The Uhuru indictments have shown that we’re living under a liberal version of fascism, or rather an increasingly visible iteration of the liberal fascism that’s always been here. The decline of American influence; the crisis of overproduction which this decline is exacerbating; the escalating class struggle coming from the consequential rise in inequality; these things are pressuring monopoly finance capital into intensifying its war against all democratic and dissenting forces. We’re only one more false flag away from the government creating a pretext for an unprecedented wave of repression against the anti-imperialist movement, and against the other popular movements by extension. To survive this siege, and overthrow the state, we need to continue building the anti-monopoly coalition which has emerged in response to Biden’s Ukraine proxy war.
The communist William Z. Foster wrote about the need for such a coalition when the first cold war was soon to begin, and when McCarthyism was only a few years away. He concluded that the communist movement could only go on if it made an alliance with all the other ideological elements which opposed the impending reactionary repression campaign; and, by extension, with the broad masses of the people:
The cue to the trade unions, in facing the post-war period, is to unify their ranks, nationally and internationally, to organize the millions of still unorganized workers, to develop their united political action movement so that they may be a real force in the democratic coalition, to establish the broadest possible alliance with all other democratic groups and classes, to defeat reaction in the coming national elections, to prepare constructive economic proposals for the postwar period and work diligently for them, and generally to strengthen their ranks and be in readiness to defend their organizations and their living standards from any and all attacks by their powerful and inveterate enemy, monopoly capital. It would be disastrous if our Party were in any way to weaken labor’s alertness to these necessities.
This is a manifesto for basing the workers movement not within the dictates of any movement elites, but within the people themselves; a vanguard can’t become a vanguard until it’s earned that role by building a connection with the workers, and gained the popular respect required to lead the workers. That means discarding the insular, ineffectual model of operating that’s practiced by all of today’s major U.S. “socialist” orgs, including Foster’s party the CPUSA. The disaster he worried about has come true, with the leadership of the modern CPUSA embracing the liberal tailist strategy of calling to vote for Democratic presidential candidates.
This isn’t the way to combat the reactionary forces in a given election, that would mean voting for a third party candidate who challenges both reactionary major parties; the present CPUSA’s strategy is the way of exclusively appealing to liberals. Such a desire to keep favor among liberal voters and NGOs is why CPUSA, as well as the relatively less reformist PSL, have both denounced Russia’s intervention against U.S. hegemony and Ukrainian fascism. Their goal is not to build the anti-monopoly coalition that can rescue American communism from the encroaching liberal fascism; it’s to gain enough of a presence within liberal and radical liberal spaces to be able to say they’ve successfully built an organization. But what’s the point of having an org if it rejects the strategy for winning a majority of the people?
This insular attitude within the prevailing Marxist spaces is a symptom of a wider pattern of thinking within modern American society; a kind of thinking that dominates liberalism, as well as the iterations of “socialism” that seek to tail liberalism. This is the anti-popular mentality, the mentality that elites need to be the sole ones in charge so history isn’t guided by a popular mass which supposedly can’t be trusted in the least.
That hostility towards the majority has obviously always been present among the ruling class. And with the 2016 election, when the popular will started leading to developments the dominant part of this class didn’t like, advocates of liberal technocracy made their anti-democratic bias heard; one such advocate was Andrew Sullivan, who put forth the idea that “Democracies end when they are too democratic”:
Elites still matter in a democracy. They matter not because they are democracy’s enemy but because they provide the critical ingredient to save democracy from itself. The political Establishment may be battered and demoralized, deferential to the algorithms of the web and to the monosyllables of a gifted demagogue, but this is not the time to give up on America’s near-unique and stabilizing blend of democracy and elite responsibility. The country has endured far harsher times than the present without succumbing to rank demagoguery; it avoided the fascism that destroyed Europe; it has channeled extraordinary outpourings of democratic energy into constitutional order. It seems shocking to argue that we need elites in this democratic age — especially with vast inequalities of wealth and elite failures all around us. But we need them precisely to protect this precious democracy from its own destabilizing excesses.
It was when Trump won, and the American republic was perceived by the liberal elites to now be in serious existential danger, that they constructed a psyop designed to propagate their view of the majority of the people as being a threat. This psyop was Russiagate, the conspiracy narrative which not only manufactured consent for a new cold war, but accomplished something crucial for the survival of our liberal cultural hegemony: convince liberals and leftists that those who aren’t susceptible to the anti-Russian orthodoxy have simply been brainwashed by foreign propaganda.
Even the smarter leftists, the ones who reject the idea that Russian propaganda is behind the pro-Russian element of the workers, embrace the idea that these workers are necessarily reactionary for siding with Russia in our geopolitical conflict. And because it’s supposed to be the job of leftists and Marxists to defeat liberal ideas, for so many of them to have been swayed by the anti-popular psyop represented a great loss for the class struggle.
The way that Russiagate reinforced the anti-popular worldview within contemporary U.S. Marxist spaces; bringing many of the former Sanders supporters into this worldview after they became Marxists; was by affirming the preexisting feeling within these circles that all outside of the “left” can’t be trusted. This psyop provided further institutional support for these anti-popular attitudes among activist spaces. It made the Democratic Party (which has plenty of infiltrators within Marxist circles) intensely focused on vilifying all counter-hegemonic elements as inherently reactionary.
This has produced a new generation of Marxists who at worst embrace the anti-Russian stance under the belief that all pro-Russian groups are simply extensions of MAGA; or at best support Russia in theory, while opposing any project to create an anti-NATO coalition which extends beyond the insular left spaces. In both cases, the conclusion these activists come to is that nurturing the anti-imperialist impulses of the majority of the workers simply means “empowering the right.”
To counter the anti-popular psyop, we need to expose the hypocrisy of this effort by these liberals and leftists to be principled on “fighting fascism.” To denounce anti-imperialist actions by countries within the pro-China bloc; or to reject Foster’s strategy of building an anti-monopoly coalition; is not anti-fascist. If anything, it’s the opposite, as liberal fascism depends on such ideas. The political actors invested in the anti-popular psyop predicate their stance on the argument that all antiwar elements which aren’t on the “left” are fascist; which not only misrepresents the character of tens of millions of Americans, but makes one unable to reach the tens of millions of others who are at present apolitical.
The class struggle won’t get anywhere if it remains confined to the circles which the Western Marxist purity fetish says we need to exclusively operate within. It can only win on the basis of Foster’s anti-monopoly alliance, in which all democratic and dissident forces unite to resist our ever-more perilous liberal fascism.
The Democratic Party infiltrators within Marxist spaces seek to discredit these authentically counter-hegemonic projects by claiming they’re fringe or irrelevant; and that’s how one can tell that these people are Democrat infiltrators. “Fringe” is a term the DNC and its media servants have been using against those challenging the liberal order for decades; what it really means is that these anti-liberal forces lack institutional backing, which they obviously can’t get in a society where the ruling institutions are liberal.
Under a system like ours, the only types of “socialist” institutions that can escape the persecution and wildly destructive COINTELPRO attacks which the pro-Russian orgs have lately been subjected to are ones that become appendages to the Democratic Party. Caleb Maupin has in effect exposed this reality in his deconstruction of the PSL:
Youth who attend PSL functions and show a knowledge of or strong interest in Marxism will be treated with suspicion. PSL Cadre are quick to tell you “We are real organizers! We aren’t interested in those books by old white men!” PSL wants to be a protest club for young liberal hipsters, not a group of working people embracing history’s challenge. If one challenges PSL’s ideological positions or tactics, the argument will inevitably lead to the classic Marcyite-movementist refrain of “Yeah? Well we actually do something!” PSL recruitment materials, while slicker and having better production values than other socialist tendencies, are about as watered down and liberal as you can get. Recruitment videos consist of members staring into a camera saying something more or less equivalent to “Look at us! We are a group of people of diverse races and genders who can recite liberal mantras! Don’t you think racism and war are bad? Join the PSL because we do lots of protesting and stuff.”
The fact that PSL nominated Gloria La Riva as their 2020 Presidential candidate instead of a younger or more charismatic cadre reveals an entrenched bureaucratism that will ultimately doom the organization beyond its mistaken tactical orientation. PSL is the property of the Becker family and their selected clique of activists, a protest hustle they have opportunistically monetized and will never willingly give up despite the actual needs of the class struggle. Like WWP, PSL will cling to the toxic liberal “movement” and continue to reassure everyone of its supposed potential, much like musicians who kept strumming away as the Titanic sank.
Following the PSL’s actions from this year, in which its ANSWER organizers tried to censure and isolate the pro-Russian orgs, it’s easy to see the similarities between the thinking of Brian Becker and the thinking of Andrew Sullivan. Both the liberal technocrats, and the liberal-aligned Marxists, feel they have a mandate to police who can and can’t be allowed to contribute to history. As Marxists, we ultimately aim to suppress the reactionary ideologies; the catastrophic error of these liberal tailist Marxists is that they’ve judged all who seriously challenge our liberal cultural hegemony as reactionaries.
Someone being a “reactionary” isn’t dependent on whether they embrace every belief that leftists are supposed to embrace; it’s dependent on whether they have a progressive historical role, or are working to hold history back. The majority of the people in the USA have a primary material interest in ending imperialism, and in carrying out workers revolution; therefore they have the potential to become revolutionary, even if they don’t all undergo a complete cultural evolution prior to then. At this stage, it’s their economic and geopolitical beliefs which matter the most; which can determine whether we’ll be able to defeat the state. By using purity as an excuse to forsake the majority of the people, the promoters of the anti-popular psyop are advancing a reactionary project, even when they claim their aims are progressive.
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