Kim Jong Il denounced libertarianism for a reason: it undermines the class struggle

Kim Jong Il wrote that “introducing individualism into socialism, which is based on collectivism, is tantamount to taking poison.” For this reason, he concluded that “Libertarianism is like an invisible moth gnawing away at the people’s political integrity,” meaning libertarianism is the source of the corruption of socialist ideology which he warned against: “The degeneration of socialism begins with the degeneration of socialist ideology, and the disintegration of the ideological front leads to the disintegration of all fronts of socialism, and in the end to the total collapse of socialism.”

All the statements Kim made about how communists must operate, readable within the compilation book Kim Jong Il’s Aphorisms, are like one big response to the mistakes which led to the demise of the Soviet Union. Whether or not they were all intended to be read in this way, communists can use them as a guide for what to do to avoid repeating that great failure. His warning that “Betrayal and surrender on the road of revolution is death, and hoping for pardon from the enemy is miscalculation,” particularly sounds like a repudiation of the revisionist position that Khrushchev stood for. Khrushchev, using a fabricated list of Stalin’s supposed crimes to support his argument, claimed that socialism can peacefully coexist with capitalism. He appeased the imperialists, opening up the USSR’s ruling party to bourgeois influence and therefore weakening the integrity of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Kim assessed the consequences of this internal attack against workers democracy:

In recent years socialism collapsed in several countries, mainly because they neglected class education and abandoned the class struggle. After assuming state power, Khrushchev weakened the function of the dictatorship of the state as a weapon of the class struggle. As a result, socialism could not be defended in the Soviet Union. Since socialism collapsed there and the Soviet Union itself was broken up, those who schemed against Soviet power in the past and their descendants have become parvenus, and those who fought in defense of Soviet power and their descendants have become beggars and unemployed. Historical lessons show that for a working-class party to neglect class education and abandon class principles amounts to digging its own grave.

This embrace of historical nihilism that Khrushchev introduced, as Xi Jinping has called it, where the theory of Lenin and Stalin were repudiated in favor of some idealistic vision for “coexisting” with socialism’s class enemies, set the global class struggle back by decades. And when Gorbachev, a product of this lack of revolutionary education, took Khrushchev’s ideas to their logical conclusion by dismantling the USSR with the hope of ending U.S.-Russia nuclear tensions, his hope was proven ridiculous. The imperialists resumed their cold war provocations towards Russia as soon as Russia began rejecting U.S. neo-colonial control, and now hostilities between the two countries are more severe than ever. Imperialism and bourgeois reaction will never stop waging war against you, not until they’ve fully taken away your autonomy and bent you to their will. Such is the lesson that the Communist Party of the Russian Federation has been urging Putin to heed on in regards to Ukraine. And that Russia is now thankfully taking seriously by intervening to demilitarize the belligerent U.S. puppet Kiev regime.

Libertarianism and individualism are largely the root cause of history’s failures to properly combat capitalism and imperialism. Khrushchev’s scheme to frame Stalin for atrocities so that he could publicly justify enabling the bourgeoisie was motivated by opportunism, a symptom of individualism’s insidious influence. Bourgeois ideology more broadly is based in liberalism, which places individual freedom—or rather a bourgeois definition of “freedom”—above the interests of the collective. Ideological degeneration reinforces other types of ideological degeneration, and snowballs into catastrophes like the one the Soviet bloc underwent after its working class gains were lost.

The bourgeois definition of freedom claims that it means the right to own property which can be used to exploit workers, and that it means free speech absolutism (with the caveat that voices the bourgeoisie don’t like are often suppressed). The proletarian, anti-colonial definition of freedom uses it to mean national self-determination from imperialist encroachment, and the ability of workers to keep the wealth they create through their own labor. Bourgeois ideology demonizes the dictatorship of the proletariat, because its goal is not to enable the exploitation and reactionary propaganda that the bourgeoisie depend on to continue their mode of production. Its goal is to wage war, by any means necessary, against bourgeois power so that the bourgeoisie as a class can ultimately be made extinct. And so that class as a concept can ultimately be made extinct as well, making the state’s role as a weapon for class struggle no longer necessary and letting the state wither away.

These two definitions of liberty are irreconcilable. If you try to operate using both of them at once, as Khrushchev did, you’ll only harm the class struggle. Mao as much as stated this when he concluded that you can’t have both your Marxism and your liberalism at the same time, and that to be an effective Marxist, you must abandon your liberalism.

The need for this ideological consistency is apparent in the “libertarian socialists” who oppose existing socialist states for supposedly being too “authoritarian.” Libertarianism produces paranoia towards the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat, leading to false perceptions like “a state will never willingly weaken its own grip.” In reality, the DPRK, the most advanced among the socialist states in developing towards communism, has been demonstrating this principle of a socialist state withering away after the bourgeoisie gets vanquished. The DPRK has been delegating increasing shares of power among its governmental officials during the last several decades, facilitating a growth in the participation of the masses within the country’s popular democracy. These are the first stages of the withering away of the state which Marx and Engels anticipated would occur during the progression towards communism. And they show how communism is ultimately less in favor of authority than capitalism is; the state is an instrument for one class to exercise domination over another, meaning the capitalists and their ideological backers want to keep the state forever. Communists don’t want to keep the state forever, we only want to keep it for as long as it’s necessary to wage war against the bourgeoisie.

Opportunists like Trotsky and Khrushchev, who both cooked up lies about Stalin to advance their opportunistic counterrevolutionary ideas, are products of how Ho Chi Minh described the bourgeois mentality can impact those who claim to be communists: “individualism [is] the petty-bourgeois mentality which still lurks in each of us. It is waiting for an opportunity - either failure or

success - to rear its head.” The task of a communist, as both Kim Jong Il and Ho Chi Minh essentially state, is to not waver in one’s vigilance towards threats to the revolution, or in one’s commitment to the class struggle. Therefore, any communist party that’s worth trusting will always work to combat the poisonous ideas from both external bourgeois antagonists, and internal opportunists. 

In an organizing setting, this requires enforcing democratic centralism, and not keeping quiet when you see someone harming the interests of the masses or harming the integrity of the party. In a post-revolutionary setting, this means measures by the state to suppress reactionary or opportunistic ideas, as China and the DPRK carry out through their filters against online U.S. propaganda. The libertarian mindset views these uses of authority as wrong, because libertarianism views any kind of encroachment upon liberties as wrong. But would you view using authority to hold someone accountable for a violent crime as wrong? The counterrevolutionary activities of the imperialists, the bourgeoisie, and the opportunists are crimes against the people. Therefore from a revolutionary perspective, they should be actively combated, and punished if they rise to the level of terrorism. We must reject the liberal mindset which fixates on “freedom,” and instead commit to class struggle.

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U.S. empire losing control over its neo-colonies, drifting closer towards collapse

Mao’s prediction about how over ninety percent of the world will ultimately rise up against imperialism is getting closer to being realized. And in reaction, imperialism’s propaganda echo chamber is putting forth a worldview indicative of a siege mentality. It’s painting a picture of a rising evil, embodied by the pro-Chinese bloc, that the “democracies” are valiantly fighting to protect the world from. 

A fruitless effort to maintain hegemony 

We’re fed narratives of Chinese “debt traps” and Russian “aggression,” when in reality these countries are making practical responses to the conditions which U.S. imperialism has cultivated. Washington has driven the formerly colonized world into ever-deepening impoverishment, prompting China to provide the poor countries with development projects that improve their conditions. Washington has carried out new cold war maneuvers which have made Ukraine into a belligerent fascist menace, prompting Russia to intervene. The multipolar order’s initial task is to clean up the mess that the U.S.-led order made.

Russia, China, and Iran, the primary villains in imperialist propaganda’s narrative, are not imperialist, but semi-peripheral. They have no material incentive to wage aggressive war against Washington, like would be the case if they were core countries waging inter-imperialist warfare. Their growth in influence is due to the ways in which U.S. imperialism has been undermining itself. It’s been doing this by engineering a vast increase in global inequality throughout the last half-century, facilitated by neoliberalism, that’s prompting the peripheral countries to seek independence from imperial control out of practical necessity. 

This effort towards self-determination is for now mainly taking the form of their joining with China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which is helping improve their living standards while diminishing the reach of U.S. capital. But increasingly, it’s also taking the form of internal political changes made by the class struggles within these countries. Despite what socialists from the anti-Chinese strains claim, these two facets of modern anti-imperialism—economic entanglements with China and worker struggles—are not mutually antagonistic, because China is not an imperialist force which seeks to crush the proletarian movements of these countries. They’re mutually reinforcing. By giving these countries an alternative option to U.S. neo-colonial rule, China is by default weakening U.S. capital, which weakens imperialism. And which therefore gives these countries more freedom to carry out the pro-worker policies Washington seeks to prevent them from implementing.

The increasing decrepitude of U.S. imperialism’s hand, helped by the multipolar path China is building, has helped cause many of Washington’s recent destabilization or coup plots to fail. In Venezuela, Bolivia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Thailand, Iran, Syria, Ethiopia, and many other places, Washington has been employing its many different weapons, and failing to carry out its goals. It’s still causing grievous harm through its sanctions, but these sanctions are ultimately ineffectual. They’re an admission of defeat, a spiteful and constantly growing campaign of violence from a declining empire which can’t regain Pax Americana. As are the meddling operations that Washington is carrying out in growing parts of Africa, Asia, and Latin America; their purpose is to try to deprive China of stable states to do BRI deals with, a goal that can’t provide Washington with stable neo-colonies for itself. 

It’s destruction that only serves to shrink the range of global stability, not to grow the range of stable capitalist states which are willing to serve U.S. capital. If Washington were to succeed at driving a peripheral country into collapse, then constructing a new government for it, this government would still be faced with a ravaged economy, and have no choice but to turn to China for help. It's not like nation-building will work; Washington had to learn that the hard way in Iraq and Afghanistan. Washington can’t construct new neo-colonies out of destabilized countries when the masses are militantly opposed to neo-colonial rule. Hence the unexpected catastrophe Washington faced in Iraq, where it became overwhelmed by anti-imperialist insurgents after toppling Hussein. 

Should a state remain in place after a successful destabilization attempt, that state will itself become at risk of falling out of the U.S. sphere of influence, prompting more imperialist efforts to foment chaos. Predictably, Iraq is now drifting closer into Iran’s orbit of influence, and still has a U.S. military presence within its borders essentially against its own will. Washington’s Afghanistan puppet state fell to the Taliban last year, theoretically opening the country up for future BRI projects. And in Ukraine, where Washington has been carrying out a nation-building project since the 2014 coup by backing an ultra-nationalist, brutally racist Kiev regime, the facade of a stable new pro-U.S. “nation” is coming undone. The Kiev regime’s crimes against the Russian speakers in Donbass have provoked a separatist war that will in all likelihood prove successful due to Russia’s military aid for the independent Donbass republics. Kiev will be left with greatly diminished territory, and presiding over a failed state that can only maintain the illusion of power by vastly intensifying repression. The proxy war Kiev was tasked with carrying out won’t even achieve its intended goal of destabilizing Russia. 

A similar dynamic of failed nation-building is playing out in Sri Lanka. The imperialists drove the country into collapse through intensifying neo-colonial exploitation during the pandemic, and during the global economic crisis the Ukraine conflict has caused. Then when the country’s people rose up, the imperialists hijacked the class struggle by backing petty-bourgeois liberal protest leaders, who promoted Washington’s propaganda about the economic crisis being caused by Chinese loans. Though the old, China-friendly government has been overthrown, the new government must contend with the reality of the situation. This being that according to analysts who aren’t cold war ideologues, Sri Lanka can’t survive its ongoing turmoil without China’s assistance. 

And if the new government carries out the additional liberalization measures that the CIA-backed protest leaders have called for, inequality will grow even more, provoking the masses into another uprising. What will the imperialists do then? Or if the new government does the practical thing and reaches out to China? Try to repeat the whole process by overthrowing this government as well? It’s a cycle that never ends.

Imperialists seek to bring back Cold War era’s neo-colonial dictatorships

Such is the kind of futile situation the imperialists face within growing amounts of the countries they seek to keep as neo-colonies. There’s no way for them to overcome the increasingly severe material reality, which is that the people they’ve exploited for so long are getting pushed to the breaking point. As the world draws closer towards another wave of revolutions, it becomes increasingly apparent that these masses within the peripheries won’t accept any arrangement in which neo-colonialism is allowed to continue. 

Washington can try to portray itself as the lesser evil by painting China as “neo-colonialist,” but the people within BRI countries overall reject this propaganda, as they reject the propaganda about Russia’s actions in Ukraine being “imperialist.” Washington has already caused the overwhelming majority of the world to turn against it, at least in terms of popular sentiment. It’s only a matter of time before all the decaying neo-colonial regimes are either forced by their people to stop acting as neo-colonies, or get overthrown by proletarian revolutions.

If this sounds overly optimistic, the imperialists themselves have admitted that they can no longer maintain control over the neo-colonies as long as the masses within these neo-colonies are allowed to wield political power. Phillip Linderman, a retired U.S. diplomat whose work focused on Latin America, has written in reaction to the recent leftist presidential victory within Colombia: “Washington’s ambitious nation-building is a foolhardy strategy when our enemies can gain the keys to the kingdom through the ballot box.” 

Linderman’s thesis is a bitter reiteration of that lesson Washington got taught by the War on Terror, and that it will soon get taught again by Ukraine: nation-building isn’t a viable option when Washington has lost its credibility among the local masses. As he argues, this has been shown in Colombia by the persistence of the FARC guerrilla movement, which has continued to find mass support for its rebel activities despite the extreme counterrevolutionary violence exacted by Washington’s Plan Colombia. Because Colombia has remained enough of a democracy for a progressive-leaning candidate to win the presidency, the anti-imperialist mass sentiment which has fueled the FARC’s resilience has unseated Colombia’s fascist Uribismo faction.

The new president, Gustavo Petro, isn’t a radical but more of a centrist. Yet the imperialists still have good reason to be worried, because his administration could open up the possibility for pro-worker reforms that the masses mandate. Such a scenario is happening in Chile, where the moderate new president Gabriel Boric has been getting successfully pressured by the masses—and by the influential communists within Chile’s government—to abide by a growing series of pro-worker policies. If Lula wins in Brazil this year, the equivalent could happen there as well. It’s not these kinds of moderate-leaning political personalities that represent a threat to neo-colonialism, so much as the work of the actual radicals, who can hope to achieve substantial gains under progressive governments.

Linderman observes this—or rather a ghoulish imperialist distortion of this—and decides that to keep control of the peripheries, Washington must utterly clamp down on the progressive elements within these countries. That the remaining neo-colonies must be turned into the same kinds of vile dictatorships which tortured, murdered, imprisoned, and disappeared hundreds of thousands at Washington’s behest during the Cold War. That’s the only conclusion which can be gleaned from his explicit call to abandon any semblance of democracy within these countries so that the left can be shut out of electoral politics. Should the imperialists do this—and they’re already in the process of carrying it out—they’ll be met with vastly expanded global guerrilla warfare efforts, ones that neo-colonialism won’t be able to survive.

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Colonialism will eat itself. To survive, we must destroy it.

 

Above art’s caption: “U.S. Army—shame on colonialism!”

Capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism are death cults, ones that are inextricably tied together and that work to reinforce each other ideologically and economically. These systems perpetually cause the suffering and death of the groups which are necessary to sacrifice in order to maintain the imperial center’s parasitic extractivism. And they perpetually work to rationalize the existence of this destructive machine. If the reality of this machine’s human and environmental impacts were to be exposed nakedly, in a whole and crystalline picture of its consequences, the masses within the core of imperialism would find themselves unable to continue supporting this machine in good conscience. But because we live under the cultural hegemony that the death cult has created, most within the core haven’t yet come to such a realization about the global order they benefit from.

This cultural hegemony simultaneously lies to those in the core about where their material best interests lie—claiming that continuing imperialist extraction would be better for them than establishing socialism would be—and encourages them not to care about imperialism’s victims. The fact that it’s necessary to argue that giving up imperialism would be in the best interests of Americans shows how twisted our culture’s moral framework is. If a system is based upon exploitation and oppression, that fact answers the question of whether or not this system should be allowed to continue. Whether or not you benefit from imperialism, or to whatever degree you do, you have a moral obligation to work towards imperialism’s defeat. But the ideology of imperialism lets the system’s benefactors believe this obligation doesn’t exist.

The imperialists claim that history is immutably a fight between dominators and the dominated, and that therefore it’s the natural order of things for some people to be subjugated by others. You can see this logic in the “white genocide” and “great replacement” ideas put forth by white racists, which argue that if whites lose their status as the supreme group, they’ll become oppressed by the new supreme groups. Such ideas are ahistorical. One can point to innumerable societies that have not had oppressor-oppressed relationships to each other, or to any other societies. The Indigenous First Nations were able to exist for thousands of years without any of these nations becoming “empires” in the sense that Eurocentric thinking defines empires. The Incan and Aztec “empires” had fundamentally different characteristics from Rome, or from the modern capitalist oppressor countries. The same applies to most of the other indigenous nations that the colonial powers have stolen from. 

The oppressors have to mythologize the peoples they’ve wronged as themselves being equally guilty, in accordance with the myth that “human nature” is innately competitive. Or else the oppressors will be exposed as the criminals that they are, culpable for acts that can’t be defended even by saying “everyone does it.” Because not everyone does it, and those who’ve actively chosen to do it must be held accountable. As Parenti has observed, empires aren’t formed passively. People build and maintain them to advance material interests, interests which should therefore be fought against due to their facilitation of oppression. We have a choice not to contribute to that oppression.

This is where capitalism comes in to reinforce the self-justifications which colonialism and imperialism use. With the transition into capitalism, participating in imperialism became indispensable for a country to thrive. Capitalism caused economies to have a crisis of overproduction, which necessitated that the bourgeoisie expand their capital into new markets so that this crisis could be foisted onto other peoples. As the capitalist Cecil Rhodes said to rationalize his project for colonizing Africa, in order to provide the people of an imperialist country like Britain with good living standards amid the exploitation capitalism imposes upon them, their country must continue and expand its imperialist extraction. The people within the core must be paid off through the wealth stolen from the people within the peripheries. Conversely, the people within the peripheries must be made to be poor to offset the impacts of capitalism’s inevitable crises. 

These were the reasons why Lenin clarified that imperialism is not a policy choice, but something that capitalism does out of self-preservation. As long as capitalism continues, there will be countries which engage in imperialist extraction. Therefore according to the mentality of capitalist realism, which claims there’s no alternative to capitalism, imperialism is not a crime but an unavoidable fact of civilization.

Anti-communism, specifically anti-Leninism, is instrumental for the perpetuation of this narrative. It can’t be recognized that capitalism is merely one stage of historical development, and that capitalism can be replaced by a new system like how it replaced feudalism. It can’t be recognized that workers states have existed for over a century now, starting with the 1917 Russian revolution, or that today’s largest workers state China has carried out historically unparalleled achievements in poverty reduction. Marxism-Leninism’s theory must be demonized, and Marxism-Leninism’s tangible progress towards creating a new system that’s superior to capitalism must be dismissed as well. The possibility of a viable alternative to the death cult can’t be considered.

As capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism expand the amount of human and natural life that they’re willing to sacrifice to keep profits up, creating an environmental crisis which is currently manifesting in an unprecedented global heat wave, the death cult can only respond by retreating further into fantasy. The capitalist, colonial, and imperialist causes behind our situation can’t get allowed to be properly diagnosed. The fact that the imperialist countries are behind the vast majority of greenhouse gas emissions compared to the peripheral countries; the fact that the U.S. military is the world’s largest polluter; the fact that the profit motive incentivized oil executives to keep climate science a secret so that they could avoid scrutiny for accelerating the crisis—these realities are all ignored. Instead China has to be scapegoated for pollution, allowing those within the imperialist countries to not take responsibility for neglecting to fight against their own governments. Naturally this blame-shifting game also extends to constructing myths about China and Russia being “imperialist” themselves, again reflecting the narrative that every side is equally guilty of the crimes of empire.

Such projection is indicative of a civilization that’s in decline due to its own contradictions, that refuses to face the consequences for its having built an entire society off of theft from other societies. If you’re in the imperial center, whatever relative advantages you have due to your social standing—whether it’s ties to a bourgeois family, a rare good-paying job, having been born white—shouldn’t cause any conflict as to whether you have a duty to fight against the machine. And should you choose the revolutionary path, communists won’t even have a problem with you. What communists care about is whether you’re willing to fight against all aspects of the superstructure which facilitates the exploitation of the global proletariat, and which in the process is putting increasing parts of humanity in peril. We all have contradictions as residents of the imperial center. It’s whether we choose to reckon with these contradictions that matters.

Will you be willing to risk your life to help free your Native comrades from the ongoing settler-colonial occupation of their nations? To do the same for the struggle of your Black comrades to be free from their own colonial bondage? To be principled in backing the struggles by those within the peripheries to free themselves from imperial control? To choose class struggle over opportunism, and participate in guerrilla warfare if this is what the conditions demand of you? If not, there will be a greater likelihood that the climate crisis which capital and empire are causing will consume you, along with the rest of the world. But this now-imminent threat of the death cult impacting its core members shouldn’t be the sole reason for participating in revolutionary struggle. The mere fact that the current social order oppresses any number of people in itself mandates that this order be overthrown.

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The imperialists created geopolitics. Now geopolitics has become their undoing.

Analogous to how Lenin said that “the last capitalist we hang shall be the one who sold us the rope,” it’s becoming apparent that the global system of geopolitics which the capitalists set up is the instrument which will be used to defeat them. When the bourgeoisie developed their socioeconomic order into imperialism, and consequently gave geopolitics the power which it now has, they gave imperialism’s enemies the tools to subdue imperialism. And by extension, to render capitalism unable to function.

With the emergence of New Imperialism, wherein export of capital became the primary tool of imperialism, the bourgeoisie reached an unprecedented level of power. But they also became vulnerable to defeat on the grand geopolitical chessboard that this new stage in capital’s evolution would end up creating. When capitalism entered into its phase of the domination by monopoly capital, imperialism—capitalism’s tool for surviving its own crisis of overproduction by expanding into new markets—naturally took on the character of exporting capital to the peripheral countries, rather than raw materials as had previously been the case. When capital became imperialism’s principal export, the core imperialist countries were able to carry out their market expansions not through direct colonial rule, but through neo-colonialism, where the core exports capital to the periphery. Therefore, the core could suddenly access the peripheral markets merely by rendering the governments of the exploited countries subservient to imperialism. The exploited countries could now be “independent” on the surface, while still fulfilling the role within imperialism that a colony has. New Imperialism had led to neo-colonialism.

This new dynamic allowed for imperialism to disguise itself, for the bourgeoisie of the core countries to continue their exploitation of the peripheries while making it appear to the uneducated observer like they weren’t exploiting anyone. The colonies were “independent” now, imperialism was supposedly a thing of the past. If the formerly colonized countries remained poor, that must be their own fault, because with “independence” they had supposedly gained the opportunity to build wealth on their own. But that wasn’t true, because with the way the imperialists had set up this new order, the former colonies weren’t actually independent. Whenever they tried to assert their economic self-determination, to control their own resources and provide their workers with wages above slave levels, the imperialists would step in to subdue them. The same is still the case. So the only way the exploited countries could do what the imperialists claimed they could now do, and build up their economies, was by fighting for their political autonomy. And after they won their autonomy, the only way they could avoid collapsing within a global market system that the imperialists still controlled was by playing the geopolitical game the imperialists had set up.

These were the historical factors which led to our current situation, where geopolitics is an instrumental part of the global class struggle. Whatever contradictions exist within the countries which oppose the U.S. bloc, it’s crucial for today’s communists to defend them from all false narratives the imperialists put forth about these countries, including that the biggest anti-imperialist powers Russia, China, and Iran are “imperialist” themselves. As far as communists within the core imperialist countries and the remaining neo-colonies are concerned, the role these and the other anti-imperialist countries play in the class struggle is one of weakening the capital of the U.S. bloc. And if the capital of this bloc is sufficiently weakened, it will lose its capacity to exploit the peripheral countries (a process already underway), and its ability to fortify the capitalist states within the core imperialist countries from revolution. Because as Stalin observed in The Foundations of Leninism, the weaker capital is in a given country, the more ripe it is for its capitalist state to be overthrown.

With the decline of U.S. hegemony, and the new cold war effort that this has prompted Washington to wage throughout the last decade or so, geopolitics is a more potent tool for the class struggle than ever. Because now geopolitics has the potential to deal the final blow to imperialism. But in a technical sense, geopolitics has been acting as a foil to imperialism for over a century now, starting with the coming of the Bolsheviks to power within Russia in 1917. When a feudal imperialist country was transformed into an anti-imperialist country, and became an active threat to the core imperialist countries, the ideological struggle within class politics entered into a new phase. One that includes geopolitics, and the debate over whether imperialist war propaganda is true, as necessary parts of the education required for attaining class consciousness. 

When the imperialists began producing propaganda designed to demonize the Soviet Union, later using Nazi disinformation agents like Goebbels, traitors to the revolutionary cause like Trotsky or Khrushchev, and literary red-bashers like Orwell or Solzhenitsyn for spinning additional myths about communist human rights abuses, they found a receptive audience among the leftists and “communists” with an ideological interest in discrediting existing socialism. Prior to when the Bolsheviks created the first workers state, the anarchists and the left’s other anti-Marxists attacked those who represent the theory of Marx and Engels merely by insinuating that communism might bring “authoritarianism.” That authority is a tool which can be used for any purpose, and that it could serve as a net positive if wielded by a state with proletarian class character, were ignored by this analysis. The anarchists were set on sabotaging whatever workers state the communists tried to build. When imperialism was confronted with a series of states which worked against its interests, and therefore began creating propaganda narratives to portray these states as “authoritarian” tyrannies, the anarchists, the Trotskyists, the social democrats, and the other anti-“Stalinist” strains were eager to repeat this propaganda.

So is the case today, more than ever now that a new cold war prompts the CIA to intensify its cultivation of left-wing anti-communism. And with the last century’s developments in communist schisms, the modern era has the additional sectarian strain of Maoism, which attacks today’s socialist states not primarily for being “authoritarian” but for being “state capitalist.” When it comes to the DPRK, the socialist country that’s currently most advanced in evolving towards communism, their claim is that the country can’t be truly socialist because its guiding Juche ideology is supposedly “anti-Marxist.” These analyses ignore that the market utilizations of China, Cuba, Vietnam, and Laos are modern versions of Lenin’s New Economic Policy (therefore meaning those countries can still be dictatorships of the proletariat), and that there’s substantial evidence for Juche being fundamentally informed by Marxism-Leninism. This determination that certain factions within the left and the communist movement have to portray existing socialism as “not real socialism” is not productive. It creates an obsession with discrediting the anti-imperialist countries over real or perceived contradictions, when the discussion ought to be primarily framed in terms of how these countries are helping weaken capital within the core.

When we frame things in these terms, we’re able to take on the right mindset for not uncritically accepting imperialism’s propaganda about these countries, which is designed to subdue the Russo-Chinese bloc and therefore reverse the weakening of capital. It’s in our class interests to only say negative things about anti-imperialist governments, current or past, after we’ve carefully verified that these things are based in fact. It’s important to point out former socialism’s faults so that we can learn from its mistakes, or to point out how Russia’s capitalist post-Soviet state has ravaged the country’s living standards. Hakim, one of my favorite Marxist-Leninist YouTubers, has respectively done both in the videos linked within the last sentence. What he hasn’t done is say that we need to support Ukraine in the present conflict, or that the people throughout the neo-colonies who are rallying in support of Russia’s Operation Z are wrong for doing so. 

These claims would be based in an incorrect argument (that Russia’s actions are unprovoked) which comes from imperialist propaganda, rather than in a correct argument (that Russia’s current state is fundamentally opposed to the interests of its own working class). And it would weaken the factually based parts of his argument, rendering them selective pieces of truth that are used to make lies appear convincing. This use of some truths to sell lies is the standard form of imperialist propaganda, like when the propagandists use the fact that Milosevic was corrupt to claim that the CIA didn’t carry out any false flags against the Serbs, or when they use the fact that Syria’s government is in need of reforms to claim that Assad is guilty of the chemical attacks he’s been accused of. 

Imperialism’s cognitive warfare works by exploiting the reality that the modern world is complex and filled with nuances, and encouraging us to be too intellectually overwhelmed to question the lies imperialism constantly spews. To say “every government is bad” without any consideration of the different filters with which our media portrays certain governments, and how it’s in imperialism’s interests to make those governments appear vastly more flawed than they actually are.

During the new cold war, in which the U.S. bloc is continuously struggling to regain the upper hand when it comes to territorial, cultural, and economic control, the foremost lie we’re being sold is that Washington’s biggest geopolitical rivals are imperialist as well. In reality, Russia, China, and Iran are semi-peripheral countries, ones that are fulfilling the task the imperialists said the peripheral countries are capable of following the dawn of New Imperialism. This is the task of building up their economic strength enough that they don’t have to rely upon imperialism’s predatory loans and extractive foreign investments. With their help, growing numbers of other countries are doing the same, from Ethiopia to Venezuela to Vietnam to the DPRK. They’re constructing a new order, one in which billions of people aren’t locked into poverty by a minority of parasite countries that wield a mafioso-style leverage over the global economy. When this order becomes defined well enough, the core countries will lose the extractive economic base their capital needs to remain strong, and the proletariat throughout the core will be better able to carry out revolutions of their own.

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Failure of Washington’s Ukraine proxy war portends to the coming anti-colonial revolt in the U.S.

Why is Russia’s Operation Z succeeding? Why has Russia taken 25% of Ukraine, with Ukraine being virtually only able to try to take back localities it’s already lost? Because Operation Z is based in the same military theory that Russia used to defeat fascism in World War II, the last time it faced a genocidal U.S.-enabled Nazi state on its doorstep. This is the theory that’s been passed down especially by Russia’s communists, who were one of the first factions to start urging Putin to take strong action against the Kiev U.S. puppet regime following the coup in 2014. Now that their hopes for a committed effort to subdue Ukraine have been fulfilled, with it being only a matter of time before Kiev must give up its charade of having potential for a comeback, the power dynamic has shifted. Not just within the region, but throughout the world, on every front of the conflict between national oppression and the national liberation struggles. That includes within the United States itself.

As it becomes more apparent that Ukraine can’t win at this point militarily, the imperialists are trying to bargain, claiming that Russia will still ultimately lose because of the costs their proxy war has brought upon the country. But after the initial shock from the sanctions, Russia’s ruble has risen to become the world’s strongest currency this year, causing the imperialist media to respond with more bargaining in the form of “the ruble’s strength is only artificial” headlines. Despite their affirmations that this proxy war is indeed driving Russia into collapse, and that Washington will get payoff for its risky move on the geopolitical chessboard, the fact remains that Russia’s economy still hasn’t tanked. This is because as these pundits begrudgingly admit, Putin has been preparing for a situation like this for years. Imperialism’s provocations have caused him to see that Russia would need to fortify itself against such destabilization attempts. The scenario of a dismantled and U.S.-colonized Russia, wherein the CIA has carried out a Yugoslavia-style breakup that takes out China’s most important strategic ally, won’t materialize. The deceptive call from the neocons to “decolonize” Russia is pure fantasy, unable to reverse the trend towards multipolarity or deal actual damage towards the Russian Federation.

By provoking this conflict, the U.S. empire has unintentionally ended up accelerating this transition away from Pax Americana. In their hubris, the imperialists have failed to anticipate that their drastic maneuver in Ukraine wouldn’t pay off. And that all they’ll be left with are the negative consequences the Ukraine war is bringing upon them: an economically imploding Europe, a solidification of the formerly colonized world’s allegiance towards the Russo-Chinese bloc, a decline in U.S. living standards due to sanctions-created scarcity and opportunistic corporate price gouging. The contradictions of capitalism within the core imperialist countries are being exacerbated. The global anti-imperialist movement is being invigorated by the outpouring of solidarity for the Donbass republics, which Kiev has attempted to ethnically cleanse. Washington’s aim was to break up Russia and destabilize broader Eurasia, but it’s ended up bringing itself closer to such a fate.

This is because as the U.S. empire demonizes Russia for supposedly being a prison of nations, the U.S. itself couldn’t be a better example of such a prison. U.S. settler colonialism is one of history’s most vile tyrannies, formed through the systematic murder of around 90% of the continent’s Natives. Whatever argument can be made for Russia’s imperial history mandating an allocation of sovereignty—and the Soviets already addressed this argument—the fact is that Russia’s version of settler colonialism wasn’t nearly as violent as the colonization of the American continent has been and continues to be. There’s a reason why modern Russia doesn’t have a direct equivalent to the Indigenous land rights struggles that the modern U.S. sees, where Native communities have to fight for necessities like drinkable water and a brutal settler state responds with extreme police violence. If Russia were doing to its historic regional communities what the U.S. does to its own, we would have heard all about it by now. But we haven’t, because the neocons lack a real case for their Russian “decolonization” proposal.

The U.S. is throwing stones while living in a glass house, and that will have consequences for it. The defeat of the racial supremacist ideology which drives the Kiev regime, in which the Russian speakers Ukraine has tried to deprive of their independence have freed themselves from oppression, will at some point repeat itself through anti-colonial struggles within U.S. borders. Like the Donbass Russians, America’s African, Indigenous, and Brown nations are targeted by an oppressor country, one which seeks to push them aside for the sake of a territorial grab by the favored racial group. When the coup happened eight years ago, and the Donbass people found themselves under threat, they fought an armed struggle for their liberation. When the contradictions within the U.S. settler-colonial structure reach a breaking point, the U.S. empire’s internal colonies will take the equivalent actions to save themselves from the fate the empire will try to subject them to in the coming decades.

This is a fate where these communities are forced into a situation parallel to the one that Palestinians have been forced into by the Israeli occupation, which has naturally prompted Palestinians to take up arms against the settler state. Where the impoverished nonwhite communities have suffered the worst from the vast upward wealth transfer which global warming is estimated to bring about, and which has already been underway throughout the neoliberal era. Where the settler state sends in police that are even more militarized and impune than they are now, along with fascist paramilitary forces, to exact violence against these groups in even greater amounts than is currently the case. In reaction to the decline of U.S. hegemony, the contraction of capital, and capitalist crises like Covid-19 and global warming, the fascists are intensifying colonial oppression. They’re scapegoating the groups which threaten the colonial order, and waging an ever deadlier war against these groups.

Violence against colonized peoples isn’t unprecedented or non-recent in U.S. history. Colonial genocide has always characterized the United States, and the formation of the U.S. empire was carried out through this genocide’s biggest waves. But with the capitalist settler project reaching an unprecedented stage of crisis, and with the power structure reacting by increasing the existing violence, the subjugated nations have a potential to successfully fight for their liberation in the coming decades. The conditions are growing ripe for a mass proletarian revolutionary effort among nonwhite and white people alike, and the colonized nations are getting pushed to a point where they may soon get provoked into militant revolt. 

The emergence and victory of a war for national self-determination within the Donbass is a warning sign for every colonial regime on the planet. It’s shown that at some point, the oppressor countries will be met with a level of resistance that they can’t suppress. It’s up to us to study the lessons that Russia’s communists have learned from fighting fascism, and apply these lessons to when we’ll be trying to fight off the reactionaries ourselves. 

For now, the point at which such an anti-colonial confrontation appears within U.S. borders draws closer. The economic fallout from the Ukraine conflict is especially impacting nonwhite communities. These communities are further losing faith in the state they live under, increasingly recognizing both parties as oppressive instruments which will never address their material needs. When this unraveling of social stability reached its logical conclusion, and the U.S. experiences a new Wounded Knee revolt, an anti-police insurgency, or something similar, the settler state will meet its karma.

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Zionism will be defeated the same way U.S. settler-colonialism will

On the surface, it appears that Zionism is a totally illogical thing for anyone to support, unless they’re a United States military strategist. It’s in effect a project to create and sustain a military outpost for U.S. imperialism, and “Israel” is the name of that base. This “country” wouldn’t exist if not for its existence being crucial to the geopolitical interests of the U.S. and its imperialist allies. The U.S. empire’s current president has as much as admitted to this, stating that if there weren’t an Israel, the U.S. would have to invent an Israel to secure its strategic access to the region. (Which is to say its ability to assassinate Iranian scientists, bomb Syria, and carry out destabilization schemes against Lebanon and Yemen through a proxy state.) 

Zionism currently has a state due to the cold calculations of imperialism, which is an extension of capital and therefore represents the banal evil of exploitation. The endless war crimes, illegal annexations, forced displacement, and racist repression that we see Israel exact against the Palestinians are an extension of this banal evil, representing the self-interest of a parasitic minority socioeconomic class.

And it’s true that the U.S. bourgeoisie primarily benefit from the continuation of the Zionist colonial occupation. But if they were the only ones who benefited from it, Israel wouldn’t exist, and the same goes for all other existing settler-colonial states. When the capitalist ruling class seek to steal an indigenous territory for the sake of military, market, or extractive benefit, they don’t merely take this land and keep it all for themselves. They distribute much of it among a select group of favored people, promising that group the material benefits of settler-colonialism. This group gains access to cheap or free land, disproportionate opportunities within the economy the settler state sets up, and the ability to not be targeted by the discriminatory laws, policies, and cultural attitudes which settler-colonialism brings upon the disfavored groups. Because the settlers are made to be the only ones with substantial social power within the colonial structure’s ruling institutions, their sentiments are made to be the only ones that matter, and the discontent and rage of the subjugated groups is safely relegated to realms where it can be made impotent.

This is the nature of society for as long as the settler state remains intact. And whether in Israel, or the U.S., or Canada, or Western Sahara, or occupied Kashmir, or New Zealand, or Australia, or neo-colonial settler states like Brazil and Colombia, the fundamental evil of the settler-colonial project is accepted by those among the settler population who embrace the ruling ideology. They benefit from the continued subjugation of the colonized and the ethnically disfavored immigrant groups, so they tend to cling to the current social order. This can be true even if a settler is simultaneously a settler and a proletarian, or even part of capitalism’s reserve army of labor. As long as a settler perceives that their best interests lie in the preservation of the colonial structure—whether or not this is actually true for someone with their class status—they won’t question this structure. They’ll be susceptible to the reactionary narratives about the supposedly superior nation being under threat from malign enemy forces, and of there being a need to fight against this enemy by any means necessary. 

This is how you get the “Blue Lives Matter” movement in reaction to the African liberation liberation struggle, or the Israeli rallies in defense of a jailed soldier who murdered a Palestinian in cold blood. All threats to the colonial order are seen as in need of being stamped out, because within colonialism’s supremacist mindset, the colonial order is objectively a good thing.

You can’t reason with someone who’s committed themselves to this racist worldview, at least not unless you invest gargantuan amounts of time and energy into changing them. But you can make the social order they defend logistically unable to be defended. You can make the economy that settler-colonialism depends on no longer able to work, cutting off its access to the global markets that capitalism requires to function. This is why Boycott Divestment Sanctions exists, and why you should read up on the list of Israeli-tied brands to boycott. It’s also (part of) why the anti-imperialist movement exists. 

The equivalent of BDS when it comes to the United States is the effort throughout the formerly colonized world to assert independence from neo-colonial control, and to in turn deprive U.S. capital of the markets it needs to keep profits up. When China builds railways and electrical grids for African countries that lift them out of colonial impoverishment, and make them no longer dependent on U.S. predatory loans, that weakens the U.S. settler state’s capital. When Vietnam, Nicaragua, Cuba, or Bolivia fight off imperialist coup attempts, that contributes to this weakening by rendering U.S. imperialism unable to regain its lost extractive range. It’s a growing global boycott of the USA, incentivized by U.S. exploitation forcing the formerly colonized world’s people to assert their economic independence.

Mao said that over ninety percent of the global population will ultimately turn on imperialism. That remaining less than ten percent are the people who fly the Thin Blue Line flag, or who join Israel’s Hasbara online public relations project, or who repeat U.S. propaganda about anti-imperialist countries with no intentions of listening to pushback. They’re the global minority of political opportunists, obstinate bigots, labor aristocrats, and bourgeois or petty-bourgeois individuals who are fighting desperately to maintain the parasitic order they’ve staked their interests within. We don’t need to win them over. What they believe is relevant only insofar as understanding how they think helps us anticipate their maneuvers. They’re an endangered species, set to die out when the conditions that perpetuate their ideology become extinct.

Most Americans only believe the imperialist narratives this minority puts forth because their conditions have made these narratives all they know, and their thinking will change when their conditions change. Even if Americans as a whole technically benefit from imperialism, these benefits are vastly outweighed by the evils that capitalism exacts upon them. And when imperialism’s propaganda is discredited in their eyes, they’ll recognize that they would gain incomparably more from the establishment of socialism than from the continuation of capitalism.

Under settler-colonialism, establishing socialism is impossible without abolishing the settler state. This reality presents an obstacle to class consciousness among the settlers, because the settlers in certain ways have their interests tied to colonialism’s perpetuation. But in this stage of capitalism’s crisis, where capital has been forced to contract and impose neoliberal policies, these areas of the settler population’s material interests are mostly outweighed by the great material interest they have in proletarian revolution. Therefore, at least for the proletarians and lumpenproletarians among them, their best interests now lie not in continuing to defend the settler state the bourgeoisie have set up, but in allying with the Native, Black, Brown, and Asian diaspora communists who seek this state’s abolition. The settler state is a tool for cultivating a social base for the territorial grabs which capital requires to perpetuate itself. When capital inevitably becomes too weak to sustain the population, as is now happening, this social base vanishes.

I don’t know if the equivalent is true within Israel, where the settlers are overwhelmingly united in support of the colonial occupation’s continuation. But Israel is a tiny country, and will become vulnerable to the anti-colonial struggle when it loses not just the military support from a declining U.S. hegemon, but the market access from a world that’s turning against Zionism’s vile practices. We must build solidarity with all of the globe’s anti-imperialist efforts, expand and intensify BDS, and work to expose imperialism’s lies. We in the imperial center must also do the organizing and educational work required for proletarian revolution, which in our case necessitates a decolonial analysis. Then the foundations of colonialism and imperialism will fall out, and humanity will be able to progress towards a new stage in its development.

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U.S. imperialism’s supremacist ideology can be defeated by liberation struggle solidarity

The pitch that the U.S. empire makes is one of a shared conquest. Or, to put it more bluntly, a shared project to steal from other civilizations. The American imperialists have stolen an entire continent from the Natives, stolen over ten trillion dollars worth of wealth created through the labor of African slaves, and distributed the benefits gained from this theft among the white settlers so that a mass social base can be created for their parasitic project. Then they’ve expanded their parasitism worldwide, turning the U.S. empire into the world’s foremost purveyor of war and neo-colonial exploitation. This has allowed for the capitalist ruling class which runs the empire to make the wealth of the settlers more secure, and to distribute some of imperialism’s spoils to the bourgeois minority among nonwhites. The empire seeks to assimilate its internal colonies—the African nation, the Indigenous First Nations, the Brown nation—into its prevailing ideology, while maintaining the loyalty of the settlers by continuing to give them relatively substantial benefits.

However, because of the deterioration of capital and the decline of U.S. hegemony, during the last half-century this model for social stability has become increasingly untenable. The bourgeoisie within the imperial center can no longer afford to allow a robust welfare state, so they’ve implemented neoliberal reforms. As a consequence, living standards for people of all demographics have been consistently decreasing throughout the last several decades. This rise in inequality has hit the colonized nations the hardest, as they were already in an especially bad situation. But it’s also had the effect of causing a newfound mass confusion among the settlers. In reaction to their disappearing wealth, many white Americans—especially white American men—have come to feel like they’ve been lied to, because unlike the colonized peoples, they until recently believed that the system is set up to help them. In reaction to this sense of disillusionment, these whites have often been turning to drugs and alcohol, committing suicide, or directing their rage outwards by committing mass shootings.

Such social ills are the byproducts of an empire in decay, of the exposure of the lie behind our social order. This lie being that our society is fundamentally fair, that there’s substance behind the settler state’s claim of representing lofty ideals of justice. The evidence against this is visible everywhere around us, including within expanding elements of the settler communities: widespread poverty both urban and rural, lack of economic recovery since the 2008 crash, wages that have been declining with inflation for over a generation. From a dialectical point of view, the fact that this growing misery is statistically impacting nonwhites more than whites shouldn’t stop the impacted whites from fighting in solidarity with the colonized peoples who share their struggles; their best interests both lie in the defeat of the U.S. empire, and in the construction of workers democracy. 

But white supremacy is and has historically been the biggest obstacle to class struggle in the United States, and this is true for a reason: that appeal towards a desire for collective triumph among those within the American “nation,” where the deserving people can build up their wealth or pull themselves out of deprivation through subduing the enemy nations, has stubborn influence within the white psyche.

This is not an argument for race essentialism, or for an “original sin” concept in which people should suffer for the crimes of their ancestors. It’s an acknowledgement of the reality that when you build an entire society off of theft from other cultures, whether through slave labor that still hasn’t been compensated, forced annexation of land via genocidal extermination campaigns, or global imperialist bloodshed and ongoing slave labor, that society’s cultural hegemony will mirror the violent ideology which has justified these crimes. The believers in the ideology of the United States view history as an unavoidable struggle between dominators and the dominated, in which any given people must either exact violence against others or have violence be exacted against themselves. 

This is where the seemingly strange reactions that we see among white reactionaries to decolonial liberation efforts come from. When white supremacists say that Black nationalism is reverse racism, or that Natives who seek to regain full jurisdiction for their tribes intend to ethnically cleanse whites, they’re projecting their own violent mentality onto the peoples they seek to continue subjugating. If we don’t continue the colonial occupation, they claim, the occupied will simply begin occupying us. Never mind that traditional Indigenous thought tends to view the concept of land ownership as culturally alien, and as disrespectful towards the environment. Never mind that the Black nationalists who have class consciousness naturally understand the need for equality among workers of all colors. The occupied must have the same supremacist beliefs that we do, and their intentions can only be revenge.

When you think like this, you come to see the deterioration of the conditions of the masses under capitalism not as a mandate for class solidarity across racial barriers, but as a mandate for the favored people to intensify their colonial warfare. Loyalty to the U.S. “nation” must be reinforced, the national liberation efforts from the internal colonies must be vilified, colonial extraction and subjugation must be intensified. On a global scale, military adventurism, murderous sanctions, and demonizing propaganda must be increased as well, however apparent it becomes that these things can’t reverse the decline of Pax Americana. There can never be a moment of self-reflection, a consideration as to whether the imperialist project is not a path towards greatness, but a death cult. A death cult in which the believers rationalize their complicity in the harm the capitalist machine causes towards others, before ultimately falling victim to the machine themselves. 

In this way, the climate crisis is the great equalizer, imperiling people within both imperial periphery and core, in both colonized and settler communities. The material advantages the richer groups have can make them less vulnerable, but this shouldn’t dissuade them from fighting the socioeconomic system which is creating the crisis. The imperialist cult seeks to persuade them that it’s in their best interests to pit themselves against the less advantaged, even as their conditions scream out the need for solidarity.

Plenty within this cult remain obstinate, and have the potential to join the fascist militias with their plans for racial and political mass extermination. But with the deterioration of the people’s conditions, the people will inevitably undergo changes in their consciousness. The question is whether these changes will be steered in reactionary and ineffectual directions by the currently dominant ideology, or whether studied communists will manage to sufficiently educate the people on the theory required for their liberation. This task of ours requires us to sufficiently understand that theory ourselves; we must be intellectually humble, and aware of the ways in which imperial or colonial chauvinism may unconsciously remain within our psyches. Ho Chi Minh warned of how individualism, the central ideology of the bourgeoisie, is insidious in that it can impact our thinking without us knowing. In the imperial center, the entitled, self-centered, and hubristic mentalies of imperialism represent extensions of this, and we must be willing to correct our course should we ever succumb to their influence.

Through vigilance, revolutionary discipline, and an empathetic attitude towards the masses, we can cut through the ideas which imperialism continues to make dominant within our culture. We can tell the people a different story from the one of an unending battle between different groups, driven by a supposedly selfish “human nature.” This is a story of the oppressed and exploited peoples of the world working in growing numbers towards the defeat of the imperialist beast, and the advancement to a better stage of historical development.

The peoples of formerly colonized countries like China and Vietnam, which used to long be at war with each other, are strengthening bonds of cooperation in their mutual interests. This new chapter in their relations has come about due to their both establishing socialism, and their both choosing to be principled in their opposition towards imperialist machinations. They won’t let Washington divide them, which would merely leave them both vulnerable to imperialism’s aggressions. Such bonds are being strengthened across the rest of the imperial peripheries, with African countries being lifted from their colonial impoverishment by Chinese development projects, Latin American anti-imperialist countries being enabled to defy sanctions because of Iranian aid, and independent anti-imperialist republics receiving help from Russia. In turn, the masses within the formerly colonized world have been rejecting the U.S. propaganda about Chinese “neo-colonialism,” and have been demonstrating in support of Russia’s humanitarian military intervention within Ukraine. Cry not for the past’s failures of anti-imperialist solidarity. Be grateful for the progress that’s now being made to an accelerating degree.

The forces of anti-imperialism are demonstrably proving wrong the ideology of the imperialists, with its assertions about cruelty and competition being innate human traits. A more equitable world order is emerging, one that will be free from imperialist exploitation when the U.S. and its allies are defeated. The globe is becoming ready for a new wave of revolutions, precipitated by the weakening of capital and the rise of class struggle. The model of domination, extraction, and perpetual war that imperialism represents is getting revealed to be not an immutable fixture in history, but a scam designed to enrich a select minority. As imperialism’s spoils dry up, the few who remain loyal to this dying system are mobilizing towards violent counterrevolution. But the rest of humanity is increasingly mobilizing to make their efforts at preserving empire impossible.

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If you appreciate my work, I hope you become a one-time or regular donor to my Patreon account. Like most of us, I’m feeling the economic pinch during late-stage capitalism, and I need money to keep fighting for a new system that works for all of us. Go to my Patreon here.