Above image is from Haz Al-Din’s 2022 “Rise of MAGA communism” essay, with the color drained to reflect how the masses have grown exhausted since then.
What the Epstein files did to our discourse was make it so that Americans can no longer accept the old culture war framework, not truly. In a society where disillusionment with our institutions has become the rule, not even a topic as divisive as Lindsay Clancy can make the people care about cultural grievance politics like they used to. The Lindsay Clancy discourse is being heavily algorithm-boosted, like every other recent dispute over gender or race. A better indicator of where the masses are at right now is the countless rant videos that working Americans have been making about their lives; which have also gotten major traction, but in a truly organic way.
When these Americans talk about how they’re being suddenly priced out of everything, how you can’t get a new job anymore, or how many new high schools students can’t even spell, this reveals the discourse that today’s masses really want. And to build a working-class movement, we will need to orient ourselves around this new mode of thinking. We’ll have to discard all notions about riding a wave of cultural grievances, and focus wholly on meeting the people’s practical needs. Which is what a workers movement is supposed to be about, but it’s too easy to get pulled into these cultural conflicts; our class enemies have created an entire bot-driven universe that’s designed to pull us in. We have to treat the old mode of discourse as the synthetic illusion that it is, and figure out what it looks like to go into the masses.
This looks like doing social investigations into the problems our communities are facing, and running our findings through the process that brings conceptual knowledge. Mao described this process as testing out one’s preexisting ideas about how to solve the people’s problems:
The leap to conceptual knowledge, i.e., to ideas, occurs when sufficient perceptual knowledge is accumulated. This is one process in cognition. It is the first stage in the whole process of cognition, the stage leading from objective matter to subjective consciousness from existence to ideas. Whether or not one’s consciousness or ideas (including theories, policies, plans or measures) do correctly reflect the laws of the objective external world is not yet proved at this stage, in which it is not yet possible to ascertain whether they are correct or not. Then comes the second stage in the process of cognition, the stage leading from consciousness back to matter, from ideas back to existence, in which the knowledge gained in the first stage is applied in social practice to ascertain whether the theories, policies, plans or measures meet with the anticipated success.
The rise of DSA represents the positing of a theory for how to resolve today’s crises—namely that by voting in Democrats who call themselves “socialists,” we’ll bring prosperity to the working masses. This assertion has an inherent conflict with the reality of what DSA is doing, because its politics aren’t even capable of winning outside the biggest cities and are fundamentally petty-bourgeois. Many of the leftists who’ve been going to DSA meetings see these problems, and are only there because DSA feels like the only socialist organization available; we’ll see many more of these kinds of people with conflicted feelings about DSA as Americans come to broadly embrace socialism, and millions look for a way forward.
For the advocates of Bolshevik politics to bring in these aspiring organizers—or the millions of others who are ready for revolution, but are too overwhelmed for organizing—we’ll need to break out of the bot realm. We should keep building our platforms, but never at the expense of building the revolutionary institutions the masses need.
Our foremost priorities must be going into the labor movement, and building local coalitions around popular goals like dismantling Flock cameras or prosecuting Epsteinite abusers. It’s through undertaking the latter task that we can come to truly understand what “speaking truth to power” should mean. We should use populist or conspiracy rhetoric, like “Epstein class”; except not in the shallow No Kings way, where all you’re doing is protesting without any practical solution. In an era when our ruling class has stopped caring to hide its crimes, and now uses these crimes to shock the people into paralysis, nothing can come from simply talking about what our rulers are doing; this was more productive in the past, but now whatever we say is useless unless it’s accompanied by a concrete program for action.
This program can include demonstrations and electoral politics, but only when this helps create sustainable power for the masses; everything we say and do in politics must be about strengthening independent dual power for the people. When an organization adopts revolutionary rhetoric, but stays dependent on ruling-class politics like DSA does, inevitably it will fail to capture the people and become stagnant. And those with genuinely revolutionary politics can take advantage of this weakness, but only if we transcend the old mode of discourse; only if we put forth a politics that’s focused around the people’s needs, which is what they’re now looking for.
What we need to understand about political discourse right now is that since the Epstein files, this discourse has become something for particular niches of individuals, ones who were already invested in politically focused communities. The average American has checked out of these spaces, and is focused on surviving; yet they are still seeking out political engagement. It just needs to be in a form that hasn’t been co-opted, and comes from a genuine effort by their fellow workers to fight back.
People these days know slop when they see it; there’s a reason why “slop” has become a colloquial word for manipulative and substanceless content. It’s because the people need a name for the universe of pointless distractions that they see the ruling class has put in their faces. Aside from the Slava Ukraine libs and boomer Zionists, audiences are looking for something like what communists have to offer, because the masses as a rule have gotten behind the anti-imperialist position. Carving out an online space of our own is necessary; but if we want the communist and anti-imperialist movement to keep gaining traction, we’ll need to center all we do around rectifying the practical problems faced by the masses. This doesn’t look like the crude economism of the “democratic socialists,” because our idea of materially lifting up the working class is to bring them actual political independence. When we show the people that this is what we’re doing, we’ll become effective in a way that no slop message could ever be.
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