When I say Marxists have created a platform of their own, I’m referring to a process that’s occurred far beyond the mainstream discourse realms. That’s involved a battle against the pro-imperialist forces which have tried so hard to capture Marxism, and prevent real Marxists from having a platform so that they can act as the new faces of Marxist theory.
Marxists have been gaining great amounts of influence on social media, with Jackson Hinkle’s success being one of the main examples of this trend. This is the part of the platform-building mission that involves gaining a great following; and as I’ve written about, Jackson is someone we need to study in order to succeed at winning the numbers game. To know why Jackson has been able to bring Marxism to such a large audience, though, we need to understand the obstacles which the communist movement had been facing prior to this development. For Marxism to become as relevant as it is now, it needed to combat the liberal co-optation which kept it marginal for so long.
Losurdo explained how this co-optation occurred, and why it made Marxism unable to be sold to the masses for as long as “Marxism” was presented in such a liberalized way. Referring to Losurdo, Prince Kapone summarizes the ways that “Marxism” came to be treated as a bourgeois academic theory, with the liberal capitalist platforms adopting it as a propaganda tool:
Western Marxism, he argues, is the ideological excretion of the imperial core’s class contradictions. It is a product of the global wage differential that enabled the rise of a labor aristocracy in the West, and of the professional-managerial intelligentsia that floated atop it. These are not merely cultural workers with opinions. They are salaried functionaries of the knowledge economy, whose radicalism rarely leaves the page. They do not want to overthrow capitalism—they want tenure within it. Their Marxism is not a weapon, but a credential. This is why, as Losurdo shows, the CIA had no problem funding them. Through cultural fronts like the Congress for Cultural Freedom, imperialism propped up a “respectable Left” that would attack socialism in the name of critique while advancing the ideological aims of the empire. The real enemies—Leninists, Maoists, anti-imperialist revolutionaries—were demonized as Stalinists, totalitarians, or worse. But Adorno? Arendt? Marcuse? They were safe. Because their Marxism had already been defanged—stripped of its class allegiance, its organizational form, its revolutionary horizon. What remained was critique without consequence, rebellion without power, theory without teeth.
What was the outcome of this process where Marxism became robbed of its substance and its platform? As explained by Losurdo, it was for the bulk of self-described “Marxist” commentators and leaders in the west to get behind U.S. imperialism’s crimes against the formerly colonized world:
Reduced to a religion, and indeed a religion of evasion, Western Marxism cannot provide an answer to the problems of the present, particularly the worsening of the international situation. We have seen what has happened in the past few years. On the occasion of the war against Libya in 2011, authoritative organs of the Western press recognized its neocolonial character. Neocolonial and bloody. An eminent French philosopher, very distant from Marxism, observed, "today we know that the war resulted in at least 30,000 deaths, against 300 victims of the initial repression" carried out by Qaddafi. According to other estimates, the toll of the NATO intervention would be even greater. And the tragedy continues: the country has been destroyed, and people have been forced to choose between desperation at home or fleeing to the unknown, which could be fatal.
I am not aware of any exponent of "Western Marxism" or of "Libertarian Western Marxism" that denounced this horror. Indeed, a personality such as Rossana Rossanda, who, as the founder of the communist daily Il Manifesto can be included in the category of "Western Marxism" or "Libertarian Western Marxism," went to the very threshold of calling for armed intervention against Qaddafi's Libya. It is a threshold that Susanna Camusso, Secretary-General of the CGIL—a union federation that has left long behind its onetime links to the Communist Party and to Eastern Marxism—happily crossed over.
It’s this problem within the communist movement, where the supposed representatives of Marxism act in tandem with liberal pro-imperialists, that’s right now threatening to splinter the antiwar movement at a critical moment. For many years, the Trotskyists in the International Marxist Tendency have been working to spread slanders against Venezuela’s revolutionary government, omitting the role of Washington’s sanctions so that they can dishonestly blame Maduro for the economic crisis. And the supposedly Marxist-Leninist KKE has been platforming these lies, to the effect of turning numerous other communist parties against Venezuela.
Now that U.S. imperialism has decided it will invade Venezuela if it can get away with this, the question of supporting the Bolivarian revolution has been forced to the forefront. These western Marxist forces are playing a role of saboteurs on the empire’s behalf; but we within the communist movement’s principled elements can rescue the workers struggle from their destructive influence.
The advantage we have against the social chauvinists is that their politics are designed to be isolating from the masses, while our politics are capable of winning the masses over. I say our politics are “capable of” succeeding in mass work because our success can only come if we properly understand our mission. Though we have examples of such effectiveness among communists who take our anti-imperialist positions, those examples could only come into being via serious investigations of the given conditions.
Jackson Hinkle didn’t gain such a following simply by taking the correct stances on Palestine, China, Venezuela, etc; there are plenty of figures in alternative media who take the same positions, but have failed to connect with the audiences that Jackson has reached. For a communist to be effective, they can’t merely repeat a series of correct statements and expect to win; they have to learn from political practice, as explained by Mao:
Often, correct knowledge can be arrived at only after many repetitions of the process leading from matter to consciousness and then back to matter, that is, leading from practice to knowledge and then back to practice. Such is the Marxist theory of knowledge, the dialectical materialist theory of knowledge. Among our comrades there are many who do not yet understand this theory of knowledge. When asked the sources of their ideas, opinions, policies, methods, plans and conclusions, eloquent speeches and long articles they consider the questions strange and cannot answer it. Nor do they comprehend that matter, can be transformed into consciousness and consciousness into matter, although such leaps are phenomena of everyday life. It is therefore necessary to educate our comrades in the dialectical materialist theory of knowledge, so that they can orientate their thinking correctly, become good at investigation and study and at summing up experience, overcome difficulties, commit fewer mistakes, do their work better
The essence of why Jackson could tap into audiences which most alt media couldn’t, even though on the surface he shares the same ideas as these other sources of commentary, is that he wasn’t following the standard formula for “dissident” media. And he certainly wasn’t following the rhetorical standards of the stagnant, KKE-aligned CPs. The way that I would summarize the style which Jackson represents is “American Wild West”; it’s not tethered to the left vs. right dichotomy, and it’s not a rote copying of existing theories. It’s a raw appeal towards the desires of the world’s people for throwing off imperial rule. The story of Jackson Hinkle proves that the “American Wild West” is greatly attractive to broad masses across the globe; and ultimately, I believe it’s how communists will bring America’s own people to Marxism.
The only reason why such Wild West Marxism has gained a following around the world, but not yet so much in America itself, is because America needs some time to sufficiently build its revolutionary forces back up. In the empire’s core, the CIA has been able to dismantle the authentic workers movement with particular thoroughness, and set up an especially insidious establishment of fake “Marxism.” But if America has already been able to produce an authentic Marxist tendency which appeals to so much of the globe’s masses, and does so by taking advantage of the wildness inherent to America, then America’s communists are in position to win over our own people next.
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