To understand Zohran’s role, we need to look at systemic forces that exist on an even higher level than his backers in the Soros family. We need to look at the imperial power structure as a whole, which is much bigger than even the most influential billionaires. It’s a system that’s so large, no one faction within it would ever be able to become truly supreme, because there will always be room for competitors. This is one of the core contradictions within monopoly finance capital. And because this contradiction can’t be escaped, the Soros wing has reacted towards imperialism’s latest crises by lifting up the “democratic socialist” tendency; which is a prelude to a clash within the ruling class that could tear apart the entire monopoly financial order.
No one can control a system that’s as big as the world
Stalin talked about the implications of this principle, in which the different monopolist wings will inevitably come to fight amongst each other. With the first contradiction of imperialism being between labor and capital, and the third being between colonial peoples and the colonizers, he identified how
The second contradiction is the contradiction among the various financial groups and imperialist Powers in their struggle for sources of raw materials, for foreign territory. Imperialism is the export of capital to the sources of raw materials, the frenzied struggle for monopolist possession of these sources, the struggle for a re-division of the already divided world, a struggle waged with particular fury by new financial groups and Powers seeking a "place in the sun" against the old groups and Powers, which cling tenaciously to what they have seized. This frenzied struggle among the various groups of capitalists is notable in that it includes as an inevitable element imperialist wars, wars for the annexation of foreign territory. This circumstance, in its turn, is notable in that it leads to the mutual weakening of the imperialists, to the weakening of the position of capitalism in general, to the acceleration of the advent of the proletarian revolution and to the practical necessity of this revolution.
These inter-monopolist conflicts are still happening, just in a different form than when imperialism still came from multiple countries. In the postwar age, the United States is the only imperialist country, because only the USA has the decisive financial power that’s required for a country to be imperialist during capitalism’s monopoly era. And now that the hegemon has entered into a long-term war against China, the factions inside the imperial ruling class are competing over which one gets to define how this war is waged. Over whether the goal of this entire project should be to benefit global capital, or domestic capital. At least this is the primary point of division; inside these two camps, additional factions keep appearing. And Zohran’s rise reveals that Soros’ Open Society doesn’t fully align with the old guard Democratic establishment.
Their divergence came from how after October 7, the Democrat leadership decided that it would enter an alliance with the Zionist right. The official Democratic Party line is to no longer even entertain individuals with views which are truly left-wing; this was shown when as soon as Hasan Piker fulfilled his role of lifting up the social democrats, liberal media started smearing him in the exact same way the Trump wing does. The Open Society camp has a different vision than these liberals, though. It believes that the best way to carry forth the war on China, and against the broader revolutionary forces, is through welfare capitalism and liberal two-statism.
The social base that the Soros wing employed to lift up this politics was the professional petty-bourgeoisie, who were behind both the campaign work and the votes for Zohran. These professionals have their own interests; ones that aren’t fully aligned with the Soros monopolists, but will keep them friendly with these monopolists until a new fissure appears within the system.
A rift born out of horror over bourgeois logic’s failure
To be sure, this fissure is coming; the “democratic socialist” movement is foundationally unable to even gain ground outside the metropolitan centers, and because it functions within the Democratic Party, the DNC is capable of successfully orchestrating a great maneuver against it. The inevitable failures of this movement will push one wing of the DSA to split from the side Open Society favors.
It’s within this divergence between the idealist intellectuals and the ruling-class cynics, between the petty-bourgeois radicals and the demagogues of big capital, where we find the repeat of an old fight. A fight that came out of the bourgeois revolutions, which both produced the modern professional intelligentsia and inevitably placed this strata into conflict with the class that it was supposed to serve.
When capital gained its decisive victory over feudalism, what came after brought about unprecedented social disruptions and institutional violence; which fundamentally contradicted the bourgeois rationalism of the Enlightenment, and forced the bourgeois revolutionary idealists to rebel against this new system as well. As Engels pointed out about what came when the proponents of this “rational” worldview got what they wanted:
The French Revolution had realised this rational society and government. But, the new order of things, rational enough as compared with earlier conditions, turned out to be by no means absolutely rational. The state based upon reason completely collapsed. Rousseau’s Contrat Social had found its realisation in the Reign of Terror, from which the bourgeoisie, who had lost confidence in their own political capacity, had taken refuge first in the corruption of the Directorate, and, finally, under the wing of the Napoleonic despotism. The promised eternal peace was turned into an endless war of conquest. The society based upon reason had fared no better. The antagonism between rich and poor, instead of dissolving into general prosperity, had become intensified by the removal of the guild and other privileges, which had to some extent bridged it over, and by the removal of the charitable institutions of the Church. The development of industry upon a capitalistic basis made poverty and misery of the working masses conditions of existence of society.
With the bourgeois order’s graduation into monopoly finance capitalism, the new imperial system could provide super-profits for a new class of privileged workers. These are the labor aristocrats who make up Zohran’s base: an elevated class who by their nature can only unionize within the realm of guilds, and who are now seeking to defend their livelihood model from the Trump wing’s attempts at dismantling it. We’re also seeing a repeat of the cognitive dissonance that the bourgeois rationalists were confronted with when their new system only threw civilization into greater poverty and conflict; doesn’t this perfectly parallel the discrediting of the “end of history” theory for the post-Soviet era, when the liberals “won” but were then hurled into a chaotic new century?
This theory came from the new bourgeois “rationalism,” in which somebody convinces themselves that they have an objective grasp on reality. This attitude is common among intellectual-minded, petty-bourgeois individuals who believe their opinions all come from an unchallengeable empiricist “logic.” Many in the millennial generation have embraced this mentality as a reaction towards the confusing changes the social media age brought, where the rules they grew up with suddenly no longer applied. Given that Zohran’s voters are overwhelmingly petty-bourgeois or millennial, it’s the definitive operating system within this base, like the Enlightenment rationalism was for the Napoleon-era intelligentsia. And the more that the ideology’s “logic” gets contradicted by the realities of history, the more the ideology’s proponents will be forced to embrace mutations of it.
What’s going to happen is that the base which has been swept up within the Zohran movement will undergo the same disillusionment process that birthed the left tendencies from the 19th century. As the intelligentsia and the craft labor aristocrats continue to be met with the exponential instability of our era, and growing portions of this class become lumpenized, today’s “democratic socialists” will have to reckon with this seemingly illogical upset. Like the original left, this current will go in many different directions.
Parts of the DSA base will be picked up by hardline ultra-leftist orgs, others will become truly lumpenized to the effect that they’ve been rendered adrift nihilists, and others may even go to the far right. In an environment where the old order keeps breaking apart, and none of the mainstream ideologies offer real salvation, the trend is going to be towards ever-larger mass elements becoming untethered.
If we understand that the old “rational” framework no longer works, that we’re navigating a world where no one is in control, then we become capable of bringing these masses into a cohesive proletarian politics. Then we can lead all of the alienated popular elements, whether they’ve come from MAGA or DSA or the apolitical mass, towards victory against their class enemies.
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