At this stage, revolutionaries and reformists are fighting over who gets to define what working-class populist patriotism means. Until the recent past, this conflict over the ownership of socialist patriotism wasn’t even present, because only Marxist-Leninists of the patriotic kind were associating with that style of politics. All other political currents that call themselves socialist, including the ones to the right of the patriotic MLs, were scorning patriotism in favor of identity politics. This would only last for as long as wokeness remained useful to the liberal wing of our ruling class, though. After October 7, the Democrats came to agree with the Trump wing that all individuals with left-wing views need to be purged from our institutions.
The goal of this purge is to set us up for the criminalization of all dissent against the imperial state’s designs; which means that when social democrats rhetorically draw upon the nation’s history, this represents a dark use of such patriotic sentiments, designed to assist the bourgeoisie’s fighting wing.
The reformists misapply socialist patriotism
Dimitrov warned that unless Marxists take ownership over their nation’s history and patriotic pride, the fascists will. We started ahead of the liberal fascists in this contest, so now they’re emulating the “patriotic socialist” or “MAGA communist” style; AOC’s recent statement that the American revolutionaries fought against the “billionaires of their time” showed this pivot, and we’ll no doubt continue to see such rhetoric from the social democrats. This brand of politics isn’t something that’s favored by the bulk of the PMC intelligentsia, who were the ones which created the idpol “critical theories” that encourage national nihilism. But within the left-wing intellectual sphere, there are certain intellectuals who promote patriotic Marxism, and who attempt to reconcile this with their reformist prejudices.
So far, the most visible example of this subset exists within the individuals behind Geese: A Review of American Communism. The magazine’s contributors are Democrats for all intents and purposes, so of course their idea of communism is to support the party’s “progressive” wing. But the extent to which they draw from the Marxist texts to support their position makes them distinct from the DSA leadership, which isn’t serious about studying Marxism and therefore has been left blindsided about major trends of the present moment.
The DSA’s role is to be passively led around by the Democrats; Geese entered into this era already intent on promoting the reformist version of MAGA communism that the Democrats have adopted. The way that the Geese members came into their present role was by breaking from the pro-Democrat CPUSA, and their reason for splitting was that they believed CPUSA is too far to the left. This solidified their orientation as being reformist, but also based within a rejection of CPUSA’s identity politics and anti-patriotic posturing.
I’m sure Geese would deny being reformist, and they’ve presented plans of action that can make their position appear revolutionary to the untrained observer. In a commentary that feels consistent with their camp’s practice of echoing MAGA communism, they advocate for a “people’s January 6th,” where communists rally the masses to stop the Trump wing from carrying out a coup in the next election. This will supposedly let us establish a workers government by enabling the “progressive” Democrat to seize control of the state. When you look at the Marxist definition of reformism, though, it becomes apparent how this plan only diverts from revolution. So says the resource MarxistLeninists.org:
Stalin summarizes the difference between Marxism Leninism and reformism as follows;
"" To a reformist, reforms are everything, while revolutionary work is something incidental, something just to talk about, mere eyewash. That is why, with reformist tactics under the conditions of bourgeois rule, reforms are inevitably transformed into an instrument for strengthening that rule, an instrument for disintegrating the revolution. ……. To a revolutionary, on the contrary, the main thing is revolutionary work and not reforms; to him reforms are a byproduct of the revolution. That is why, with revolutionary tactics under the conditions of bourgeois rule, reforms are naturally transformed into an instrument for disintegrating that rule, into an instrument for strengthening the revolution, into a strong point for the further development of the revolutionary movement. ""
Mixing the “reform” and the struggle for “reforms” with “reformism” and “reformist” means moving away from the ABCs of Marxism and breaking its wings. Especially in times when there is no revolutionary situation, in Lenin's words, " A period of reform. The absence of a revolutionary situation. This is the essence of the work."
This reality, in which reforms are not synonymous with “reformism” and can be used to bring revolution closer, is something that’s been misinterpreted by those pushing reformism from a “Marxist” standpoint. According to their reasoning, it’s not reformism to side with one wing of our class enemies, because supposedly the reforms this wing implements will advance the revolutionary process. It comes from denial of the principle that as long as you subordinate yourself to capital, any reforms you fight for will strengthen bourgeois rule. Which comes from the denial that siding with one wing of capital means subordinating yourself to it.
The “progressives” serve the role of demagogues for finance capital
Geese, and those who share its view, are so confident that they’re operating from an independent position while they assist the Democratic Party. This self-perception comes through in the Geese article that calls for a January 2029 mobilization behind the Democrat candidate:
If the state is much more captured by the Right than it was on January 6th, the Left can no longer play defense and expect the structure to hold. For a decade, the broader Democratic coalition has mobilized under the banner of protecting the institutions. By 2029, there will be nothing left to protect. The institutions are the very weapons the enemy will use to execute the steal.
The liberal establishment will predictably hold vigils outside the Supreme Court, begging a captured judiciary for a legal remedy. They will fail. The Left must reorient its psychological posture entirely. We must become an offensive insurgency. We are besieging a captured state to physically evict the regime.
To execute this siege, the movement requires an unassailable popular mandate. A neoliberal campaign is structurally incapable of providing this. The centrists, if they are the ones left to respond to the coup, will lack the vision to inspire the masses to throw themselves into the struggle. They possess zero willingness to marshal popular forces to displace the regime. Not only this, they have demonstrated an incapability of even marshaling sufficient voters to defeat Republicans in the first place. It may seem as if a centrist or even right-wing Democrat will be uncontroversial enough to avoid triggering the coup. This is delusion. Whether it is Gavin Newsom or AOC, they will not allow the election results to go a different way. Let’s not forget that to these forces someone as conservative as Joe Biden was perceived as an existential threat.
If the Trump wing rigs the next election, will communists be obligated to help the Soros wing, like communists needed to support Roosevelt against Wall Street’s plot to coup him? This is how the Democrat-aligned current within American Marxism views their relationship to the Democratic Party—not just the socdem wing, but the party as a whole. They’re operating from the notion that U.S. capital’s Thiel faction is the only source of fascism, and therefore we must assist the Open Society faction in its efforts to regain power.
This notion is so wrong because in the 21st century, American social democracy does not have the kind of antagonistic relationship to finance capital that it had in Roosevelt’s time. And this is because during the class war escalations of the last generation, the U.S. communist movement has had no independent or substantial presence. It’s been a niche appendage to the Democratic Party, which is why the Democrats were in position to contain American socialism when it reappeared.
The social democratic movement of today did not gain prominence within the Democratic Party due to bottom-up pressures from the working class movement, which were what caused FDR to become as left-wing as he did. In the post-2008 era there hasn’t been a powerful working class movement, not in the organized sense; instead there’s been a growing spontaneous anger from the working masses, anger that our ruling class has needed to respond to but hasn’t yet given the workers real leverage. The outcome is that the socdem movement we’re dealing with today cannot be allied with against finance capital, because it’s one of finance capital’s most insidious and inseparable tools.
Amid the Obama era’s rising popular discontent, capital’s liberal wing decided to adopt Sanders and the other socdem politicians as controlled opposition. Sanders made a non-aggression pact with the DNC, ensuring he wouldn’t start a third party and his movement could be captured. The technocratic liberal billionaires took this compatible “progressive” current, and infused it with ideas that assist monopoly finance: liberal Zionism, anti-Russia hawkery, “environmentalism” that’s about furthering land privatization in the Global South. The biggest real aims of the “progressives” are ones that come from these billionaires, not from the demands of the workers.
No, we are not obligated to side with the Soros wing, any more than we should side with the liberal Zionists over Netanyahu. We need to take advantage of the growing conflicts between our enemies, and provide the masses with an alternative to the duopoly. As both sides in this duopoly destroy America to try to win their inter-capitalist fight, it will become more apparent to the people that neither side deserves their allegiance. The main problem the communist movement now faces is that when somebody delves into theory, if the theory gets misapplied this can actually make them more out of touch with the people’s interests. The Soros wing is going to cultivate a current inside Marxism that backs liberal finance capital, and that gets its ideological basis for this off of a crude economistic populism.
The pro-Democrat Marxist patriots are a problem in a way that the woke leftists weren’t, because their ideas are capable of gaining broad support among the class conscious workers. The answer to this problem is to separate Marxism from Soros “progressive” politics, which will require a bit of strategic correction from the patriotic MLs; many of us are still acting like the woke leftists are the main problem within the communist movement, when our most relevant foes of today have pivoted away from idpol. In response to this development, a split is happening within the PMC; a division where one part of the intelligentsia clings to the idpol theories, while the other part has thrown itself behind a reformist version of socialist patriotism. It’s the latter element that could soon deceive many workers, and we must reorient ourselves around combating this element’s ideas specifically.
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