The “democratic socialists” haven’t come out in support of Bolivia and Kenya’s workers because reformists always flounder during revolutionary moments. They present themselves as the allies of the working class, yet whenever the working class asserts itself, they don’t know what to do. This is especially true when a popular revolt appears in the Global South; the left’s gatekeepers cannot coherently respond to threats towards imperial control. And those of us within the imperial extractive countries can take advantage of this unavoidable weakness the social chauvinists have. We must respond to Bolivia and Kenya by exposing how our “socialist” bourgeois leaders lack solidarity, and lack the initiative to lead the workers in our class war.
In waging this campaign against the opportunists, we also have an opportunity to bring the U.S. communist movement towards a position that can let it rebuild working-class power, and reconnect with the masses who it’s long been cut off from. The “Marxists” in the imperial sphere have long isolated themselves from their own people, while using the excuse that these people are supposedly too invested in imperialism to embrace revolutionary politics. The most explicit version of this attitude is the “third worldist” position, which minimizes or even fully dismisses the role of the workers outside the Global South. This kind of thinking is dangerous to the working-class movement, and it gives the bourgeois reformists greater opportunities to deceive the masses. To make the communist movement go on the advance, and expand its relationship with the people, we must clarify the role that the imperial sphere’s workers have within global class battles like the present one.
In French Intellectuals and Democrats and the Algerian Revolution, Frantz Fanon spoke of the workers in the “Global North” as having great potential to ally with the struggles of colonized peoples: “One of the first duties of intellectuals and democratic elements in colonialist countries is unreservedly to support the national aspirations of colonized peoples. This attitude is based on very important theoretical considerations: … the community of interests between the working classes of the conquering country and the combined population of the conquered and dominated country.”
Fanon talked about how the pro-imperialist left rationalizes forsaking solidarity with Global South liberation struggles. He described how the French imperialists portrayed the freedom fighters as bloodthirsty terrorists, and how these left-wing imperial gatekeepers refused to support any part of the Algerian struggle associated with the alleged “terrorist” elements. He described how others within the imperial left simply hid behind silence, remaining neutral on the most relevant battle in the global class war. He also articulated an appeal by Algeria’s liberation fighters towards the imperial working-class leaders, still urging them to take on an anti-imperialist leadership role despite all their failures:
The FLN addresses itself to the French Left, to French democrats, and asks them to encourage every strike undertaken by the French people against the rise in the cost of living, new taxes, the restriction of democratic freedoms in France, all of which are direct consequences of the Algerian war. The FLN asks the French Left to strengthen its action in spreading information and to continue to explain to the French masses the characteristics of the struggle of the Algerian people, the principles that animate it, and the objectives of the Revolution. The FLN salutes the French who have had the courage to refuse to take up arms against the Algerian people and who are now in prison. These examples must be multiplied…
Such appeals are ways of testing those who claim to be the deserved leaders of the working class, and seeing whether they’ll do the right thing at the critical junctures. If they don’t do the right thing, then the only recourse is to expose them and out-organize them. But it is important to note how Fanon and the Algerian fighters made sure to first give the French left a chance, and make it be known that they’d extended this request for friendship. These kinds of requests will be rejected by the “socialist” leaders who are paid to assist capital, yet they’ll be received by all the workers who are already developing an anti-imperialist consciousness. It’s these proto-revolutionary masses who make up the real target audience of calls for solidarity.
Without sufficient pressure, the reformists will always remain inert on matters related to imperialism, foremost preferring that safest path of silent neutrality. It’s likely that we won’t hear anything about Bolivia or Kenya from the “democratic socialists” unless the Trump White House outright launches military interventions against these countries, and the reformists will have an opportunity to appear antiwar. This is how the opportunists use hollow phrases to keep up a faux-dissident aesthetic; we’ve seen it with Palestine, Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, and every other country where imperial violence has become impossible to ignore. It’s in moments like the present one, though, where the globe’s masses are in revolt yet the “democratic socialists” are inert, when we can draw attention to how ineffectual this “dissent” truly is.
Amid the latest U.S. escalations against Cuba, the discourse has seen much new frustration around the left’s utter failure at stopping Washington’s aggressions. These conversations are by nature internal to the left-wing sphere, but we have an opening to bring our ideological struggle into the broader masses. The message we need to put forth to this wider audience is that change can never happen inside the duopoly, and that our only path forward is to build an independent popular front against the banker regime.
We must bring the revolutionary momentum that’s spreading across the Global South into the heart of the empire, leading the USA’s masses like Kenya and Bolivia’s revolutionaries are leading their masses. It’s no surprise that when our era’s great revolt against banker rule began, it would start in the Global South. The correct takeaway from this is not that the imperial center’s masses aren’t compatible with revolutionary politics, but that we haven’t yet done the work to give them the means for joining the revolt. When we put in this work, the balance of power will undergo a fundamental change.
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