Stalin’s ghost laughs from above Europe as imperialist war makes revolution a practical necessity

The panic that the White House is experiencing at the moment is about more than Washington’s war crimes within Ukraine (re: Nord Stream) being revealed, or the economic collapse this war has worsened. It’s about how the imperialists are growing ever closer to fulfilling the scenario that Stalin foretold in The Foundations of Leninism, where imperialism creates the prerequisites for proletarian revolution. The defeat of Washington’s psyops, and the growing tension between the war machine’s interests and the people’s interests, are factors that can bring a breakthrough in class struggle. A potentially pivotal breakthrough, where the ruling elites are faced with an unraveling in social stability that they can’t reverse.

This peril which the American and European ruling class have come to face is a demonstration of what Stalin described as:

The contradiction among the various financial groups and imperialist Powers in their struggle for sources of raw materials, for foreign territory. Imperialism is the export of capital to the sources of raw materials, the frenzied struggle for monopolist possession of these sources, the struggle for a re-division of the already divided world, a struggle waged with particular fury by new financial groups and Powers seeking a "place in the sun" against the old groups and Powers, which cling tenaciously to what they have seized. This frenzied struggle among the various groups of capitalists is notable in that it includes as an inevitable element imperialist wars, wars for the annexation of foreign territory. This circumstance, in its turn, is notable in that it leads to the mutual weakening of the imperialists, to the weakening of the position of capitalism in general, to the acceleration of the advent of the proletarian revolution and to the practical necessity of this revolution.

It appeared on the surface like Washington’s decision to provoke Russia into war let the imperialists bypass this issue by creating an incentive for all the imperialist powers to unify. Yet this moment where these countries put aside their previous disputes was always going to last only as long as the situation remained stable enough for nobody to start acting in one’s self-interest. And that was a setup for a fragile alliance. It’s not just that the sanctions have destroyed Europe’s economy, and that this is provoking the people in places like France to mobilize. It’s that Washington, in its fixation on destroying Russia, has turned its own allies into targets within the new cold war.

When Seymour Hersh confirmed that Washington was behind the Nord Stream explosion, the New York Times and the intelligence sources which run it diverted from this revelation by claiming the culprits were a “pro-Ukrainian group.” How this “group” could have managed to carry out the same kind of industrial sabotage operation that CIA agents are historically trained for, I suspect these intelligence officials are aware of as well. This incident of the criminals pointing somewhere random and saying “look, the criminals are over there!” has not been enough to stop the German public from turning against the United States. Nord Stream was their project, their infrastructure, in their national interest. This backstabbing has further made Germans upset at their social fascist government, which has acted as Washington’s loyal agent for war. When Germans are hearing their foreign minister outright say the country is “at war with Russia,” they can only think of the last time they were being ruled by a circle of American-tied militarists who were set on escalating with Russia no matter what Russia had actually done.

By design, Germany’s bourgeois state won’t allow an anti-NATO government to be voted in. Except now that the German people—the German proletariat especially since the war is harming their living standards the most—are turning against NATO, Washington, and militarism, the present government and its successors will have to reckon with an equivalent of the popular venom that France’s government now regularly endures. A population that’s been radicalized towards the anti-imperialist stance would be even more threatening towards global capitalism than France’s anti-austerity movement is. The next step is to reach the synthesis between these two types of causes, which is communism as applied to a presently imperialist country. The people will have to realize that the only solution is to transition towards workers democracy so that they’re afflicted neither by the parasite class which steals their pensions, nor by the imperialist wars which also harm their interests.

This exemplifies another contradiction of imperialism Stalin covered, which is “the contradiction between labour and capital. Imperialism is the omnipotence of the monopolist trusts and syndicates, of the banks and the financial oligarchy, in the industrial countries. In the fight against this omnipotence, the customary methods of the working class-trade unions and cooperatives, parliamentary parties and the parliamentary struggle-have proved to be totally inadequate. Either place yourself at the mercy of capital, eke out a wretched existence as of old and sink lower and lower, or adopt a new weapon-this is the alternative imperialism puts before the vast masses of the proletariat. Imperialism brings the working class to revolution.” Whether Germany gets successfully compelled to set itself up against the USA, and becomes another example of inter-imperialist competition, the “unity” that NATO initially created within itself during the war is an illusion. 

The U.S. has already been in competition with Turkey, another NATO power which aspires to rebuild Ottoman imperialism, for many years in relation to Syria. Such a mutually weakening relationship could emerge between Washington and other NATO members as the insanity of this conflict drives the different players to desperation. Then Washington will be forced to start effectively waging war against them, in the same way it wages war against the peripheral countries which disobey it: by carrying out terrorist attacks, political meddling, and assassinations to try to regain them as assets.

Stalin’s ghost can laugh from above Europe, because he’s been proven right. Even after all the confident statements from the imperialists in this last year about how the sanctions will doom Russia, how NATO has a great future, how the people will tolerate any sacrifice within this war, he’s the one whose view of history has been vindicated. Civilization’s development did not reach its final stage when capitalism came, and the emergence of modern imperialism is itself proof of that. The system transitioned into a type of imperialism which exports capital from the core to the peripheries because this was the only way to displace the crises capitalism creates for itself during its monopoly era. Crises that would be fatal if imperialism weren’t here to export the bulk of the system’s exploitation onto the proletariat throughout the neo-colonies. The industrialist Cecil Rhodes, in the famous quote of his which Lenin included, stated this as being the goal of imperialism. He declared that empire is the only way to maintain stability when capitalism drives many of the core’s people into poverty.

The working class has a choice between continuing to act as observers within history, and asserting its agency over history by organizing towards revolution. The job of communists is to make the proletariat aware it has this choice, and give it the means for choosing the option that’s in its interest.

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Washington always knew Ukraine couldn’t win. It didn’t anticipate what fatal costs this loss would have.

The most significant factor within the failure of Biden’s Ukraine proxy war is not Kiev’s ongoing process of military defeat. Washington elites aren’t growing increasingly concerned at the moment, and trying to find a way to bring the conflict to at least a perceived victory, merely because of Ukraine’s severe arms equipment and personnel deficiencies. These elites always knew the moment would come when Ukraine became spent as a tool for waging war, and it would have to be sacrificed like the empire has sacrificed previous allies such as the Kurds. The reason the White House is panicking is because now that the time has come for this latest imperialist discarding act, the war has come along with an economic crisis, one exacerbated by the war’s economic aspect. 

The crisis is unfolding at an accelerating pace. Since the start of this year alone, the warning signs for a new economic unraveling from the previous months have turned into a disaster that the White House is now realizing won’t simply go away. The time frame that Colonel Douglas Macgregor proposed last week for when the situation in the USA reaches an even worse point, a point where Americans get subjected to the kind of unemployment explosion the Fed’s critics anticipate, was within the next sixty days (now fifty). This is because in June, the Fed will need to make a new interest rate decision, and if it keeps acting in the reckless way it’s been consistently acting, under the present circumstances the outcome will be catastrophic. There’s no avoiding a vast acceleration of the imperial center’s social collapse. This collapse was made guaranteed fifteen years ago, when the bank bailout made our financial system even more concentrated and dangerous. That created the conditions for an even worse meltdown. The Ukraine war, and its furthering of inflation, have compounded the destructive impacts of this crisis upon the working class.

As Macgregor observes, when the full consequences of Washington’s decision to provoke Russia are felt, the American people will be wanting answers. They already do to a growing degree. Almost two-thirds of them are now living paycheck to paycheck, and within a year this could easily surpass two-thirds. The answers they can find are that their government has systematically sold them out to corporations and banks which have engineered another depression; that the Fed has been advancing an explicitly stated scheme by the top capitalists to gain more leverage over employees by further driving down living standards; and that the Biden administration has manufactured an economy-destroying war for the sake of try to win on the geopolitical chessboard. Because the sanctions have failed to destabilize Russia, so much that Russia’s economy is expected to grow this year, the empire won’t be able to subdue China. Which means it won’t regain the neo-colonial access points needed to keep U.S. capital strong, and to prevent the revolutionary scenario which has been made far more likely by the war’s failure.

Scott Ritter describes the factors behind the economic rise of BRICS, and the consequential ineffectiveness of the sanctions, as: “residual fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic, blowback from the sanctioning of Russia by the G7 nations in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and a growing resentment among the developing economies of the world to G7 economic policies, and priorities which are perceived as being rooted more in post-colonial arrogance than a genuine desire to assist in helping nations grow their own economic potential.” The Afghanistan and Iraq invasions were the two great crimes of Washington that ensured most of the globe wouldn’t back it when it tried something as outrageous and divisive as the Ukraine maneuver. The structure of the empire, which is to say the material basis which keeps the American bourgeois state strong, is in terminal decay. This applies to both America and Europe. European banks are failing as well, while the people of Germany especially grow upset over the war zeal of their leader and Washington’s sabotage against their Nord Stream pipeline. France’s unrest could soon spread, to the effect that NATO’s new unity gets revealed as having been fragile all along.

Victory for the proletariat can come from this, but only if we navigate our conditions correctly. This is what requires unbreakable principles on the part of communists, and the ability to correctly judge what the circumstances call for from moment to moment. The acceleration of the system’s collapse is also speeding up the process of class conflict, creating a constantly changing set of circumstances. As U.S. imperialism’s crisis intensifies, so do our ideological conflicts, particularly the ones within the American left. All it’s taken is for the conditions to change, and we’ve begun seeing rifts which couldn’t have been imaginable only a couple years ago. It’s an extension of the other geopolitically related disputes within left spheres that the rise of China has been creating, except with the introduction of an unprecedented nuclear war risk, the debates have reached proportional levels of drama.

What are these debates? At their core, they center around the question: should leftists and communists continue operating in a way that doesn’t fundamentally threaten the Democratic Party, or should we break from the Democratic Party’s supporting narratives? That’s what we’re really arguing about when we’re arguing over whether to support Russia’s Operation Z. Additional disputes have opened up over whether to believe the FBI’s account regarding the case of antiwar commentator Scott Ritter; whether to support Rage Against the War Machine and its project to expand anti-imperialism beyond the left; and whether to work with openly pro-Z parties like the PCUSA. 

It’s obvious which side I fall on regarding all of these questions. If anybody else is a serious Marxist, but has doubts about these matters, consider the idea that led me to the stance I’ve reached at this stage. This idea is that in a moment when the effort to defeat imperialism’s psyops has such potential to weaken the capitalist state, advancing this effort is primary, and therefore one should be open to working with anti-imperialists of a variety of ideological tendencies. There’s a limit to this, I won’t associate with LaRouchites or Strasserites. But I also won’t embrace the sectarian mindset which the imperialism-compatible left, the element of the left which three-letter agencies are proven to historically back, depends on to maintain its status within our organizing spaces.

The imperialism-compatible left is the tool within the initial layer of the state’s counterinsurgency, which is the layer where the state seeks to hold back the organizational success of revolutionary politics. Its monopoly over these spaces, and over the broader narrative about what it means to be a “socialist,” are the primary factors which threaten to prevent today’s rising mass outrage from going in a revolutionary direction. We know this because in 2020, the last time there was a revolt, the Democratic Party and its narrative managers successfully snuffed out the chance for police abolition by diverting the black liberation movement into helping its opportunist project. We have a new opportunity for revolutionary politics, and must stop the opportunists from doing this again.

I realized this several months ago, and since the beginning of the year, new developments have appeared which have rendered the counterinsurgency more vulnerable. Seymour Hersh has confirmed that Washington blew up Nord Stream, providing powerful rhetorical tools for the Rage Against the War Machine rally and its new permanent coalition. PCUSA, which helped build RAWM’s left flank, has been working with the PSL in organizing ANSWER’s rally, creating more unity and opportunities for idea-sharing within our movement. Now the war and the economic crisis are reaching a point where the people can no longer tolerate what their government is doing. 

Our revolutionary crisis is unfolding at a speed we couldn’t have anticipated until recently. Our narratives and political culture are being upended, leading to an environment that’s full of possibilities but can also be confusing when one isn’t sure how to respond to it. To find how to respond, base your decisions off of this question: “what’s the best course of action for advancing the class struggle?” The forces of reformism, sectarianism, and radical liberalism want us to ignore the revolutionary path, but the conditions are making that path clearer than ever. We have the ability to assert agency over history, and turn this chaotic situation towards a great escalation in the class struggle.

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The campaign to smear Scott Ritter & other anti-imperialists is a desperate attempt to maintain NATO’s narrative control

Art by Fox Green of Space Commune

The story of the Ukraine proxy war’s failure is the same one as those of the catalyzing events within the falls of all past empires: a hegemon does something reckless to try to regain its waning influence, then ends up ensuring its own defeat. 

Coming of multipolarity represents hope for the class struggle

This is not because Russia has militarily defeated Ukraine, an outcome that Washington anticipated from the start. It’s because the imperialists haven’t fulfilled their foremost goal behind the proxy war, which was to destabilize Russia so that China could then be subdued in the new great-power competition. Because Washington’s sanctions have failed by this crucial metric, the PRC will be able to keep building a global economic network that incrementally renders neo-colonialism untenable. 

The proxy war has failed so badly that it’s not only proven unable to reverse the construction of this network, but sped up the process, with the sanctions creating more of an incentive for Russia, Iran, Kazakhstan, and Eurasia’s other pivotal geopolitical players to solidify their economic ties to China. If not for pressure from principled anti-imperialists like Russia’s communists, Putin wouldn’t have carried out the military operation that made this possible, as he prefers cooperation with the Americans and once even wanted Russia to join NATO. The direction of history has compelled him to embrace an anti-imperialist policy, and he and his successors at this point won’t realistically abandon that policy.

These facts are the essence of what communists in the imperial center should be focusing on at the moment when it comes to global affairs. They tell us something indispensable about our conditions, which is that the imperial extractive arrangement that provides the material basis for U.S. capitalism is falling apart. It’s falling apart because Russia is militarily defeating U.S. hegemony while China is economically defeating it, with the former victory making the latter one easier and vice versa. Because U.S. hegemony is the globe’s primary contradiction, and Russia and China aren’t imperialist powers, our correct practice is to educate Americans about the progressive impacts that these shifts in the global power balance are bringing. The lifting of the peripheral countries out from enforced underdevelopment; the weakening of U.S. capital; the radicalization of the U.S. working class that imperialism’s recent failures are making possible; these must form the basis for our analysis.

The goal of the imperialism-compatible left is to obscure this progressive nature of these developments, so that we don’t see the rise of a genuinely revolutionary politics that’s capable of winning victory for the workers. The way the actors within this anti-revolutionary element are going about with their wrecking mission centers around social media, which has become their primary narrative weapon. Accordingly, the rhetoric they use to try to sabotage revolution only truly fits within social media, and the particular type of polarization that it creates.

When I’ve made the kinds of geopolitical analyses that I just summarized, the things I’ve seen imperialism-compatible leftists do to try to discredit them include some notable rhetorical patterns. 

The fabrication and maintenance of a pro-imperialist smear narrative 

First, when I cite the UN weapons inspector turned anti-imperialist commentator Scott Ritter to support my points (which feels unavoidable since the things he says are so sound), they repeat the FBI’s narrative that Ritter is a predator. This smear is akin to the lies that Russiagate liberals directed towards Julian Assange to try to discredit WikiLeaks’ exposing of U.S. imperialism and the Democratic Party. And like in that case, the target is innocent. As Ritter has posted in response to the use of this narrative by NATO propagandist Elliot Higgins: 

What Higgins won’t speak of is the fact that I have consistently maintained my innocence, and pled such at trial knowing I was facing up to 40 years imprisonment, and after being offered a deal which would have resulted in no time served. Innocent men don’t plead guilty. The trial was highly politicized, with the judge disallowing exculpatory evidence (a forensic analysis of my computer hard drive that showed zero criminal activity), while admitting illegally unsealed files which were cherry picked by the prosecution to manufacture their case. I was found guilty at trial. While imprisoned, I was told that I would not be paroled unless I admitted guilt. This I refused to do. After making my case to the prison authorities, I was paroled despite never having pled guilty. (Innocent men don’t plead guilty.)...For those who can accept this, I look forward to our continued constructive engagement on this and other platforms. For those who cannot, exit stage right—your presence is not wanted or needed. As for Mr. Higgins, I’ll let history judge which among us has behaved honorably.

Ritter is being targeted in this way because he’s an authority who’s providing a strong case for the view on geopolitics that serious Marxists put forth. Those carrying out these attacks include not just NAFO, but plenty who call themslves leftists or “Marxists,” because sectarian leftists have an overlapping interest with NAFO in portraying him as a bad actor. They attack him and those adjacent to him not because their central goal is to wage informational warfare against Russia, as the feds involved in NAFO are, but because they depend on imperialism maintaining its narrative control for their own project to survive. This project is left opportunism, where they get to wield power within a community whose insularity has been furthered by the invention of social media. To keep this status of theirs, they must fight the threats to it, which are Marxists who prioritize anti-imperialism and class struggle.

This year, the primary way the imperialism-compatible left has attacked Marxists like us is by claiming we’re wrong for supporting Rage Against the War Machine. RAWM’s big event from last month, and the permanent organizational coalition that’s since emerged from it, represent a force that can bring great escalation to the class conflict. This is because the guiding idea behind RAWM—which is that we must do whatever it takes to defeat U.S. imperialism—can under no circumstances be incorporated into the opportunist project that these types of leftists are invested in. The imperialism-compatible leftists claim they oppose RAWM because its coalition aspect includes Libertarians and others not on the left, but if these leftists were so opposed to making tactical alliances with right-wingers, they wouldn’t be placing themselves on the same side within this ideological conflict that Ukrainian Nazis are on. Many of them don’t even recognize the moral mandate that Russia had in Ukraine, which was to use demilitarization as a means for neutralizing the threat to the Donbass from Ukraine’s ruling fascists. Their foremost priority is not to fight fascism, imperialism, or capitalism, but to fight against those who threaten the personal status they’ve gained as an outcome of their appeasing imperialism.

To maintain a monopoly over organizing spaces and the left social media sphere, they have to successfully defend a particular set of ideas: that Russia and China are imperialist, that Russia was wrong for intervening in Ukraine, and that U.S. hegemony isn’t an important contradiction (this goes along with their notion that class shouldn’t be the central focus). So they attack those who’ve embraced RAWM, even more than NAFO does. Whereas for NAFO, RAWM is only another target, for the imperialism-compatible left, we’re the target. We’re the element that poses the most urgent threat to the viability of their superficial brand of “leftism.” When these types repeat the narrative about Ritter being guilty to attack us for citing or associating with him, this is the cynical motive that’s driving their actions. The same applies to when they use the smears against the PCUSA, such as that it’s a “patsoc” org, to discredit the RAWM coalition which the PCUSA is part of.

Streamer drama, 4Chan ops, & manufactured polarization

With there being these adjacent priorities among the feds and the left opportunists, the latter have naturally taken advantage of the ways the former manipulate online narratives. Which is where the bizarre and convoluted story of patriotic socialism comes in. 

I don’t expect to ever be won over by the argument that displaying the U.S. flag is an important part of practice for Marxist-Leninists in the imperial center. This flag and its fifty stars (symbolizing the fifty states on indigenous territory) represent a colonial project whose extractive relationship to the First Nations is ongoing. Yet at this stage in my development, I won’t cut off another Marxist-Leninist simply for displaying the flag, because this proxy war has taught me that many of those who display it are also the most eager to participate in the narrative war against NATO. That alone tells me it would be a mistake to continue the practice I used to have of automatically viewing anybody who hasn’t yet gotten the indigenous Marxist mentorship that I got as a reactionary. There’s more nuance to it than that, and recognizing this nuance is essential for building the coalition we need to narratively defeat U.S. imperialism. Which is a pivotal part both of sabotaging the U.S. empire’s operations to exact violence, and of bringing America’s proletariat the anti-imperialist education it needs to become revolutionary.

Why did I for a time have this paranoid attitude towards many individuals who would otherwise be my allies? Because I was viewing this movement through a highly polarizing lens, a lens which COINTELPRO has sought to get those in our movement to adopt. It’s the lens the imperialism-compatible left is using when it flippantly attacks anti-imperialists as “patsocs.”

The reason why there’s so much division in our movement, division that those opposed to revolution are now exploiting, is because the fairly moderate perspective of the Marxists who are open to patriotism in the same way as Parenti has been hijacked. Hijacked by right opportunists, the inverse category to the pro-imperialist leftists I’m primarily decrying. As Stalin answered when asked whether the left deviationists or the right deviationists are worse: “They are both worse!” In the last couple of years, these types of actors have proven this with an outrageous series of propaganda campaigns. Campaigns that, if they haven’t been funded by three-letter agencies, certainly have things in common with movement-wrecking psyops. They’ve taken Parenti’s basic proletarian patriotism argument to an absurd extreme, portraying anyone who doesn’t embrace their strange Fox News/communist amalgamation as a fake communist. They’re the ones responsible for popularizing the “patsoc” label, which the left opportunists are now taking advantage of by weaponizing it against all principled anti-imperialists.

When I say “patsocs,” I’m not referring to the Parenti-informed types, but to this latest cult within our movement. Because the patsocs have relied on Caleb Maupin (who’s made big mistakes in his organizing practice, though ones he’s since taken accountability for), the characteristically erratic streamer Infrared (also known as Haz), and the non-committal “communist” Jackson Hinkle, in the last year their movement has lost its fragile relevance. Maupin’s organization the CPI has been disbanded following his scandal, then replaced with a smaller org that’s not led by him; Infrared’s numbers have gone down; and Hinkle has migrated out of communist circles entirely. During the later stages in its decay during late last year, the ways in which it had been seized upon by actual 4Chan trolls became more apparent. When Ye went on his series of Hitlerite rants, the fascist infiltrators within Infrared’s fanbase started making bizarre posts in support of Ye, provoking infighting. This potentially made one of Infrared’s showrunners more comfortable with then posting a blatantly antisemitic meme term that was directly borrowed from Nazi chan boards.

I’ve told this ridiculous story because its associations with 4Chan trolling ops show how the rhetoric the imperialism-compatible left uses to smear serious Marxists relies on the same polarization that the 4Chan trolls manufacture. As the Marxist commentator Hot Labor observed this week about the dishonest ways the legacy of the patsocs is being exploited:

Me: “Hey maybe a billionaire funded NGO isn’t real activism”

Radlibs: “Haz! Maupin! You’re a national socialist!!!”

The New Left COINTELPRO libs aren’t sending their best 

None of this has anything to do with Haz yet these radlibs will namedrop @InfraHaz as a way to escape providing any real analysis. They simply mention his name and hope that the other person shrivels in embarrassment. Unfortunately for them this doesn’t work with real Marxists, ones who aren’t defined by random niche online communities. Also remember these are the same people who think podcasting is activism. 

Hot Labor has also commented: “‘PatSocs’ and the discourse surrounding this phenomenon [are] fed shit…the phenomenon only exists in extremely online communities.” This doesn’t mean the patsoc cult isn’t capable of assimilating individuals who could otherwise be good movement members. I’ve seen this kind of tragedy happen. Yet the online left’s new derangement syndrome over a tendency that lacks any actual organizational power is ironically what’s keeping the patsocs alive in any capacity. The argument the patsocs used is that because the left has failed the class struggle, the only way to win is by embracing their crude iteration of “socialism.” The way to counter this argument is by building an alternative to the imperialism-compatible left that’s actually effective.

The synthesis we need to bring Marxism to victory in the post-Ukraine era

The hope I’ve been able to find amid all of these absurd narrative attacks against our cause is that there’s a growing amount of Marxists who have the right idea. Who share the pro-Operation Z stance of anti-imperialist parties like the Korean Workers Party, without embracing reactionary politics or getting dissuaded from their stance by sectarian polarization. A good way of finding who’s in this trustworthy category was by putting out a polemic against Gerald Horne, and seeing who agreed with my assessment that Horne seeks to discredit historical materialism. Because historical materialism is the reason why Marxists support Z, those who defended me over the Horne polemic have for the most part stuck with me since then. That’s apart from some who’ve been upset over my support for RAWM, but I can’t be an effective actor without upsetting many, so I’m comfortable with this.

Within this solid circle of political collaborators, I’ve been able to find Marxists who have the dialectical analysis that’s needed for bringing the workers to victory. This is the analysis that’s articulated within Carlos Garrido’s The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism, which I consider an ideological successor to Parenti’s arguments about how western Marxists disregard dialectics. In an essay that’s adjacent to this book, Garrido observes:

Western Marxists, although claiming to be the ones who rekindle the spirit of Hegel into Marxism, are the least bit dialectical when it comes to analysis of the concrete world. They are unable to understand, as Hegel did, the necessary role apparent ‘failures’ play as a moment in the unfolding of truth. For Hegel, that which is seen as ‘false’ is part of “the process of distinguishing in general” and constitutes an “essential moment” of Truth. 16 The bud (one of Hegel’s favorite examples which consistently reappears in his work) is not proven ‘false’ when the blossom arises. Instead, Hegel notes, each sustains a “mutual necessity” as “moments of an organic unity”. 17 Socialism is not ‘betrayed’ when it, encountering the external and internal pressures of imperialism and a national bourgeois class, is forced to take more so-called ‘authoritarian’ positions to protect the revolution. Socialism is not ‘betrayed’ or transformed into ‘state capitalism’ (in the derogatory, non-Leninist sense) when faced with a backwards economy it takes the risk of tarrying with its opposite and engages a process of opening up to foreign capital to develop its productive forces.

The conclusion Garrido comes to is that “Dialectical logic must be brought beyond the textbook and used as the interpretive framework with which we analyze the world in general, and the construction of socialism in specific. Only then will Western Marxism gain the possibility of being something more than a ‘radical’ niche of Western academia, focused only on aesthetics and other trivialities where purity can be sustained without risk of desecration.” Under our present conditions, where the latest imperial backfiring has accelerated the decline in the proletariat’s living standards, we can apply this lesson by making anti-imperialism a central priority. 

The way to be truly offensive towards the ruling class is by striking at the ideas and policies of theirs which are most important at the moment for maintaining the system. The purity fetish of western Marxists makes them imperialism-compatible because it renders them unwilling to back projects like Z, projects that actually deal damage towards U.S. hegemony. This fetish also impacts their attitudes towards how to operate in terms of domestic organizing, shown by their rejecting RAWM for its inclusion of Libertarians. The new iteration of CPI, which is also part of RAWM, is another thing that I’ve had to realize is okay to work with. This is a sign that our movement is growing more unified and more serious.

Class conflict is escalating, the inflation crisis and the Fed’s deliberate drive to expand unemployment have made this inevitable. The question is whether communists can direct the growing worker uprisings in a direction that leads them to victory. The way to give them this power is by taking away the influence of the imperialism-compatible left, which blocks the workers from gaining effective outlets for revolt.

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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.

Class conflict is escalating. We must defeat the “Marxist” anti-communists who seek to stop workers victory.

The only exceptional thing about the crisis the working class is experiencing is that it comes at a stage in capitalism’s collapse where the potential for destruction is unprecedented. Where the system is producing the greatest ever risk of nuclear war, a destabilization of the climate, and the terminal decline of the economic system within the American sphere. These events cause or correlate with a great amount of misery and deprivation for the working class, but misery and deprivation for the working class are not the exception. There have always been horrifically exploited people under capitalism. And during the last half-century, this exploitation has been getting progressively more severe, and present in the lives of more people. Socioeconomic cruelty is nothing new for a great proportion of society. This inflation crisis, and the Fed’s scheme to exacerbate it by driving up unemployment for corporate interests, represent the point where this cruelty has grown big enough to cause unprecedented mass backlash.

The movement that’s been provoked by the elite’s recent crimes against the working class is visible in the new rise of strikes, union activity, and in a broader sense antiwar organizing, since imperialism depends on sacrificing the proletariat’s livelihoods in the imperial center. It has the potential to be more effective and sustainable than Occupy Wall Street, so long as the spontaneous outrage behind it gets directed towards the organizations which can make it revolutionary. That’s where one of the movement’s biggest ideological obstacles comes in. There’s a class of petty-bourgeois intellectuals, among them the Yugoslavian anti-communist movement participant Slavoj Zizek, whose goal is to prevent the rise of an effective workers movement. As the class conflict grows more intense, these actors will try to redirect radical sentiments towards their set of ideas, which appear radical on the surface but fundamentally oppose workers revolution.

Key to understanding how these academic and commentary types operate is by seeing just how narrow their targeted audience is. They’re not trying to reach the broad mass of workers, as the average worker doesn’t have the time or the incentive to absorb what they say. They’re trying to reach students, those involved in organizing spaces, and those involved in online political spheres. These types represent the minority whose life circumstances can lead them to come across any of the work of the pseudo-Marxist intellectuals. Their unique situation makes them prime for becoming the most advanced section of the workers, but only if they gain the dialectical perspective. If their thinking is instead shaped by the petty-bourgeois distorters of Marxism, they’ll become apathetic, or aggressive social media promoters of these distortions who actively impede the proletariat’s victory.

With this context, which shows the distorters of Marxism seek to limit their audience to a particular subset, we can get a sense of what proletarian revolutionary agitation must look like: a campaign to reach the people as a whole, rather than a niche. That’s what I’m trying to do by using rhetoric which centers class, as class is the unifying interest among all the different identity groups who are disadvantaged by the system. This type of educational material can’t reach everyone either, since as long as capitalism dominates, there will be plenty of workers who lack the time to read everything I write. But by its nature as an appeal to the needs of every proletarian, this material is capable of resonating with more of society than petty-bourgeois intellectualism can. And if proletarian propagandists like myself create content that’s digestible for the average person, alongside the polemics directed at our own community, we’ll be able to make the theory more popular.

Whereas Marxist material can lead someone to deeply relate to and understand it, the works of these intellectuals are designed to have the effect of estranging the average person from the idea of theory. As the way commentators like Zizek present “theory” makes it look like a procedure of observing things through a personal, rather than a materialist, lens of analysis. Which, to someone without the luxuries of abundant free time and mental space, feels shallow, something only an out of touch person would care about.

This shrinking of the appeal of theory is the point of what these actors do. The Marxist scholar Gabriel Rockhill describes Zizek as someone whose job is to replace the material with the idealist, to get his readers to disregard the notion of seriously analyzing our reality: “Žižek, like Badiou, is not a historical materialist. Neither of these philosophers engage in rigorous analysis of the concrete, material history of capitalism and the world socialist movement, and they eschew serious political economy in favor of discussing superstructural elements and products of the bourgeois cultural apparatus. Both of them openly indulge in an idealist philosophical approach that privileges ideas and discourses, and they are metaphysicians who defend an anti-scientific belief in superstition.” A look at the particular way Zizek makes anti-communist arguments reveals the use this framing has in molding minds. 

Left-liberal commentators like Chomsky assail Leninism by promoting the same myths about it that Zizek promotes, i.e. that Leninism was anti-democratic and a betrayal of the revolution. But Zizek’s superstitious, philosophically oriented type of thinking makes his statements more damaging to revolutionary consciousness than Chomsky’s. This is because whereas Chomsky merely says Leninism and “Stalinism” are evil, Zizek puts forth an actual operating procedure for left anti-communists to try to frustrate the spread of dialectical ideas.

This procedure he proposes is to attack the idea of the people, as a whole, being worthy of admiration. His premise is that “Stalinism” and its supposed crimes, which left anti-communists presently project onto China and the DPRK, is justified by the idea that these deeds are necessary for advancing the interests of the collective. Zizek therefore concludes that through satire which points out the shallowness and self-absorption which people can fall into, this narrative basis for “Stalinism” will be broken apart. I don’t know how seriously this idea is even worth taking, as it’s obviously an example of Zizek’s standard analytical method where he takes something and gives his opinion on it without real investigation. But the fact that there are minds which can be brought to take it seriously shows it poses a kind of threat towards working class victory.

To combat this and the other reactionary ideas these actors put forth, it’s necessary to do more than argue against them directly. I could point out the misleading nature of the historical narrative about Stalin having been a figure who was tied to some exceptional series of crimes, or how a derisive attitude towards the people naturally leads to a stance that’s incompatible with proletarian revolution. I could also decry Zizek for his pro-imperialist ideas, which are a natural extension of his rejection of dialectics. But these aren’t the arguments that can render the postmodernist, anti-dialectical perspective unable to influence popular consciousness. The argument that can truly do this is one which presents an alternative mode of thinking, a mode of thinking whose superiority at letting us understand the world is easy to see. That’s how to make it readily apparent why the notions that come out of his analytical framework are wrong.

This alternative mode is one which tells the worker: “Your ever-worsening circumstances can absolutely be turned into a scenario where you’re the one in control over your workplace. In fact, the long arc of history favors this scenario, as it’s the next stage of societal development.” As opposed to the insular “left” intellectual sphere’s narrative, which in effect says: “Your circumstances have no clear way of being ended, and you shouldn’t listen to those who say otherwise, as they represent a perversion of socialism.” A “socialism” that’s opposed to dialectics is not a socialism that can actually change history, except for when it obstructs history’s progression. It can only act as another brand, one constructed by appropriating the aesthetics of the real thing.

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USA’s new cold war has prompted China to become more revolutionary, advancing the anti-imperialist struggle

There is an idea within academic, commentary, and left-wing activist spheres which has come to act as the primary obstacle towards the development of revolutionary consciousness. This idea can be summarized as: “the most effective challengers to capital and empire are not worth taking example from.” Whether this idea is used to propagate the foundational left anti-communist myth (this being that Stalin ruined the Russian revolution), or one of the left anti-communist myths about today’s socialist experiments, its function is to sabotage the emergence of a vanguard. To target ideologically developing individuals who could otherwise become members of a revolutionary effort, and lead them to a stance that causes them to help maintain the existing social order.

When somebody has embraced this stance, they can decry the policies of the U.S. government all they like, and still inhabit this role as an obstacle towards the people’s victory. Such is what happens with the left-wing radicals who get successfully sent down the anti-China ideological pipeline. By anti-China, I mean more than when somebody is advocating for a militaristic policy towards the PRC. I also mean when somebody promotes debunked or unproven accounts of human rights abuses, something that even critics of the new cold war reliably do when they have a platform backed by capital. This self-reinforcing set of ideas, where the fundamental myths behind the war on China are affirmed within our discourse even by those who don’t want war, is made possible by the foremost left anti-communist notion of our time. This is the notion that the PRC’s system of government can’t genuinely be called socialist.

To take this position, one has to be coming from a place not informed by a dialectical analysis of history. The liberal view of China—which is to say the view that has an incentive to protect imperialist interests by devaluing imperialism’s challengers—looks at China’s elements of private enterprise, and concludes from this that China must not be a dictatorship of the proletariat. What’s revealing is that the types who take this stance predominantly don’t even care about establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat. They’re liberals who celebrate the fall of the USSR, and the massive social murder this led to, because they view any model of democracy which the bourgeoisie can’t domineer as anti-democratic. There are also the ultra-leftists who believe China was a dictatorship of the proletariat prior to Deng and Jintao’s reforms, but their view is the minority one, since most within their broader ideological camp think Mao was a “totalitarian.” Whether regular liberalism or ultra-leftism is the driver behind their statements, the perception they share is that China’s opening up its markets renders its socialism a fraudulent one.

This view is undialectical because it disregards what the market reforms have been leading up to this entire time. That being the reversal of the liberalizations which the country underwent, and the restoration of its more nationalized original model. Except because of those reforms, and the immense wealth they brought, this model will now have the economic basis to be sustainable.

The argument of these liberals is that China’s government can’t be trusted to allow such a dismantling of private business, because supposedly the integrity of the country’s ruling party became compromised when the reforms were implemented. If this were true, then China wouldn’t have responded to Washington’s provocations against it by embarking on just such a project to de-liberalize, and to more effectively counter imperialism in the process. The assumption of the anti-China left was that the country would never progress beyond the most privatized stage that it was in during the 90s and 20s, that its project to build up its productive forces could only bring a terminal decline of socialism within the country. Now that the war on China has prompted China to choose between liberalism and revolutionary politics, it’s shown to have picked the latter path. There are some liberals within the 90-million-strong Communist Party who seek to join the U.S. bloc, and to implement the Khrushchevite reforms the U.S. wants, but their side has lost.

The initial way China was compelled by Washington’s attacks to embrace a more revolutionary role was by adopting a highly assertive foreign policy. Since 2012, right after Obama’s “pivot to Asia” in which Washington began the new cold war, the PRC has been acting with the mindset that it must further its sovereignty, its security, and by extension its global standing. The liberals say this is nothing more than a rival imperialist project, but Xi Jinping has directly rebuked this charge, saying: “China will never seek hegemony, expansion, or a sphere of influence no matter how strong it may grow.” The type of influence that China has gained and will gain is distinct from a “sphere of influence” as Washington defines it, where a country increases its power not to cooperate with others but to exploit and subjugate them. The myths about China acting like this, promoted by supposedly subversive commentary sources like the Daily Show, are easy to debunk. 

U.S. hegemony is the globe’s primary contradiction, the PRC is weakening U.S. hegemony, and the PRC isn’t creating a new imperialism by the term’s Leninist (as in materialist) definition. So this policy alone has given the country a greater revolutionary status than it had only two decades ago. China still hasn’t gone so far as to voice support for Russia’s anti-fascist war in Ukraine, like the DPRK has done. But China doesn’t need to be so vocal, nor send weapons into the conflict as Washington alleges, to assist in Russia’s effort at accelerating the U.S. empire’s downfall. It’s only had to affirm that Russia was provoked, while meeting with Putin about helping get Ukraine to agree to a peace plan.

The PRC has also grown more revolutionary in its domestic policies. Xi Jinping’s aggressive anti-corruption campaign was a prelude to the war China’s government has lately been waging against the country’s billionaires. Bloomberg wrote last year about one type of recent historical contrast that’s shown this increase in the Communist Party’s radicalism:

Cheers greeted China President Xi Jinping as he toured Beijing’s Renmin University of China in April, telling students and teachers: “We must continue to promote the modernization of Marxism.” Social science research, he said, should have “Chinese characteristics” and contribute to “China’s independent knowledge system.” It was a notable contrast to 11 years earlier, when Hu Jintao, Xi’s predecessor, visited the same campus, “listening carefully” to discussions on macroeconomics. That was in China’s boom years. The economy was growing faster than 10% a year, and private entrepreneurs in sectors such as real estate and technology operated with more autonomy than ever. Corruption and pollution were rampant. Karl Marx wasn’t mentioned. Now, Xi was meeting with two “political economists”—Liu Wei, the university’s president, and Zhao Feng—who blend Marxism with elements of Western economics. The visit highlighted China’s pivot to funding and supporting researchers who are suspicious of the power of private business, with some advocating barring private capital from entire sectors. The message was clear: In today’s China, Marxism is back, and investors had better take note.

This isn’t quite how a serious Marxist would portray these events, because those who properly grasp dialectics understand that whatever valid criticisms could be made of the Deng/Jintao era, Marxism was never truly not present within China. If Marxism had been successfully expunged from the party, its recent shift back towards nationalization, increase in penalties upon unethical business practices, and redoubling of efforts to foster class consciousness within government wouldn’t have happened. Post-Mao China has never been an equivalent of the post-Stalin Soviet Union, because Deng was not another Khrushchev. He didn’t make the party unable to ever again commit to class struggle, because he didn’t weaken the dictatorship of the proletariat like Khrushchev did in the USSR. The mechanisms for the proletariat to assert its dominance have still been in place. 

Moreover, the Deng reforms themselves didn’t turn China into a neoliberal haven, but rather allowed for a controlled element of private business that existed alongside the state-controlled elements. Therefore the idea that China ever regressed back to capitalism is overly simplistic. As Invent the Future clarified in 2018, prior to when the nationalization reached its present intensity:

Although the number of employees of private enterprises has overtaken the number of employees of state- and collectively-owned companies, the basic economic agenda is set by the state. Private production is encouraged by the state only because it contributes to modernisation, technological development and employment. While some Marxists may insist that markets can have no place under socialism, it’s difficult to reconcile such a view with Marx’s own view of socialism as a transitional stage on the road to communism. China has proven in reality that it can use (heavily regulated) market mechanisms in order to more rapidly develop the productive forces and improve the living standards of its people. It will come as a surprise to many readers to know that public ownership continues to dominate in China. There has been very little in the way of actual privatisation, in terms of transferring ownership of state enterprises into the hands of private capital; indeed, the state sector is several times bigger than it was in 1978, when the reforms were launched. Rather, private enterprise was allowed to develop alongside the state sector, and has grown at an even faster rate than the state sector (bear in mind that it started from a very low base).

Even throughout the country’s past pollution crisis, healthcare privatization, and rise of a billionaire class, a basic proletarian democratic structure was maintained. A structure that the workers could use to undo the liberalizations when the right time came. Now that this time has come, the rich have been collectively losing hundreds of billions, at the same time the people’s living standards continue to rise following 2020’s elimination of absolute poverty within China.

The liberals will still say China’s new guiding class of Marxist economists can’t reconcile Marxism with the relatively open economy the PRC still has for the time being. Yet even when they’re proven wrong, and the economy becomes further de-liberalized, these dishonest actors will still say China isn’t building authentic socialism. We know this because even when these actors look at the DPRK, the socialist country that’s not had free market reforms and has developed the furthest towards communism, they still say Juche Korea isn’t a true example of socialism. Whether they say this because they’re NATO liberals, and believe the Orientalist myths about the DPRK being a “totalitarian monarchy,” or because they’re ultras, and reject Juche as a perversion of socialism, their essential sentiments are consistent. No country will ever be socialist enough for them, nor will any country ever be carrying out anti-imperialism in a way that they deem morally acceptable. Those who’ve set themselves up against China, Russia, the DPRK, and the other countries resisting U.S. hegemony have placed themselves on the losing side of history, letting the rest of the world progress without them.

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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.