The choice of the post-Covid generation is over whether to submit to the individualism that’s destroying our world, or become lions who fight alongside the other lions. When I speak of these heroic historical actors who reject individualist behavior, I’m not just talking about the ones who directly join in the political struggle, though this is something we should encourage people to do. I also mean the large parts of the masses who won’t take part in the revolution per se, but who will still play a critical supporting role within this change by going against the Epsteinite regime’s anti-human ideology. By participating in the cultural revolution in which the people go against the atomization our rulers are pushing, and act in solidarity with our neighbors amid the next phases of our crisis. Most will choose this path, because the only alternative is to struggle and suffer alone.
This decision is something we’ll all be faced with the next time the American working class erupts in revolt, like the peoples of France and Spain have done. Spain is especially important for Americans to take example from, because the infrastructure of the USA is very effectively designed against riots; the social unrest we’ve seen in recent times has come to be largely captured by counterinsurgency operations, and whatever riots that come next will be subject to this same principle. Therefore when the workers next rise up, the nature of their actions will have to take an alternative form. And we must make sure the workers are organized enough that they can pursue the option of a coordinated economic shut-down.
This is why it’s so crucial to shock the children of 9/11 out of apathy. Up until the mobilizations against the Gaza genocide, the prevailing mentality among the post-Covid generation was one of surrender; surrender towards the system and the class that killed their future. Far too many were embracing a shut-in lifestyle; and far too many still are, because the counteroffensive from the Zionist right has successfully created a chilling effect among student-aged people.
In the broader population, there’s emerged a widespread alienation from political discourse, largely brought on by the sheer overloading of social media information about how chaotic and unjust today’s world is. The other factor is the increase in the cost of living, which has forced people to work ever-harder and drained their ability to give “the discourse” any attention. The political conversations the masses still want to have are ones that speak towards their crushing experience (think of the TikTok compilations of working people ranting about how insane everyday life has gotten). And when politics again becomes central to the masses, it will have to take a genuinely revolutionary form. Otherwise they won’t care to listen to anything about it.
It’s because of this that Khamenei’s response towards the Democrat midterm victory was to say it accelerated America’s collapse; the backlash against Trump 2.0 was not an indicator of restored Obama-era stability, as the liberal wing would claim, but a demonstration of sheer alienation from the regime. Because we all know that Americans don’t see the Democratic Party as representing real hope.
Amid this irreparable disappearance of mass faith in our institutions, the ruling class has reacted by accelerating its assaults upon the global working class, a policy that the Democrats will continue by pursuing new and larger wars. The immediate outcomes we’ll face are either a takeover by the liberal “Millennial Reich,” a coup by the tech oligarchs where they install a fake president, or a civil war between these factions. It’s actually with the latter scenario that the popular forces will be in the best position, because if our enemies are fighting each other, they’ll lack the capacity for a full-scale fascist purge of dissent.
The appeal that both wings of our enemies will bring to the post-Covid generation is: if you remain neutral in the class war, you’ll be in the best place to advance your personal interests. They’re already successfully using this reward/threat psychological control method, with the apolitical students staying away from activism mainly due to fear that they’ll be shut out of potential careers.
Our rational counter to this is that these careers are shrinking in number anyway, so you most likely have nothing to lose in this arena by joining the class war. And we should use this argument, but we must remember our task isn’t just to appeal to those who’ve been de-classed. A working-class movement needs the workers themselves, as well as the petty-bourgeois individuals with potential to come to our side. We also can’t forget that the enemy’s individualist narratives can compel not just those who are relatively successful, but also those who’ve been cast adrift by the anarchy of the market.
The whole appeal of ultra-left adventurism is that you might as well sacrifice yourself because following the law offers nothing for you; which is similar to our argument, except it abdicates someone of all obligation to be a responsible revolutionary. We actively urge people to follow the law in their political practice, because the conditions objectively call for our work to be above-ground and legal; these ultra-lefts call to ignore the conditions in favor of egoic satisfaction. This isn’t an attitude that comes from proletarian politics, it’s simply a crude reaction to the presence of contradictions under class society. A reaction that Marx explained as being facile and infantile in his refutation of Max Stirner, who substitutes personal development for the class struggle:
The transformation of the individual relationship into its opposite, a purely material relationship, the distinction of individuality and fortuity by the individuals themselves, is a historical process, as we have already shown,’ and at different stages of development it assumes different, ever sharper and more universal forms. In the present epoch, the domination of material relations over individuals, and the suppression of individuality by fortuitous circumstances, has assumed its sharpest and most universal form, thereby setting existing individuals a very definite task. It has set them the task of replacing the domination of circumstances and of chance over individuals by the domination of individuals over chance and circumstances. It has not, as Sancho [Stirner] imagines, put forward the demand that “I should develop myself”, which up to now every individual has done without Sancho’s good advice; it has on the contrary called for liberation from a quite definite mode of development. This task, dictated by present-day relations, coincides with the task of organising society in a communist way.
This is the nature of the fallacy that tendencies like Stirner’s “Egoists” take advantage of: under class society, the individual sees that their personhood is stifled by the ruling institutions, so they may get the impulse to cling to individualism as if this will free them. Convincing someone that the world is against them is one tactic that reactionary demagogues use to bring people to this fallacy, and in today’s climate it’s more pervasive than ever. An example is gender war politics, which the algorithms are deliberately pushing onto the masses so that they’ll scapegoat either men or women for their problems.
Such narcissistic lashing-out is how our rulers want us to respond to the breakdown of the old order. They seek to make us even more alienated from each other, and stay in the same self-centered mindset that took hold of the bulk of the boomers. In American history, this mindset is actually an aberration; it had to be socially engineered so that the past collective revolutionary sentiments were suppressed. America will only be able to reconstitute itself, and overcome its new dark age, by rediscovering this strength within our national culture.
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