To capture the masses who will be left adrift by DSA’s inevitable collapse, American communists must account for the question of cultural revolution. Within our community, it’s already accepted as a given that the reformists will fail, and that this failure will create many disillusioned individuals who were promised a viable working-class politics. There’s talk among our circles about the need to figure out the long game when it comes to winning over the DSA base, and how if we act complacent about this then we’ll simply fade into irrelevancy. These conversations echo the conclusions that Mao came to about what it takes to sustain a revolutionary project; how in order to ensure a revolution’s success, you have to constantly be confronting the problems of the moment.
We must apply Mao’s logic by starting upon America’s own project for cultural revolution today. And we can start on this effort today, because certain developments have recently come about that will let us combat counterrevolutionary ideas in ways we couldn’t before.
Due to the U.S. empire’s internally disruptive policies under Trump 2.0, we’re seeing a proletarianization of the left, where the aspiring professionals are being cut off from the ruling institutions and becoming de-classed. There is still a petty-bourgeois managerial element, and it’s gained enough strength to be able to elect the Zohran Democrats; but these gains are the setup for a credibility collapse that will immediately follow, and that we’re already seeing in certain circles. Among the bulk of the DSA’s base, the “democratic socialist” promises of secure professional career paths will fail to materialize. There will still be a gentrifier class, but this class will have left behind the rest of the progressive urbanites, whose only options will be to become lumpen or join the trades.
This distinction between the upper and lower strata is important to make; it reminds us that the DSA’s supporters should not simply be treated as enemies, and reveals an emerging class conflict that will be key to the defeat of bourgeois culture in America. We need to show these newly proletarianized Americans that the gentrifiers are their class enemy, and that American communists will join them in a project to expropriate this enemy’s wealth.
We can appeal to these victims of capitalism on the same basis as when Mao appealed towards his party’s youths, and called for them to intervene against the anti-worker forces in Chinese society:
The old Social Democrats in the past decades, and modern revisionists in the past dozen years or so. . . have formed a group of anti-communist, anti-people, and counter-revolutionary elements against whom we are waging a life-and-death struggle. There is no equality between us and them. Therefore the fight against them is a fight for our preservation and their extinction. The relationship between us and them can never be one of equality; it is a relationship of one class oppressing another — i.e. proletarian dictatorship over the bourgeoisie. The day when the people are happy will be the day when the counter-revolutionaries begin their misery.
What does this struggle look like in America? At this stage, it looks like finishing the mission of our nation’s communist forebears to seize control over worker organizing. It looks like combating the anti-worker labor bosses and the ineffectual, petty-bourgeois craft unionist ideology, building on what William Z. Foster described as the communist party’s task one hundred years ago:
The labor movement is confronted with the twin dangers of company unions and devitalized trade unions—the bureaucracy would make Siamese twins of these dangers by building a living bridge between them. But the left wing will not and cannot be discouraged by the difficult situation. The masses in the unions and outside are suffering from bitter exploitation. They are discontented. Our experiences among the masses demonstrates that clearly. Labor banking, the B. & O. plan, and the general rapprochement of the bureaucracy to company unionism will not allay this discontent, but increase it. Our program of revolutionary class struggle is the correct one. If we know how to apply it effectively the masses must and will continue to rally in greater numbers around our red banner.
The “democratic socialists” are today’s most aggressive promoters of such reactionary types of unionism. The socdems are the movement that was behind the push for narrow craft unionism which we saw arise in the early 2020s, where one section of the ruling class backed barista workplace organizing to detract from the trade unions.
The passion with which these “progressives” support this kind of guild unionism comes from how they’re in a real conflict with the other sections of the bourgeoisie, the sections that actually hold monopoly power; the guild model is being increasingly threatened by big tech’s AI scramble, so these petty-bourgeois professionals are fighting for the preservation of their career model. The question is how many of them will continue to go in a fascistic direction, and how many will defect to the side of proletarian politics.
This is where the transformative philosophy of cultural revolution comes in. Mao’s calculus about how to treat the parasitic class elements was ruthless, but he wasn’t a Pol Pot who wanted unlimited violent negation; he made it clear that the cultural revolution’s participants needed to exclusively employ nonviolent methods wherever they weren’t needing to defend from violence. Pol Pot-style ultraviolence is something that will come from the lumpenized elements inside the declassed petty-bourgeoisie, with certain gentrifier Democrats also supporting such adventurist terrorism. The impulse to resolve a contradiction through crude, brute force comes from petty-bourgeois thinking. Proletarian politics is where we can find how to actually change a society.
America’s cultural revolution will succeed through exposing the anti-proletarian charlatans before the far right can “expose” them. The far right seeks to scam the workers in a way that parallels how the socdems have scammed them; like the socdems, fascists don’t offer genuine relief for the rural workers, and they promote a unionism that further disempowers the proletariat. Hitlerism is about declaring war on humanity, and this makes it appeal to the same lumpen forces that represent the base for ultra-left adventurism.
These infantile reactions towards capital’s contradictions come from an absence of proletarian culture; and in the United States such ideologies are especially prone to spring up, because here the capitalists have been highly successful in dismantling the historic culture of the workers. The masses will be receptive to these ideologies for as long as they lack working-class organizations, and for as long as they’re only exposed towards bourgeois politics. We do have a clear path to building such working-class institutional power, and this path runs through the project to build up our algorithmic presence; the masses of today are online, and they’re just waiting to find us. We can win the narrative war, and thereby the class war, if we mobilize our ranks to an extent that we haven’t done in the past.
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