To take the barbarian path means to throw off the decadent, metropole-centered mentality, and reorient towards the hinterland. We must heed the analysis from Engels that only barbarians—which here mean those dispossessed by or disconnected from the imperial hubs—can revive a civilization in decline. It’s this idea that has great illustrative and rallying power for the post-Covid generation; for those who’ve never had the opportunities from earlier times, and are being pushed to either work in economic traps or retreat into isolation.
These victims of globalization are looking for a path forward, and this path runs through the rectification of inequality between urban and rural. This aspect of the class war can’t be overlooked; an integral part of why we’re seeing atomization, decline in family formations, and the acceleration of class warfare against the workers is because the metropole can keep gobbling up the youthful energy from the rural. The small towns keep withering, while the cities get filled with working-age people who increasingly exist in a landscape that only lets them work. And the socialist movement, blind to its true duties, has taken the path of least resistance in response to this trend; the bulk of today’s left orgs dismiss the rural masses as hopelessly backwards, while only focusing on the big cities and sometimes the college towns. The working-class movement will only move forward when this neglect of the rural gets fixed.
One iteration of this countryside reorientation idea has been “MAGA communism”; which in part is about winning disillusioned Trump voters to socialism, but really is about a much deeper civilizational reckoning. By consciously becoming the spiritual successors to MAGA, communists can fulfill the original MAGA’s promise of societal rejuvenation. We should still operate according to this idea, but the old label is no longer necessary, as the Trump base has massively rejected his brand. What American communism needs next is a redoubled effort to build dual power, especially across the rural “MAGA” areas we’re still neglecting; and a way of establishing continuity with past revolutionary projects which parallel this.
This barbarian language that I seek to help associate with communism is based in a kind of nostalgia far older than what MAGA produces. This is terminology that invokes the times and achievements of Genghis Khan. Our movement has already utilized barbarian nostalgia within our art and rhetoric, but here I propose we should lean into it more, and also do the practical work that proves we actually offer a path to rebuild society in the vein of past barbarians. For the practical aspect, which is the most important one, what we must recognize is that any sustainable workers party will need strong hinterland foundations.
Its ranks will have to build local collectives, institutions that provide the working masses with alternative subsistence sources, employment, and means for waging their labor struggles. And we’re in the process of building these institutions, but at this stage they mainly exist within the big cities. Though ideologically we know that “MAGA” country must be accounted for, and the movement can’t be limited to the metropole, an old discrepancy remains.
The workers movement in the United States, and in many other places, has yet to undergo the reorientation towards the rural which China’s communists did. When the CPC was driven out of the cities, and forced to organize within the countryside that it had neglected, this represented a correction that every communist party on the planet needs to undergo at some point. And it can’t be a one-time thing; decades after the workers won in China, the urban-rural divide is creating fresh problems, one example being the concentration of youths within the cities. When the forces of barbarian rejuvenation triumph, there’s still a danger of these civilizational imbalances reappearing, because the urban-rural contradiction is deeper and far older than capitalism.
The anti-China actors of course seek to use this to make people blackpilled about socialism, but all it means is that as socialists we must learn how to strengthen the barbarian tendencies within our movement. To make the gains of the hinterland revolts keep building on each other, rather than becoming overwhelmed by the gravitational power of the metropole. We’re seeing this problem appear within both the infant-stage modern American communist movement, and the world’s largest workers state; but it can be combated.
There are clear reasons why the imbalance towards the metropole keeps appearing, and they come from the inherently class-based nature of civilization. As Engels explained, this integral role that class holds within modern society gives the barbarians an inherent vulnerability:
Since civilization is founded on the exploitation of one class by another class, its whole development proceeds in a constant contradiction. Every step forward in production is at the same time a step backwards in the position of the oppressed class, that is, of the great majority. Whatever benefits some necessarily injures the others; every fresh emancipation of one class is necessarily a new oppression for another class. The most striking proof of this is provided by the introduction of machinery, the effects of which are now known to the whole world. And if among the barbarians, as we saw, the distinction between rights and duties could hardly be drawn, civilization makes the difference and antagonism between them clear even to the dullest intelligence by giving one class practically all the rights and the other class practically all the duties.
But that should not be: what is good for the ruling class must also be good for the whole of society, with which the ruling-class identifies itself. Therefore the more civilization advances, the more it is compelled to cover the evils it necessarily creates with the cloak of love and charity, to palliate them or to deny them – in short, to introduce a conventional hypocrisy which was unknown to earlier forms of society and even to the first stages of civilization, and which culminates in the pronouncement: the exploitation of the oppressed class is carried on by the exploiting class simply and solely in the interests of the exploited class itself; and if the exploited class cannot see it and even grows rebellious, that is the basest ingratitude to its benefactors, the exploiters.
And yet history’s exploiters can’t escape the cycle of class struggle. When this hypocrisy is exposed, the barbarians are always there to provide the authentic alternative. Like the German barbarians took over after Rome’s self-destruction, so will the next practitioners of barbarian politics after America’s dark age. How long this dark age lasts depends on how fast we can build dual power for the workers, and do so in a way that fully accounts for the rural. This idea of proletarian barbarism isn’t just about branding; it’s foremost about changing our mode of work so that we’re not replicating the institutional left’s urbanite insularity, and instead expanding the class struggle to all areas of the nation. By making this improvement, we’ll multiply the progress we’ve already made, and show globalization’s victims why communism is their route towards victory.
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