At the same time when Asia’s workers states have developed so far that no one can deny their success, the people in the empire’s core have gained broad desire for revolution. These two things haven’t happened coincidentally. They both came out of the path that the world was set upon when the United States became the center of financial control, and then the American empire’s decline immediately began. Korea’s people beat back the empire, then Vietnam’s people did too, then the empire found itself losing too much for the domestic status quo to continue. Faced with international defeats, our ruling class began a war on the U.S. workers, which accelerated when the USSR fell and Washington reached the peak of its power.
This power proved to be fragile, largely because Chinese socialism had by that point prepared itself for a productive explosion. When the American masses became ready for revolution, and unified in the desire to rid themselves of their illegitimate banker regime, the examples from Asian socialism would be there to show them what the path forward looks like. And the number of people who’ve come to favor communism because of these socialist projects is growing.
A problem we still face is that certain imperialist narratives about these socialist states, like “Uyghur concentration camps” or “Kim Jong Un the tyrant,” have yet to be sufficiently driven from the public’s consciousness. To resolve this problem, we must wage a new campaign of ideological struggle.
This campaign must be about more than debunking anti-communist propaganda. Merely countering the enemy’s lies, without offering a deliverable alternative to the duopoly, is what U.S. Marxists did back when socialism in America was still just talk. Since the escalations of Washington’s new cold war in 2022, and the radicalization that this brought to America’s people, communists have been able to gain relevance in a way they didn’t before. And those who know what it truly means to go into the masses have made progress since then.
This ability to add substance onto the form, and advance beyond the realm of discourse, looks like centering service towards our communities while taking a leadership role within workers struggles. These are the two main policies that benefit the cause at this stage.
In later stages this will change; but for as long as class struggle exists in any form, we will have to stay attentive of which reactionary ideas we’re primarily dealing with, and how these ideas can be defeated. At this moment, the biggest ideological threat is a passive, selfishly nihilistic American attitude towards the crimes our government commits against the world’s people. Among Gen Z, there’s a widespread susceptibility to this attitude, because the economic decline of this last generation has caused Gen Z to think in highly materialistic terms; the primary question for them is whether something will benefit them directly. Without proof that an idea or movement will help them personally, they’re not interested.
This comes from a rejection of the high-minded liberal idealism that our ruling class sold to many Gen Xers and millennials; which could become a good thing, as long as we don’t let imperial nihilism be what replaces this idealism. The way to do this is through showing that communism can rescue the masses from capitalist degrowth, and provide alternative material support systems as America’s collapse accelerates.
Our task of combating apathetic individualism will be protracted. America may not undergo its own “cultural revolution” until after the fallout from imperial decline forces us into an arduous collective struggle. And the task still won’t be complete after then. Even after China had undergone a struggle of this kind, Mao warned that a culture can’t be immediately freed from retrograde influences, and that this fight is in fact something very long-term:
In China, although in the main socialist transformation has been completed with respect to the system of ownership, and although the large-scale and turbulent class struggles of the masses characteristic of the previous revolutionary periods have in the main come to an end, there are still remnants of the overthrown landlord and comprador classes, there is still a bourgeoisie, and the remolding of the petty bourgeoisie has only just started. The class struggle is by no means over. The class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, the class struggle between the different political forces, and the class struggle in the ideological held between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie will continue to be long and tortuous and at times will even become very acute. The proletariat seeks to transform the world according to its own world outlook, and so does the bourgeoisie. In this respect, the question of which will win out, socialism or capitalism, is still not really settled.
Mao’s response to this problem was to launch the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which we’ll need to properly understand in order to wage our equivalent battles against American individualism. On the GPCR, many of the Marxists who support China have come to a synthesis between criticizing its errors and recognizing its necessity. We see how ultra-leftism gained prominence within the CPC’s anti-liberal campaign, and we also see how liberalism had to be systematically fought in order for China to not go the way of the USSR. This teaches us that when we carry out a cultural revolution in America, it will only be able to succeed on the basis of embracing America’s national heritage and identity, unlike the ultra-lefts do.
America has been a collectivist nation for longer than it’s been an individualist one. Individualism—or rather the illusion of “individualism” within a fundamentally collectivist species—only became dominant in our society when the ruling class psyoped Americans into it after World War II.
For most of the nation’s life prior to then, the American workers movement had been strong, and this revolutionary strength came out of the inherently collective fight that the country’s proletariat was forced into. When the U.S. transitioned out of its settler-colonial era, and monopoly finance capital arose, this proletariat gained new ability to unify across race; and it was on this basis of cross-racial workers struggle that the American nation could become something far more cohesive. This nation has yet to be constituted fully, but we know how to get it to that stage: by throwing off the rule of capital, and taking example from the socialist civilizations that we’re being dazzled by.
Both the past and the present vindicate communism. When you look at how workers struggle was integral to forming the modern American nation, and how workers victory was what brought these other countries to where they are now, it becomes clear our only path forward is to overthrow the banking regime. It couldn’t be more obvious that our interests are in the defeat of the monopoly financial dictatorship that fortified its control after World War II, and that’s now working towards the destruction of American civilization itself. The propagandists for nihilistic complacency have no way of disproving this reality. For their politics to remain tenable, they have to keep the people confused, and protect the anti-communist narratives that make it look like there’s no alternative.
This is all they can do amid the inspirational achievements we’re seeing in today’s socialist development. As the masses see these achievements, we must turn this into an entry point for greater revolutionary consciousness. Which must be done not just by explaining how our enemies are factually wrong, but by using history and practical action to show why the revolutionary path is the way forward.
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