now, and recent history shows that we should treat such a conflict as a serious possibility. This was the first lesson many of us took from the leadup to Russia’s special military operation: though it can seem like the U.S. and its satellite states are just engaging in hyperbole when they say they fear major Russian action, the idea that Russia will act isn’t necessarily a psyop, as the bulk of antiwar commentators believed it to be prior to February 2022. The other big lesson we were forced to internalize, the one we urgently need to convey to the working-class movement, is that you always must investigate which class forces are behind a war. Because when we understand the critical role that the workers had in bringing Russia towards intervening in Ukraine, we’ll know how to navigate the class conflict during the next geopolitical escalations.

Lenin, even as he excoriated the “socialists” who sided with their imperialist governments in the First World War, pointed out how there are circumstances in which backing a military action can actually be the revolutionary stance. The crucial question is whether one has been honest in looking at which class the action benefits:

We Marxists do not belong to that category of people who are unqualified opponents of all war. We say: our aim is to achieve a socialist   system of society, which, by eliminating the division of mankind into classes, by eliminating all exploitation of man by man and nation by nation, will inevitably eliminate the very possibility of war. But in the war to win that socialist system of society we are bound to encounter conditions under which the class struggle within each given nation may come up against a war between the different nations, a war conditioned by this very class struggle. Therefore, we cannot rule out the possibility of revolutionary wars, i.e., wars arising from the class struggle, wars waged by revolutionary classes, wars which are of direct and immediate revolutionary significance. 

Still less can we rule this out when we remember that though the history of European revolutions during the last century, in the course of 125–135 years, say, gave us wars which were mostly reactionary, it also gave us revolutionary wars, such as the war of the French revolutionary masses against a united monarchist, backward, feudal and semi-feudal Europe. No deception of the masses is more widespread today in Western Europe, and latterly here in Russia, too, than that which is practised by citing the example of revolutionary wars. There are wars and wars. We must be clear as to what historical conditions have given rise to the war, what classes are waging it, and for what ends.

If the conflict between Russia and NATO expands, the narrative we’ll hear is that Russia’s “aggression” has been what’s worsened the inflation of prices, rather than the actions of our own ruling class. The goal will be to convince us that Russia’s intervention not only lacks justification, but is the source of our living standards crisis. To defeat this lie, we’ll need to reframe the conflict in the same way Lenin recommended communists talk about the great war. He explained how the only way for the conflict to truly end was through workers revolution, because as long as the imperialists remained in power they would keep the war going. The same is true for the present war, but in a different way. We’re now in a situation where global financial power has become centralized in the United States, and therefore only the defeat of the U.S. regime can end the geopolitical conflict.

Said Lenin in response to the reform-minded idealists who sought to avoid revolution, while still claiming to be for peace:

For all its hatred of war and desire for peace, the Russian people could do nothing against the war, so long as it was being waged by the tsar, except work for a revolution against the tsar and for the tsar’s overthrow. And that is what happened. History proved this to you yesterday and will prove it to you tomorrow. We said long ago that the mounting Russian revolution must be assisted. We said that at the end of 1914. Our Duma deputies were deported to Siberia for this, and we were told: “You are giving no answer. You talk about revolution when the strikes are off, when the deputies are doing hard labour, and when you haven’t a single newspaper!” And we were accused of evading an answer. We heard those accusations for a number of years. We answered: You can be indignant about it, but so long as the tsar has not been overthrown we can do nothing against the war. And our prediction was justified. It is not fully justified yet, but it has already begun to receive justification. The revolution is beginning to change the war on Russia’s part. The capitalists are still continuing the war, and we say: Until there is a workers’ revolution in several countries the war cannot be stopped, because the people who want that war are still in power.

The same principle applies to today’s conflict. As long as the imperial regime in Washington remains intact, this conflict will continue, because the imperialists have reached a stage where maintaining endless war is their only way to preserve global financial dominance. Their strategy for extending the American century, and containing China, is to keep constantly attacking China and its partners. Russia can get far in beating back Washington’s offensive, but it can’t overthrow the U.S. regime. Only a workers revolution can do this. By emphasizing this reality about what it will take to get peace, and how the class war is intertwined with our geopolitical confrontation, we can narratively outmaneuver the dogmatic opportunists who use “no war but class war” to separate the workers from Russia’s resistance. We must go into the unions, into the popular struggles, and convey this message to the working masses. 

The circumstances will absolutely create a new opening to put forth this message; whether the next escalation comes in the form of a broader European war or something else, the 21st century’s geopolitical chaos has only begun to expand. We missed certain revolutionary opportunities earlier on in this war, but we can learn from our mistakes, and respond to the upcoming disruptions in a way that actually brings the masses to our position.

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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 from our era of accelerating inflation, 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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Accelerationism, the mass descent into the “black pill,” & the proletarian barbarism that will deliver us from crisis

What is the driving ideology of the U.S. empire right now? What’s the framework that the current regime is using to further support for monopoly-finance capital’s goals? This framework is accelerationism, the desire for society’s disruptions to exponentially build up in intensity, combined with the “black pill” ideology of resigning oneself to a supposedly unavoidable doom. The accelerationists—who foremost consist of the tech nerds behind the modern right—have needed to put forth this amalgam with the “black pill,” an idea which appeals to a social class that’s on the bottom rung. 

It’s the only way that these technocrats could successfully sell their agenda for exponential suffering: portray this suffering as inevitable, and present a notion of radical acceptance that’s really about passive retreat. To defeat this psychological trap, we will need to bring those who’ve come to the BP towards a new synthesis; not a total negation of what they believe, because there is truth to it, but a view with additional insights. We need to convey how in order to revive civilization after its present collapse, we’ll have to undertake a project equivalent to the German barbarism which replaced the Roman empire. This new barbarism can only be a proletarian barbarism, built in order to recover from de-industrialization and all of its ills. This is the essence of our task as rejuvenators of society within the American context. How to get the working class in position for this is something I’ve also been delving deep into, but here I want to focus on combating BP-related diversions from this task.

Becoming NEET while the technocrats take over

For the targets of the BP/accelerationist psyop, the contradiction is in how embracing the black pill can bring surrender to the forces that engineered the present crisis. The subjects of this particular discourse are the “excess males,” the terminally sexless, downwardly mobile men who mostly would be able to live a normal life just a generation ago. But the “black pill” applies to so much more than the looks hypergamy dating market grievances that it’s been framed around. 

The black pill is really about realizing that the traditional pathways have rapidly disappeared, with 2008 being the first big catalyst for this collapse and 2020 being the accelerant. These were the moments that led the United States to see the rise of an equivalent to Japan’s “Hikikomori” shut-ins, characterized by the “NEET” acronym of “not in education, employment, or training.” 

To wage a mass struggle against the institutions that produced this crisis, we will need to look at which ideas these institutions have fed themselves in order to get to this point. These ideas are not necessarily the origins of the crisis; really they were formulated in reaction to events that the capitalists didn’t anticipate, as they forsook the dialectical analysis that showed what their system would bring about. And there are different wings in our ruling class that have conflicting approaches for responding to the unexpected.

Right now, the faction that’s in power is the one which believes in unregulated technological progress as a cure for capital’s crises. In time, the pendulum will swing back towards the ideology of wanting to undo progress for the “greater good,” returning us to the Obama-Biden paradigm of “degrowth” anti-tech demagoguery. The anti-AI liberals are already leading a major movement within bourgeois politics, and they’ll likely win out in the long term. This is all part of the same cycle that capitalism has been in for centuries, as explained by Edgar Hardcastle in 1933:

Technocracy is likely to be popular for a time because its arrival is opportune. Six months ago the capitalist experts were confident that they know how to explain and cure the crisis by means of then currency theories and policies based thereon. Now the world has grown more sceptical and technocracy comes as a godsend, a bright new toy which will for another season keep attention fixed on non-essentials. It is a safe bet that within a year or two many of the excited followers of the technocrat myth will have rushed to the other extreme and will be busy resurrecting the neo-malthusian bogie of over-population and food shortage. The neo-malthusians have been lying low for about two years but their advance guard will soon be on the march again. While the engineering experts led by Scott are preaching the dangers of high productivity, according to the Daily Herald (January 5th) the agricultural experts of the Royal Institute of International Affairs are warning us that the curtailment of production has gone too far, and that we are faced with a possible scarcity of wheat, meat and other products.

In 2012, after the anarchy of the market had returned us to depression, Nick Land sought to reconcile this bipolar nature of capital in his work The Dark Enlightenment. Land represents a kind of Malthusian thinking, as all anti-egalitarianism does, but he sought to synthesize this thinking with the technocratic mindset of unencumbered progress; in other words, the Thielite ideology behind Trump’s “accelerate AI, let the people suffer” policy. 

Land wrote that “Where the progressive enlightenment sees political ideals, the dark enlightenment sees appetites. It accepts that governments are made out of people, and that they will eat well. Setting its expectations as low as reasonably possible, it seeks only to spare civilization from frenzied, ruinous, gluttonous debauch. From Thomas Hobbes to Hans-Hermann Hoppe and beyond, it asks: How can the sovereign power be prevented—or at least dissuaded—from devouring society? It consistently finds democratic 'solutions' to this problem risible, at best.” Curtis Yarvin has provided an idea of what a post-democratic model would look like through his proposal for CEO monarchy; he’s concluded that autocratic control would end the cycle of infighting within the ruling class, which as he observes has expanded into the realm of geopolitics:

Competing branches of the US government still engage in Third World proxy wars, in which the Defense Department and its political allies and satellites (the Republican Party, the arms and energy industry, Israel) face off against the State Department and its allies and satellites (the Democratic Party, the NGOs and universities, Europe, Palestine). The true nature of these conflicts, which would end instantly if the US was under unitary leadership, or even if both American factions could agree to cut off all “aid” to all their foreign satellites, is admitted by no one. It is considered entirely normal that the US often arms, and always talks with, both sides of these bizarre, incurable pseudo-wars.

When you understand how imperialism works, it’s obvious why this proposal is self-contradictory. There’s no way to preserve the status quo, as “rightist” politics aims to do, while escaping our foreign entanglements; imperialism requires that foreign policy be about ensuring control over global markets, otherwise the financial order wouldn’t be able to function. The ruling system also necessarily creates competing wings inside bourgeois politics, which negates Yarvin's argument about there being a supposed fix for inter-capitalist conflicts within the political system. The right-wing intellectuals in the Thielite camp can’t escape these realities; all that they have is idealism. 

Many of the black-pilled men who these Thielite psyops target already recognize that our ruling system can’t be salvaged; this is clear from how prevalent edgy anti-regime phrases like “goyslop” are within black pill communities. The “Jewish question” is undoubtedly the most popular political view inside these spaces, and though it’s incorrect, it can be replaced with a proletarian consciousness. The problem is that the regime has ways of gaining psychological control over people, without needing to have the targets like the system they live under. And the role of the Thielite technocrat wing is to orchestrate this interference within the minds of the male “excess,” feeding them messages designed to encourage retreat from the fight at hand.

“Let people enjoy things”

In his manifesto for the right-wing movement, the Israeli asset Bronze Age Pervert talks about infiltrating organized crime. This is partly so that the breakdown of society can be sped up to advance the accelerationist end goal, and partly so that the masses will be controlled through sex and drugs. Says the conclusion of BAP’s Bronze Age Mindset:

The increase of chaos, confusion and pressure on the Leviathan will lay it low: imagine even a world where the people, under relentless assault of contradictory and wild claims, would lose all faith in the media and government and doctors and believe nothing they hear through official channels anymore. This would be an order of knights of the spirit such as exists at most every thousand years. Slowly, maybe over two generations, they will work patiently, exploring and laying claims to all the sewers of the underworld, all the effluences of the Leviathan, all the joints of the lower skeleton that undergirds this world. They will take over night clubs, bars, brothels, hotels, casinos, pornography, and much worse, and rather than live to insulate themselves from the vice promoted by this world, they will intensify it and learn to wield it as a great weapon. It is the greatest weapon in our age. 

Know that the Leviathan sustains itself not by the promotion of vice, but by its normalization. But in every normalization, a great deal must be edited out; this is its great weakness. This order of knights will keep vice true to itself. From underneath comes all the Satanic power of the Babylon we are fighting. Some men, whose bond between each other must be made of titanium, will surely come around who can descend in that world...who have the mental and spiritual resources to descend to the underworld and come back with the prize.

This is all predictive programming for the degenerate trends that ruling-class psyops have been nurturing, to an unprecedented degree, since the DOJ’s partial release of the Epstein files. I contend that degeneracy is now an unprecedented problem because never before has there been such an extensive infrastructure for creating and distributing child pornography; big tech made sure that this would happen when the AI era arrived, with Grok’s ongoing child sexualization activities being just the start of what these platforms are going to do. The foundations for mass simulated child abuse materiel were laid decades ago, and part of the plan was activated this month when a federal court ruled that such content is legal when in private.

This “let people enjoy things” attitude is fully aligned with the “military nihilist” trend, where Zionist lumpen streamers like Asmongold have been encouraging their audiences to apathetically accept whatever their rulers do abroad. It’s a call to willingly embrace the subservient role our government wants for us, and consume endless pornography while the U.S. military expands its destructive campaigns. The CIA and the Mossad realized the value of this type of sexualized psyop a long time ago. After Japan’s postwar economy crashed, and a generation of men were pushed into becoming shut-ins, the Japanese fascist state found an extremely useful tool for social control: pedophilic anime. This psychological weapon and its variants have since been widely exported, with Jeffrey Epstein’s project to manipulate 4Chan users being a pivotal moment in the spread of this perverted mind virus.

This is the lifestyle that the enemy wants excess men to embrace: a lumpenized detachment from the past or the future, and a fixation on the Epsteinite porn that the algorithms are increasingly pushing. Just because this is the behavior that the Epstein regime seeks to bring these men into, though, doesn’t mean we should come to associate this behavior with the state of being rendered excess. This is a mistake that we should take care to avoid; a core part of the gender war psyop is that men who’ve been failed by society are by default predatory, misogynistic parasites, and it’s no coincidence that the Epsteinites are trying to push men into embodying these traits.

Like with BAP’s psyops, the goal is to predictively program society into going in the direction that benefits our ruling class. As the United States becomes lumpenized, our rulers want its people (particularly its men) to become like the incels of Nigeria who’ve joined Boko Haram. This is the preferable alternative to the masses coalescing into a popular revolutionary movement, like the people of Haiti have done amid their own experience of being de-classed. Haiti is a nation that’s bringing about proletarian barbarism; its movement to unify the gangs, and revitalize the devastated communities, is what things look like when a civilization has no path other than to rebuild. 

Our society’s left-behinds have two options: do the bidding of the Epsteinites, or disobey the algorithmic programming and become the new barbarians. Based on how Engels concluded that only barbarians can rejuvenate a dying civilization, this is what I would add to the statement that our future is either socialism or barbarism; if America’s path to socialism will be long and protracted, as it appears to be, then a proletarian barbarism will still fill our need for revolutionary change. This revolutionary barbarism will just take the form of a militant mass organization, building itself up amid the next disruptions and bringing in all the left-behinds who’ve been able to find it.

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Liberal Zionism’s plan to capture the next working-class upsurge, & how Lenin showed we can defeat it

The Democratic Party’s plan to contain the coming workers upsurge is intertwined with liberal Zionism’s efforts to co-opt the Palestinian cause. It’s the working-class movement's treatment of the Palestine question that will determine whether the movement gains independence from the Democrats during its next phase; because the struggle against Zionism is inseparable from the struggle against capitalism, and being against Palestine’s colonization is still the most important litmus test within the class struggle.

These realities are self-evident, but our class enemies have methods for diverting the workers from what the struggle calls for. And the way they aim to divert us from the next critical tasks is by presenting a “soft” Zionism disguised as liberation, based around the “coexistence” narrative about what Palestine supposedly needs. This is how the labor bosses and the reformist politicians can capture the next working-class revolt; the counterinsurgency against this revolt will depend on how well these opportunists can sell the lie of a “peaceful” Zionism, one that’s being undermined by the “extremists” on “both sides” of the anti-colonial war.

It’s this narrative that the Democrat gatekeepers within the union bureaucracy will use to try to constrain our efforts, and justify shutting down their pro-Palestine constituents. As we go into organized labor, and put forth our agenda of boycotting the Zionist entity, we’ll be met with sympathetic overtures followed by underhanded sabotage. The labor leadership will prefer the version of the boycotts that only targets the West Bank settlements, as advanced by the UK and many other U.S.-aligned governments; and of course the gatekeepers will always want to include condemnations of Hamas in their statements. But our response must not be to give up on agitating within the unions. 

This was one of the basic lessons from Lenin, as A. Lozovsky summarized in his 1924 guide for trade union militants. There are two particular lines from this text, pertaining to the radicalization of the working masses, that I’ve put emphasis on for the quotation. They refer to bringing the workers towards communism, which is of course my goal as a Marxist-Leninist; but their logic applies to any area of the struggle that you might want to bring the masses into. Says Lozovsky’s commentary:

There is a whole chapter in this book entitled “Should Revolutionists work in Reactionary Unions?” Lenin analyzes all the left arguments for quitting the reformist unions in this chapter. “We should have nothing to do with them because they do not defend the interests of the workers, we cannot support them because they are opportunists, no compromises,” the British lefts proclaimed. However, their leftism was in reverse proportion to their influence over the labor movement. And in the chapter dedicated to the British lefts, Lenin says: “You do not want to affiliate to the labor party, you do not want to support it in the elections, but the fact that the majority of the workers in England still follow the British Kerensky’s and Scheidemann’s the fact that they have not yet had the experience of having a government of these men, which experience was required by Russia and Germany to drive the mass of the workers towards Communism…

But Lenin does not stop here. He says: “The slogan, Without compromise, onward, never deviating from the straight path,” when this slogan is raised by an undeniably helpless minority of the workers which knows (or at any rate, should know), that the majority will shortly, in case of a victory of Henderson and Snowden over Lloyd George and Churchill, become disillusioned and come to the support of Communism (or in any case, to neutrality in most cases favorable neutrality, towards the Communists), it is clearly a mistaken slogan. It is just as if 10,000 soldiers threw themselves into battle against 50,000 enemy soldiers; this is a time when it is necessary to “hesitate,” to “deviate from the path,” and even “compromise” as long as there are reinforcements 100,000 strong behind you who cannot immediately join the battle. This is intellectual puerility and not a serious tactic of a revolutionary class.

It’s when we understand this longer game—where the people will join with revolutionary politics after experiencing the futility of reformism—that our mission within the unions is shown to be so much less daunting. If we’re willing to put in the work, and endure all the obstacles entailed within navigating organized labor, the reward will be to access critical revolutionary mass elements who we would otherwise never reach.

This work does not look like throwing “critical” support behind the candidates these Democrat union leaders are supporting, in the hopes of mechanistically replicating Lenin’s project to support the Labor party. This is what pro-Democrat Marxian groups like Geese magazine argue; their strategy is shown to be ineffectual by the fact that our socdems can’t truly win in the first place, since their strategy depends on the voters within the metropolitan centers, as well as by our lack of strong revolutionary organization compared to the communists from Lenin’s time. Without real power of your own, “strategically” supporting your enemies will only help them. The real lesson to take from Lenin’s statements here is that we must relearn the trade unionism skills which American communists lost a long time ago, and that we can only gain through historical study combined with direct experience. 

What we must do is formulate a clear program of action for the unions, modeled after the American workers movement’s past mode of practice and applied to the situation of today. In 1926, after the capitalists had brought the labor bureaucracy towards severely compromising the unions, William Z. Foster described how the workers needed to respond:

As against the degeneration of the trade unions practically into company unions by the bureaucracy, the left wing must intensify its activities along the lines of our established policies. The Workers Party must carry on an extensive ideological campaign to awaken the membership to the great necessity for trade union work and to bring all the non-union members into the trade unions. Our party must thoroughly organize its fractions in the unions and the T.U.E.L. It must everywhere build the [Trade Union Educational] League into a broad, definitely organized left wing movement. We must stimulate the development of the so-called progressive bloc in the unions. We must make united fronts with the progressives on the basis of minimum programs of immediate needs of the unions. We must take advantage of the union elections to defeat the bureaucracy and to put progressives and revolutionists in key positions. We must redouble our agitation for the Labor Party, for the organization of the unorganized, and for amalgamation. We must relentlessly combat labor banking and the rest of the class collaboration movement. We must be the heart and the head of every struggle of the workers against their employers and the state. We must emphasize the struggle for world trade union unity

Right now, the most damning piece of evidence we can find for the yellow nature of the unions is their complicity on Palestine. The last time American unions made a major move on the Palestine issue was in 2024, with a joint union letter calling for an arms embargo on the Zionist entity; they certainly haven’t taken up the 2025 call from Palestine’s union federation to mobilize a full economic boycott. The labor bosses will continue trying to get away with this inaction, and will likely start following in the example of the other liberal Zionists who’ve been denouncing Netanyahu to rehabilitate Jewish supremacy’s image. This subservience to the empire won’t save them from the next crackdowns on organized labor, though. As the assaults on the working class escalate, the impulse of these labor leaders will be to fold, and let the unions become empty shells. 

We must use this inevitable cowardice to expose the “coexistence” agenda’s true nature, and show the workers why they need to revolt against organized labor’s leadership. We have to draw the connection between the fake comprador “pro-Palestine” stance, and the absurd ideology of “class peace” between bosses and workers. This isn’t so we can create red unions, as Lenin and Foster clarified, but so we can build up independent working-class power that doesn’t split the labor struggle. It also doesn’t mean the crude economist behavior of fetishizing union organizing, as if it’s enough on its own. The path forward looks like strengthening the progressive forces inside the unions, while constructing the separate institutions that the workers will need in order to overcome the bureaucracy’s power imbalance. 

A workers party is indispensable within this project; but it will only be able to properly serve its purpose after we’ve built the collectives that can represent the workers without them needing to be in a party. The Trade Union Educational League provides one historical model for this that we must learn from; another example is the unemployed councils, which this country used to have and we are now in severe need of. Within this mission of rebuilding workers power, there are a myriad of tasks; but we can avoid becoming overwhelmed by these tasks, because all that they really mean is a redirection of all the energy which is now going into futile reformist endeavors.

Many of us within the struggle have been funneled into reformism in the past, and we know the pain of putting serious work into something that turns out to be unserious. Our takeaway from this shouldn’t be that political work is a waste of time, or that every org is just trying to scam you; it should be that when we find a genuinely productive path, all of this regret about our mistakes will only make us more effective. We know the mission of today: combat liberal Zionism within organized labor, and give the workers organizational independence. When we stick to this objective, our work will only multiply the revolutionary struggle’s gains.

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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 from our era of accelerating inflation, 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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