To progress American Marxism into the next stage, we must assess the mood of the people today, which is one of profound uncertainty. When you look at how the masses are speaking these days—and I’m not just talking about surveys, but about the countless candid rant videos that working Americans have been making—you see just how advanced their alienation has gotten. They have the sense that nothing makes sense any more; that they have no opportunities to work towards a real future, that they’re being priced out of everything, that technological control is destroying their freedoms, and that everyone around them has suddenly become anti-social.
Within this picture, we can see the makings of a revolutionary scenario where the masses have to collectively fight back against the worst trends within themselves. Where a popular revolt does come about, but to succeed it must combat the hyper-individualist impulses that our conditions are proliferating. Which is where a revolutionary leadership must find its role.
In Haiti, a country that’s vastly further along in its process of societal collapse, the revolutionary leadership that’s emerged is one which has had to unify groups of gangs. Which might not be the nature of our task in the United States, but as time goes on we can see more parallels emerging. Like Haiti, our society has been undergoing a growth in lumpenization, where the workers are de-classed and forced to live off of alternative means. In Haiti, the only path towards throwing off international financial control runs through building within these lumpenized sectors. The practical reality is that the armed groups which have been gaining ground are the only forces able to challenge the neo-colonial police and the foreign occupiers.
As the situation in the USA continues to spiral, any organized effort at defeating our own banking regime will need to structurally adapt in equivalent ways. We’ll have to build a revolutionary organization for an environment where the people are ready for revolution, but the culture is still deeply individualistic.
Part of this means rethinking democratic centralism as we know it, which was created for pre-industrial societies that were highly collectivist; in a society where people feel like they can easily go on a renegade path, effectively organizing the masses will require structures that can build around any wreckers within our own orgs. Another part of this adaptation, one that has to do with responding towards the specific shifts from the last decade, is embracing the next popular revolutionary upswings as they actually exist. Not in the idealized form that we may imagine them as, but in the raw and untamed form that any real mass upsurge will take on.
This is different from worship of spontaneity, because when Lenin ridiculed the bourgeois reformists for bowing to spontaneity, he was criticizing them for underrating the conscious element. This rejection of revolutionary theory overlaps with the kind of opportunism that Mao spoke against in The Socialist Upsurge in China's Countryside, where he ridiculed the “Marxists” who scorn any mass development that doesn’t conform to their established routines. Mao described how this “Marxism” ignores the mass revolutionary consciousness that’s right in front of our faces, in favor of a rigid dogma that helps no one:
The masses have a potentially inexhaustible enthusiasm for socialism. Those who can only follow the old routine in a revolutionary period are utterly incapable of seeing this enthusiasm. They are blind and all is dark ahead of them. At times they go so far as to confound right and wrong and turn things upside down. Haven't we come across enough persons of this type? Those who simply follow the old routine invariably underestimate the people's enthusiasm. Let something new appear and they always disapprove and rush to oppose it. Afterwards, they have to admit defeat and do a little self-criticism. But the next time something new appears, they go through the same process all over again. This is their pattern of behavior in regard to anything and everything new. Such people are always passive, always fail to move forward at the critical moment, and always have to be given a shove in the back before they move a step.
To prevent this kind of complacency, we must grasp what the breakdown of American life demands from us. We’ll need to respond towards the collapse by truly embracing our nation’s wild west spirit; which is how the masses themselves have already responded to our conditions, making them greatly surpass most U.S. “Marxists” in their revolutionary intelligence.
In these last couple of years, as our ruling class has greatly accelerated its assault on the American people and the world, we’ve been seeing ever-more raw mass upsurges. The people have formed the Luigi movement, which is premised on the recognition that denying healthcare means murder; and such awareness about the hypocrisy of bourgeois moralism has carried over into their reactions towards every other ruling-class evil.
When Amazon employees have set fire to their tyrannical workplaces, or Americans have destroyed Flock cameras, the default view among the masses has been that these actions are self-defense. This is the inverse to the kind of views that Americans overwhelmingly had in the mid-20th century, when the aristocracy of labor was strong and the ruling class therefore enjoyed massive popular support. Today the financial monopolists are at war with the American people, and the people understand this to an advanced degree.
If we can avoid underestimating the people’s enthusiasm, we’ll be in position to translate this mass ideological unity into social unity. Americans have become unified in hating the ruling class, yet in their daily lives they’ve become more disconnected from each other than ever. Popular revolutionary forces have been able to overcome such mass atomization, including within circumstances many times worse than ours. Within Haiti’s present revolution, a critical thing the revolutionary leadership has done is give the people new foundations for coming together. In the places the movement controls, a foremost priority for the government has been to give the children education, as this is how to stop them from falling into the hands of the fascist mercenary recruiters. Thereby, the basis for social cohesion has been strengthened in all areas. If we continue to build alternative community support networks, as American communists have increasingly been doing, we’ll give the people the same kind of strength.
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