When I predict that America is going to break up, I say this with the confidence that such a breakup will actually be what catalyzes America’s great coming-together. This will be a breakup between the different factions of our ruling class, which are headed for a type of civil war where they target each other with ever-larger asymmetric terrorist actions. And the bulk of the people won’t side with either faction of their exploiters. What will happen after this American repeat of the USSR’s downfall is an upheaval that parallels China’s path towards workers revolution; a dark age that comes from the evils of the imperialist system, and that therefore guides the people to the correct path.
China couldn’t have come to socialism without first seeing through all that didn’t work: every reactionary ideology, from social democracy to feudalism, showed itself unable to bring the masses out of the collective humiliations colonialism had brought. Now, as America enters into its own century of humiliation, we’ve already exhausted some of the biggest faux-solutions to our crises; after Trump 2.0’s total betrayal of its popular mandates, the MAGA wing of post-2016 bourgeois populism has lost much of its former base, while the Sanders wing is splintering over its leadership’s own subservience to the system. Amid these developments, the faction that’s now overwhelmingly likely to win is the “Zombie Biden” wing—the old-guard neoliberal Democrats who are opposed to the Soros wing’s efforts at lifting up DSA.
It seems wild that this is the case, because the Zombie Biden wing lost its popularity over ten years ago. The turning point happened when Americans became disillusioned with Obama, the former populist idol, over his refusal to fix the perpetual depression the working class entered into after 2008. Biden never even tried to establish continuity with Obama’s image of radical reform, and as soon as he got in, Americans became so alienated from their government that it brought them closer together. This “nothing will fundamentally change” philosophy will continue to define the Democrats, because the bulk of our ruling class recognizes the optimal path for itself at this stage: continue to disregard public sentiments, like Trump 2.0 has been doing, so that the war against the world’s workers can keep accelerating.
This has been the consensus of our rulers since beginning of the Gaza genocide, when MAGA entered an alliance with the neoliberal Democrats over their shared desire to crush pro-Palestine sentiment. And this Jewish supremacist coalition has brought some increased unity among the capitalists, yet we’re already seeing signs of how ready the different players are to backstab each other. The Bannon wing in the fracturing MAGA coalition has allied with Sanders in attacking AI, making clearer the dividing lines in this new phase of inter-elite battles.
It’s most likely that the anti-AI wing will win out in the long term, but this won’t produce the social benefits that the Zohran “treatlerites” hope for; at most there will be a few more Zohran-style mayors in the biggest cities, who can’t stop the new wave of engineered collapse that our rulers are going to bring upon the working class. And because the current administration has committed to accelerating AI, we’re going to see disruptions to the job market in these next couple years that won’t really be reversible, even after Trump is out of office. The Zombie Bidenites will be the ones tasked with managing an economic post-apocalypse, with their best option being to “lumpenize” the bulk of the masses by offering some form of meager welfare in place of jobs.
Clearly a situation like this is not sustainable. The question is whether America’s inevitable splintering brings generations worth of dark age, or a relatively brief period before the people have prevailed. We know that the workers aren’t far from their next moment of revolt; France shows what’s going to happen in the other places that have been devastated by the attacks from the usurers. And these uprisings will keep happening until the core problem gets resolved. This is part of the message we must bring to the people, who as Mao said will be targeted with lies about how they have no hope for victory:
Before it explodes, a bomb is a single entity in which opposites coexist in given conditions. The explosion takes place only when a new condition, ignition, is present. An analogous situation arises in all those natural phenomena which finally assume the form of open conflict to resolve old contradictions and produce new things. It is highly important to grasp this fact. It enables us to understand that revolutions and revolutionary wars are inevitable in class society and that without them, it is impossible to accomplish any leap in social development and to overthrow the reactionary ruling classes and therefore impossible for the people to win political power. Communists must expose the deceitful propaganda of the reactionaries, such as the assertion that social revolution is unnecessary and impossible. They must firmly uphold the Marxist-Leninist theory of social revolution and enable the people to understand that social revolution is not only entirely necessary but also entirely practicable, and that the whole history of mankind and the triumph of the Soviet Union have confirmed this scientific truth.
Americans have already embraced this reality in essence, because they’ve already become faced with the total discrediting of their institutions. The only remaining gap between their awareness, and the full revolutionary position, concerns how many of the people have rejected electoralism as a solution; and this gap is closing fast, because reformist stars like Zohran can’t bring one one-hundredth of the changes required to resolve our crises. The cybernetic, self-reinforcing nature of our system is what keeps the duopoly in power, not the will of the people; they’ve rejected the culture war politics the duopoly uses to maintain its perceived legitimacy, and have thereby gained class consciousness to the greatest extent that our present conditions allow.
The proper definition of a “class-conscious” worker, and of a “proletarian,” is when the worker has attained an actual organizational connection to the class struggle. Giving them this grounding in the class war is our task at this stage. The logic of social revolution has become apparent to the people, and this logic is what lets somebody take on the class war’s tasks while truly understanding what they’re working towards. It lets them see the larger goal, from the revolutionary perspective, behind joining a union or participating in a strike. When Marxists advocate for these actions, our motivations for doing so extend infinitely far beyond the realm of workplace organizing; to say communism is “class struggle” would be selling it utterly short, communism is about a struggle that will continue after class itself has gone extinct. Ours is a vision of endless transformation and revelation, where all the contradictions in a civilization get drawn out—a “ruthless criticism of all that exists.”
The contradictions that are leading our rulers to destroy each other were always there, and because of this, the idea of an American collapse has always been prevalent in our popular imagination. We’re just now seeing these expectations confirmed, and the reaction from the bulk of the masses has been the most positive one: to conclude the old order must be replaced. This leap in dialectical awareness will give us a solid foundation for building the new order, which is going to look far closer to the ideal of “America” than anything that came before.
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