In our time of liberal fascism, where the Biden administration is indicting communists for doing anti-imperialist work while trying to use the RESTRICT act to codify this practice, the main “Red-Brown alliance” is the one between the liberal fascists and the “Marxists” who tail them. Our equivalents of the Strasserites, the element of socialists who allied with the Nazis, are largely the liberal tailists who claim to be “Marxists” while volunteering to be Democratic Party discourse agents. There are still the types who are right opportunists, yet they lack the kind of narrative power that the left opportunists have.
The left opportunists have chosen the side within our partisan divide that’s more able to blunt class consciousness, because the majority of Americans are not reactionaries and are therefore more susceptible to the ideas put forth by the liberals. Ideas like the one that in order to prevent fascism, we have to vote blue, support our “democratic institutions” such as the intelligence agencies, and hate Russia (which within the liberal narrative is inseparably associated with the American right).
The fallacy of this lesser evil argument is that the liberal side is a lot more evil than its apologists will ever want to admit. We’re seeing a version of fascism being developed by the liberals, under the guise of defending from “foreign interference” and “protecting our democracy.” Russiagate, a psyop that’s ongoing, is about creating a dichotomy between the fascists and the good side, when in reality this “good side” fundamentally represents the same type of social system the other one does. The logical conclusion of this narrative is that if anybody fights against the militarist, corporate brand of politics the Democrats have come to even more aggressively embrace during the last decade, they should be seen as on the side of the fascists.
When you pay attention to the types of people and organizations that these liberal tailist “Marxists” or “progressives” attack, you see that this McCarthyist campaign under the guise of social justice is what they consistently advance. It doesn’t matter if they claim to oppose the Democratic Party, this is the impact that their sectarian actions have. An example of this is when the supposedly radical Black Agenda Report tried to discredit the Rage Against the War Machine rally and coalition. As the organizer Jamie Gray has pointed out in his rebuttal to BAR’s polemic, the reasoning behind it was driven by an emotional reaction, not by a serious analysis of what we need to do to win the class war:
Mao united with the anti-communist KMT to defeat the Japanese. Did Mao (the famous communist) become an anti-communist in so doing?...So if someone hasn’t been there from day one they’re not trustworthy? Have you considered that maybe subjective conditions of the human consciousness have a delayed response to the objective conditions of reality? That is, things have been bad for Black Americans for a long time, nobody disagrees with this, but now that whites are also beginning to wake up to the evils of this bloody empire, you’re suddenly going to push them away? Have fun losing…Come to the rally and talk to these people. Interview them. Do what Fred Hampton’s Rainbow Coalition would’ve done. Figure out if they’re really this insane caricature you make them out to be. The Russian Revolution was carried out by a working class that had just years prior being doing anti-semitic pogroms, but the Bolsheviks found ways to rally them up and turn them against such backwards racists ideas.
These sectarians could reply by claiming that this alliance between the different tendencies of the anti-NATO movement is equivalent not to the alliances Mao or the Bolsheviks built, but to the one the Strasserites built. When you truly investigate the nature of this alliance, do you honestly find something that reflects this characterization though? You do not, because the sectarians have an interest in portraying this situation as greatly different from how it actually is.
Those seeking to discredit this anti-NATO coalition repeat the “Red-Brown alliance” accusation as a reflex, yet when you honestly examine the character of the coalition’s most right-oriented participants, you don’t find any Browns, as in fascists. At the most you find bourgeois or pro-bourgeois forces, like the Libertarians, that are distinct from fascists. It would be dishonest to call them fascists, the differences between these two things matter. The impulse to equate them comes from the same anti-Marxist place as when imperialism-compatible leftists call Russia a fascist state. By the standard they’re using, every bourgeois state is fascist, which isn’t a serious way of analyzing conditions. That’s why the attempts to discredit the idea of a united front against NATO, and the attempts to discredit Russia’s military effort at defying U.S. hegemony, are so comparable.
When one is arguing against Russia’s action in Ukraine from a “communist” angle, they have to reckon with how it was Russia’s communists who led the effort at pressuring Putin into acting in Ukraine. The CPRF began warning after the 2014 coup that if the Russian government didn’t handle the situation properly, tragedy would come. And tragedy did come in the form of Ukraine’s shelling of the Donbass, most of which would have been prevented if Putin hadn’t waited eight years to start dismantling Ukraine’s military. It was the ideas of the communists, not the ones of Putin or of those to his right, that ultimately brought Russia to work towards eliminating the Nazi threat. This is evident from how Russia’s fascists have not gained more state power amid the war, but have instead become more marginal within the government. It’s the communists who’ve gotten more ideological influence as Russia has looked for guidance on how to fulfill its anti-fascist task.
And in the arena where it matters, that being the arena of demilitarization, Russia has succeeded in its task. It’s made Ukraine’s military too exhausted to mathematically be able to achieve its strategic goals, making the Ukrainian side’s only reliable long-term fighters the Nazi terrorist cells. Which aren’t capable of winning back Ukraine’s lost territories, and certainly not of reversing the damage Russia’s operation has done to U.S. influence.
This is what actually comes from an alliance between communists and the national bourgeoisie to combat a situation’s primary contradiction, that contradiction in this case being U.S. hegemony: history is successfully brought to a new stage of progress. Operation Z has made Banderism’s victory impossible while weakening imperial power, and the imperial center’s united anti-NATO front has exposed the broad masses to anti-imperialist ideas. The front has done so with the Rage Against the War Machine rally, which gained mainstream media attention (as well as provoked alarmed efforts from the liberal establishment to discredit it). The front’s next steps are to expand its coalition, bring its ideas to more of the people, and (as far as its left flank is concerned) use this anti-NATO shift in mass consciousness to grow the revolutionary organizations.
These past and future achievements of the front wouldn’t be possible if we communists were to isolate ourselves from the other anti-NATO elements, if we were to assume we could build a relationship with the people while not using the great platforms that these elements have. The platform of the Libertarians, and of the supposedly MAGA communist group Midwestern Marx, are capable of reaching a significant amount of the people, and we shouldn’t disregard this. Lenin warned about the folly of the “left” revolutionaries who did this in regard to refusing to work within reactionary trade unions, and his reasoning is applicable to our task of fighting U.S. hegemony. The actors who seek to convince us it’s not applicable care not about winning, but about gatekeeping.
Upon seeing any serious opportunity for bringing the hegemon to defeat, they make connections to fascism that aren’t there, trying to link the communists who take this opportunity to political forces which aren’t even helping with the effort. We’ve seen this in the attempts to tie Russian mercenaries to neo-Nazis, when the case for that idea has rested upon social media hoaxes amplified by groups like NAFO. Don’t trust these manipulators, trust serious analyses of our conditions.
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