The starkest contradiction between academic leftism, and the reality of today’s conditions for the youth, is how academia itself increasingly cannot offer upward mobility. The members of higher education tend to think in a socially progressive way, and they often identify as leftists or give credit to surface-level Marxian ideas. Yet due to the nature of bourgeois academia, the very structure of these educational institutions is growing ever-more hostile towards the students.
For the Gen Z who’ve come of age post-Covid, post-graduate unemployment is unprecedented in its scale, and in the degree of hopelessness for this trend to end. These students are also experiencing the fallout from a systematic campaign to dismantle higher education as we know it, with the worst consequence from this being growing student homelessness. For the younger Gen Alpha, these problems will no doubt be at least as severe. To bring the post-Covid generation into the class war, Marxists must properly unpack academic leftism, and understand where it lies within today’s material conflicts.
The contradiction we must confront
Academic leftism is a mindset, a mindset where “socialist” intellectuals preach to the masses rather than actually leading the proletarian struggle. This way of relating to the people as a “Marxist” is a holdover from the period of bourgeois revolutions, where after the people overthrew the feudal order, there appeared “right” and “left” wings within the new capitalist parliament; with the right being on the king’s side, and the left existing in negation towards the king. Because the concept of a political left came out of bourgeois politics, there has always been a contradiction between identifying with the left, and identifying as a communist; “leftism” is something that the capitalist ruling class has been able to incorporate into its core ideological makeup, making leftism compatible with the notion of a “progressive” imperialism.
Part of this is apparent in how all of Washington’s color revolutions have involved backing leftists who hate the governments the empire wants gone. The problem goes much deeper than this, though, because the left isn’t merely something that imperialism has co-opted; when we recognize proper definition of what “the left” is, that being a wing within bourgeois “democracy,” it becomes clear that communists must escape from leftism in order to become truly independent from bourgeois politics.
This is where it’s so important to grasp the nature of the ideological conflict within leftism, and within the academic institutions that utilize leftist ideology. Because even though communists seek to rebuild an authentic left, to reconstruct the working-class institutions that were destroyed in the 20th century, all the while we must remain prepared to combat the problems which will inevitably arise out of leftism. These problems being the unprincipled, imperialism-compatible behaviors that are embraced by the leftists who support Washington’s color revolutions.
Inevitably these behaviors will manifest in the form of attacks against those who seek to rebuild America’s workers movement, because leftism without dialectical thinking is pure negation. It’s the ideology that you can use to cancel any working-class organizer for not being woke enough. This is why Haz Al-Din concludes that leftism’s logical conclusion is to serve the very most destructive and malicious designs of imperialism.
He phrases this by calling leftism the heir to fascism, which sounds counterintuitive when you’re looking at these ideologies on the surface level; yet no matter how bombastic it seems, the reality is that we have seen leftists across the globe rallying alongside fascists in Washington’s color revolutions, with Ukraine being one of the foremost examples of this.
The defense from these left fascist collaborators is that they came towards their views based on their own lived experiences, and have their own reasons for hating the U.S.-targeted governments which they live under. And this is what reveals the contradiction between leftism and Marxism; because indeed, these collaborators represent a political camp that emerged out of real material factors, independently from U.S. imperialism. Where their politics came from, though, was not class consciousness; it came from petty-bourgeois and lumpen resentment, which invariably becomes targeted at the proletarian forces. This is why Haz describes leftism as fulfilling the same anti-proletarian role which fascism does:
The true heir of fascism, is none other than Leftism itself. Fascism, like leftism, establishes the dead form of modernity as a pinwheel - a swastika - actively and voluntarily preserving it at the expense of its own real technomic premises, and therefore emanating an affect of revolutionary change. If there is any model worthy of representing the ‘political spectrum’ (which does not actually represent political difference, but rather the political homogeneity of the modern state), it is precisely that of the swastika, as it cannot tilt right without also moving left. The dead form of modernity cannot be preserved, without also emanating the veneer of change. This shocking fact is already self-evident throughout Europe and Ukraine. To call leftists fascists would be superfluous, for leftism is already far more fascist than fascism could ever possibly have been. All the genocidal intent, violence, terrorism and bestiality of fascism is amplified, with far more viciousness, brutality and efficiency in leftism, a fact which is sure to become evident to all in the years to come.
These are the activities that our ruling class hopes to draw the lumpenized students or former students into: ultraviolent adventurism, efforts to terrorize the actual working-class forces, libidinal release to cope with one’s alienation. This is why “antifa,” as it actually exists today, mirrors the Brownshirt model of recruiting from the unemployed youth. And these anti-worker “counter-gangs” grow out from academic leftism; the identity politics ideology behind them is taught to these unemployed youths by the academic/NGO networks. This infrastructure has laid the groundwork for a new wave of counterinsurgency, wherein the adventurist wing of ultra-leftism escalates its assaults against working-class organizations.
Rescuing the left-behind youths
Such is the role that ultra-leftism will play in this next stage of the class war: weaponizing the most disaffected among the post-Covid generation against the proletariat. To draw these youths away from ultra-leftism, or from its far right counterpart, we must fully break from the academic leftist model. We must reject the mode of practice that the bourgeois revolutionaries have passed down onto us, wherein the members of the revolutionary intelligentsia merely talk at the masses in hope of rousing them towards revolution.
There is a difference between trying to lecture the masses into becoming revolutionaries, and building a collective organization for these masses which can give them practical experience within the class struggle. Only with the latter model can the population’s level of class consciousness truly be raised. Because there’s been no left in America for a long time, during this first organizational stage we have needed to look for class consciousness within the ideological realm; to identify which parts of the masses are most disillusioned with the liberal order, and go into them. The proper definition of class consciousness, though, is when the working masses come to participate in working-class organization itself. This is the context we must consider while we follow Lenin’s call to raise the consciousness of the workers:
There can be no talk of an independent ideology formulated by the working masses themselves in the process of their movement…This does not mean, of course, that the workers have no part in creating such an ideology. They take part, however, not as workers, but as socialist theoreticians, as Proudhons and Weitlings; in other words, they take part only when they are able, and to the extent that they are able, more or less, to acquire the knowledge of their age and develop that knowledge.
But in order that working men may succeed in this more often, every effort must be made to raise the level of the consciousness of the workers in general; it is necessary that the workers do not confine themselves to the artificially restricted limits of “literature for workers” but that they learn to an increasing degree to master general literature. It would be even truer to say “are not confined”, instead of “do not confine themselves”, because the workers themselves wish to read and do read all that is written for the intelligentsia, and only a few (bad) intellectuals believe that it is enough “for workers” to be told a few things about factory conditions and to have repeated to them over and over again what has long been known.
When we truly grasp what Lenin meant by this, we can address the contradiction between leftism and Marxism, which is reaching a heightened point of conflict at this phase in the decline of our social order. Because of how extensively our ruling class has engineered society’s decline, the college pipeline as a rule no longer offers a path towards employment, or towards starting a family. And this breakdown of the boomer societal model is forcing those within left politics to confront an existential question for their cause. They’re having to answer: should we keep modeling our practice after academic leftism, or should we pursue the alternative route? That alternative being to wage the class war in a way which is truly responsive towards the conditions we’re facing today.
These are conditions where the foundation for “normal” life has been dynamited. If trends continue as they are, for the most part the post-Covid generation will not create a new generation after them; their familial connection to the future has been severed. Never before has humanity seen such a level of alienation, and therefore no attempt at mass politics that’s unwilling to confront this alienation can survive; not as a truly independent force, at least.
Leftism provides a cope for the post-Covid left-behinds, in the form of boundless negation; it tells them that humans are a virus, and therefore it’s a good thing for us to stop having children. It also preaches national nihilism, Clavicular-style, to the effect that leftists can avoid caring about the American family’s destruction. Of course these arguments can’t placate everyone, though, and their real purpose is to cultivate a niche political ideology. Among the left-behind youths who are seeking concrete political answers to the problem of familial decline, right now the main ideological influences are coming from the right. This is largely because it’s the right-wing “Jewish question” commentators who are talking about this problem in the first place. They’re the ones who are making the connection between the decline of American patriotism among the 30-and-under crowd, and the disappearance of opportunities for starting families; which aren’t things that leftism even recognizes as being bad.
Because leftism was designed to negate mass politics, in the Trump 2.0 era it’s lost its former relevance, and we shouldn’t be treating it as the central threat. I focus on leftism here for the purpose of contrasting anti-mass politics with the politics which Marxists need to embody; we know what the opposite of an effective communist movement looks like, and this lets us avoid the idealist errors that keep our movement stagnant. If the essence of academic leftism’s problem is that it’s about preaching to the masses, then we know that raising the consciousness of the masses can’t happen without actual popular organization. It can’t happen without unemployment councils, or party-building, or the other essential elements that are demanded by a Bolshevik practice. And when we use these tools to let the post-Covid generation fight its existential battle, then we can earn this generation’s respect.
The post-Covid generation’s fight is existential in nature because if they lose this fight, then they will become outmoded amid capital’s next technological phase. Gen Z, and those younger than us, see where things are headed unless we assert our interests. Recognizing this is part of how Marxists can convince the left-behind youths that we deserve to lead them. Academic leftism and its radlib outgrowths don’t even pretend to offer the post-Covid generation a solution. The far right offers them a false solution. We offer the authentic solution, but we must understand what our own goal is before we can speak or act credibly.
Within Marxism, there is a battle for ideological control, where the leftist negationist side is in conflict with the dialectical side. This battle has been happening for centuries, and it will continue for centuries more; but the fact that it’s lasting this long shows the necessity for Marxism to evolve. To be effective as a Marxist, you have to reinvent yourself according to each new historical reality. As Gen Z and Gen Alpha fight to remain vital amid unprecedented existential peril, this is the mode of operating that we must impart onto them.
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