To gauge the state of consciousness among the activist base, we must look at how the institutional left’s leaders are choosing to speak towards this base. We recently got an exceptional example of this when Joe Sims, chairman of the Communist Party USA, came out to admit that the party has been an appendage to the Democrats.
For anyone who’s seen the efforts by Sims and other CPUSA leaders to promote voting blue, or their blatant subversion of the CPUSA’s constitution to shut out members who oppose this policy, this confession would seem completely shocking. Yet it makes perfect sense when you consider how Gen Z, the ones CPUSA will need to recruit in order to survive, have collectively been rejected by the Democrats to the effect that Gen Z will never get behind the “vote blue” position.
It is this permanence of Gen Z’s alienation from establishment politics, this certainty that a critical amount of them won’t be herded back the next time around, which has been decisive in pushing Sims towards the posture he now takes. What happened after 2024 was not like the Democratic Party’s crisis after 2016, where the DNC could count on culture war divisions to let them seemingly return things towards the Obama-era “normal.” Now the only hope for the party to maintain popular support is through replacing the Obama-type leadership with the Mamdani social democrats, who themselves are being increasingly undermined by their own contradictions.
The Obama era is never returning. The Obama paradigm was defined by an alliance between the Democratic Party and the woke activist element, held together by NGOs and by compatible left orgs like CPUSA. As soon as Palestine advanced in its anti-colonial struggle, and the Democrats decided to purge the woke contingent, what was left were millions of college students and graduates who no longer have hope for professional careers. Which means they’re now in the same alienated position as the Americans who would gravitate towards MAGA after the 2008 collapse. No longer do these left-wing students have a chance at accessing the positions that were implicitly promised to them; now the government is recruiting from the evangelical student crowd in schools like Liberty University, the nonprofits that would have hired the woke crowd are being progressively dismantled, and higher education itself keeps being downsized.
For orgs like CPUSA, the danger from this is that the pipeline which has provided them with new blood will disappear, forcing these orgs to either radically switch up their rhetoric (like CPUSA is doing) or silo themselves off to hold on to their members (like PSL is doing). For the U.S. empire, the danger is that the post-Covid generation’s alienation will lead to a new wave of mass revolts; ones that are even more powerful than the uprisings from the Vietnam War era, because now the masses have been proletarianized and are very high in anti-imperialist consciousness.
Mao viewed the consciousness of the people as a decisive factor in whether Vietnam would turn into a third world war: “both the United States and the Soviet Union, and some other countries, are preparing to spread the war. As far as this is concerned, it seems that a war might begin. I am not quite sure about this question…we must take people’s consciousness into our consideration. When the United States stopped bombing North Vietnam, American soldiers in Vietnam were very glad, and they even cheered. This indicates that their morale is not high…The student strike is a new phenomenon in European history. Students in the capitalist countries usually do not strike. But now, all under the heaven is great chaos. Mainly in Europe, in the United States, in Latin America, and in Japan, there are student strikes.” Should equivalent popular struggles emerge today, this will create a new obstacle to Washington’s plans for a Taiwan proxy war, thereby putting the globe’s revolutionary forces in place to go on the offensive.
Now that the masses are behind the revolutionary position in much greater proportions, and even the most “woke” parts of the masses share the same interests as the conservative masses, the critical next step is to provide the people with organization. This mission will require more than continuing with the tasks the American communist movement has already adopted in these last couple of years, which are a great improvement on the previous stagnation but are only the first step.
In practical terms, we know what to do: construct alternative sources of material support for the masses, take roles of leadership over the labor movement, build coalitions based around popular anti-systemic goals like prosecuting pedophiles or dismantling Flock cameras. The communists who’ve broken from the compatible left orgs have gained great clarity by orienting ourselves around these tasks, and we still see that orgs like the CPUSA are not pursuing them. But when Sims adopted our language, and recognized how an ostensibly Marxist org can be a front for the Democrats, he was able to respond towards a shift that we must also respond to if we want success.
This is a shift where the class of aspiring professional activists—who orgs like CPUSA are reliant on, and therefore need to watch closely—has irreversibly fallen out with the ruling institutions, leaving this class adrift and ready to embrace new ideological mutations.
Why should communists of our kind treat woke Gen Z as a priority for mass outreach, when the main ones we initially had to fight against were woke Gen Z? Because the institutional foundation that set these activists down their opportunistic path has now been destroyed. The base for Obama-Biden era radical liberalism can no longer exist, not in the form that it did prior to when October 7 caused institutional activist funding to be cut off.
Mamdani and his politics will not restore the old status of petty-bourgeois professionals, partly because these politics are designed to exclusively win office within the big cities and also because the other ruling-class factions are too powerful. The vanishing of opportunities for these aspiring professionals is not a temporary fluke, it’s a “canon event” in the story of how the U.S. empire re-creates Rome’s decline.
Many among the cast-out aspiring professional class will react towards their terminal disenfranchisement by embracing radical liberalism. But this doesn’t mean we should view them as enemies for doing so, not without them first being tested on whether they’ll outgrow such politics. When I say radlib politics can’t exist as they used to, I mean that any attempts by the remaining institutional woke agents to reassert their control will be inevitably run up against opposition from within the ranks of their own organizing spheres, which are increasingly made up of people who’ve been set on a new path.
Petty-bourgeois morality policing cannot win out when the activist base is growing ever-more proletarianized, and will respond towards their political experiences by gaining ever-greater dialectical awareness. For an example of this: even though the logic of conventional leftism prioritizes protecting Jewish feelings, and guarding against non-PC language when describing what Zionism does, the realities of ongoing institutional Jewish support for Palestine’s holocaust are forcing a rupture within the left.
For activists who don’t have hope of entering the professional sphere, and don’t need to worry if their language offends anybody, there is zero incentive to fool themselves into accepting the moralistic hypocrisy of these crypto-Zionist left gatekeepers. Anybody who wants to keep enforcing the PC framework within the anti-Zionist movement will fail to get the applause they’re looking for among the activist base; they’ll open themselves up to great scrutiny from those with an anti-colonial consciousness, and they won’t be able to simply dismiss this scrutiny as right-wing “Nazbolism” or any other wokeist caricature.
What happens when the woke starts negating the woke, and the moralistic kingdom that the HR professionals have built collapses under its growing contradictions? You get the conditions for a new era in the class struggle, where the future revolutionary vanguard is able to gain allies among the same woke crowd which would have scorned it during past times. The developments of these last few years have taken away the ability to gatekeep the class struggle. The struggle can no longer be gatekept, because the structure which made up the compatible left has been demolished. What’s arising in its absence is a new revolutionary infrastructure, capable of bringing in more participants than ever.
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