Milei and “Bronze Age Pervert” are narrative tools for trying to neutralize a rising anti-imperialist libertarian element

Only twenty years ago, when our government and media were doing all they could to sell the war in Iraq, they had almost ideal conditions for carrying out an imperialist psyop. They were able to fully harness the power of religion, and of U.S. patriotism, to convince the majority of the people that Washington had an obligation to intervene in any given part of the globe. Then the country underwent a political reorientation. One where more liberals revealed themselves to be obstinate supporters of the new cold war, while many right-leaning people shifted towards a proto kind of anti-imperialism.

It was a spontaneous mass consciousness shift, brought about through the great disillusionment that came from Obama’s refusal to rescue the working class from the 2008 economic meltdown. And it irreversibly weakened the imperialist narrative managers. “A lot of people probably tuned out from mainstream media long ago,” wrote the journalist Caitlin Johnstone in 2018, “but as the manipulators of the political establishment become more desperate, their movements are becoming a lot more obvious, and they’ve been giving us a lot of valuable information lately.” At this stage, the main thing the narrative managers are trying to do is re-create the old dynamic of left-right culture war battles, and thereby prevent the people’s anti-imperialist impulses from being nurtured. 

When it comes to the right, their tactic for doing so is to promote illiberal figures—such as Javier Milei and the far-right polemicist Bronze Age Pervert—to lead conservatives and libertarians towards aiding imperialism. This is an attempt to replace the greatly effective discourse psyop that the empire used to be able to utilize. 

The war propaganda machine’s main strategy from the Bush era was based within the ideas propagated by Murdoch media, which portray the world as a struggle between the “good” American side and the “evil” communist side. The ruling class, which at that moment was mainly invested in the Republican Party, could manufacture consent for war by connecting imperialist interventions to God, country, and the family. This was so useful for the propagandists because they were able to make illiberal values, in which one feels devoted to a certain belief system and social structure, appear to be dependent on supporting U.S. foreign policy. 

As time passed, and capitalism entered into its next phase of collapse, those illiberal values stayed while the loyalty to the war machine went away. By 2015, the predominant section of U.S. conservatives approved of Trump’s statement “the American dream is dead.” Which translated to them also now being watchful of efforts by our most powerful institutions to scam them, whether through unsafe vaccines or through wars sold under false pretenses.

Milei and Bronze and Pervert are working to sell just such a war: the proxy war against China which the new cold warriors want in Taiwan. Milei’s administration has been participating in Taiwan provocations, while for years BAP has been aggressively promoting the empire’s Taiwan narratives. To make these things appeal to their target audience, they’re surrounding their pro-war activities with an updated version of the Fox News rhetoric that worked so well a generation ago. This month Milei gave a speech at the World Economic Forum that blamed “socialism” for the world’s economic ills, and that’s been described as having “broken the internet.” BAP is promoting a version of this kind of new rightism that’s more extreme, combining his anti-communist arguments with statements decrying our lack of ethnic homogeneity.

You’d think that antisemitism would be central to the rhetoric of these two narrative manipulation actors. But with the present effort to sell the genocide against Gaza, the main right-wing psyops are for the moment pivoting away from that particular tactic. Milei is a fanatical Zionist who’s converted to Judaism because of this, while BAP is Jewish and able to be accepted by far-righters who don’t prioritize attacking Jews. That doesn’t mean antisemitism doesn’t continue to be prevalent on the right, though, with much of the conservative opposition towards Israel coming from antisemitic conspiracy thinking rather than genuine anti-imperialist consciousness. And the modern right’s psyops have potential to take advantage of this widespread antisemitism, even if they’re at present trying to distance themselves from it. (Which is of course nothing more than posturing, as Milei has put Nazis in his cabinet; this mirrors how Israel itself maintains ties to global fascist movements, including Nazi ones like Ukraine’s Banderites.)

Antisemitism is one part of the larger phenomenon of false consciousness, which represents the basis for today’s right-wing psyops. The war propagandists of yesterday told conservatives that they must hate Washington’s geopolitical challengers in order to defend our powerful institutions, because back then conservatives saw these institutions as friends of God and the family. Now that most conservatives no longer see these institutions as allies for their illiberal religious social structures, the war propagandists instead tell them that Washington’s adversaries are on the side of the deep state. 

Alex Jones, another one of these controlled opposition “libertarians,” has been pushing this lie the most explicitly. He’s been saying that China and Iran are involved in the social engineering schemes of the Democratic Party, the legacy media, big pharma, and the intelligence agencies. Which is an idea so absurd that someone could only believe it if they’re already on an ideological path which makes them inclined to make conspiratorial connections, while rejecting a materialist analysis.

This is the same way that people come to antisemitism, or “the stupid man’s socialism.” In order to be radicalized towards blaming the wrong sources for capitalism’s contradictions, you need to be persuaded to view serious thinkers as part of the conspiracy. Like when Russia’s czarists tried to save their threatened system by fabricating the antisemitic propaganda piece “Protocols of the Elders of Zion;” or when anti-communists invented the “Judeo-Bolshevism” narrative to portray Marxism as a Jewish conspiracy; today’s imperialist psyop agents want to shift blame onto designated scapegoats while demonizing those who correctly diagnose the problem.

When Trotsky saw the Russian peasantry in large part be susceptible to antisemitism, his response was to stubbornly insist that the peasantry wasn’t worth prioritizing within the revolution, leading him to his idealist “permanent revolution” theory. Communists of today can’t make the equivalent mistake. We must organize against imperialism and monopoly capitalism in our communities, whether urban or rural, with the intent of bringing in revolutionary elements wherever they exist. When we find false consciousness, which is going to be often, we need to respond not by concluding that the people are fundamentally reactionary. We need to respond by working with the allies we can find within the fight against the primary contradiction, that being U.S. hegemony. 

This doesn’t mean tailing the reactionaries or condoning bigotry, it means embracing the only strategy which can let us defeat reactionary politics. It will let us smash monopoly capital, while proving communists to be the friend that the people need. This is what will let us expand our efforts to educate the people, and advance our consciousness shift to its next stage: the stage where the people have not only recognized that our imperialist institutions are the enemy, but also recognized how to fight this enemy.

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The U.S. influence network that wants to turn China into a tool for the American culture war’s left wing

Above: Roy Singham

To have a positive role within the anti-imperialist struggle, communists in the United States need to understand two things: 

1) that our government continues to use the tactic of backing leftist or “communist” forces which can divide or mislead the global communist movement, and…

2) that the politics being pushed by U.S. millionaire Roy Singham fit the description of such an imperialist destabilization force. 

Ever since Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzeziński got Washington to start infiltrating communist formations abroad, as opposed to its old policy of indiscriminately opposing all communist elements, the U.S. empire has been able to gain an unprecedented amount of control over the left. His idea was to use the New Left as a tool for undermining the proletarian struggle, rather than trying to fight it. Since the New Left’s origins were themselves connected to the CIA’s Frankfurt School, this maneuver was easy to carry out. And it let the imperialists find greater unity with the types of socialists who share their key foreign policy goals.

At this moment, imperialism’s biggest goal is to counter China, which Singham and the network of organizations he funds are useful to. They’re so useful precisely because they represent themselves as pro-China, as this gets them support from many more Marxists than would otherwise be the case. It also gets them support from more of the right types of Marxists, as anti-China Marxists are much further from being correct than the ones who support China. That’s the insidious character of the strategy Brzeziński came up with: it leads actors who would otherwise be positive influences on history towards unwittingly aiding the imperialists.

The suspect nature of Singham’s ostensibly pro-socialist activities is obvious on the surface, as Singham is himself a capitalist millionaire. This in itself isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as it’s possible for members of the bourgeoisie to become class traitors. What confirms him to be a class enemy to the workers is that instead of using his resources to genuinely advance the politics of the Communist Party of China, Singham is backing a distinctly American type of “socialism” which isn’t compatible with the CPC. From his home in Shanghai, he’s cultivating a network of NGOs and political parties whose role is to guide the U.S. communist movement—and the Chinese socialist power structure if possible—towards abandoning a genuine fight against U.S. hegemony.

The way they’re trying to do this is by creating a wedge between the PRC and Russia, China’s biggest strategic partner. And among the orgs Singham backs, the most prominent example of this is the Party for Socialism and Liberation. Since the Ukraine conflict escalated two years ago, the PSL has opposed Russia’s operation to rescue the Donbass Russian speakers from ethnic cleansing; taken a stance against multipolarity in response to Russia’s action; attacked the pro-Russian orgs even right after some of them had helped PSL; and worked to separate Russia from Africa. These acts of sabotage against the anti-imperialist movement are symptoms of a deeper ideological poison within today’s communist movement: the type of politics that seek to make “communism” simply mean American leftism with Red aesthetics.

To find the distinction between the authentic communism that the CPC represents, and the Brzeziński-type “communism” that Singham and his beneficiaries promote, look at the ideological basis for PSL’s growing hostility towards Russia. In strategic terms, the reason for PSL’s distancing itself from Russia is that its leadership wants to be able to appeal to as many liberals as possible. The leadership wouldn’t be able to sell this decision to the org’s members, though, without a certain narrative which liberal-aligned U.S. “Marxists” have come to believe about China. This is the narrative that China, as well as the DPRK, are embodiments of American wokeness. That the politics of these countries are essentially the same as the politics of American leftists, and that therefore all their achievements vindicate what these leftists believe.

The problem is that these leftists don’t truly share the predominant beliefs of the CPC. They view social and cultural issues through a narrowly American lens, not grasping how China and many other countries have highly distinct conditions. Conditions which are too different from those of the USA for an Americanized cultural framework to be applicable. In China, gender and sexuality lack the great significance that they have in U.S. culture. Where contradictions exist in China when it relates to these things, they’re not of the same nature as U.S. anti-trans and anti-gay legislation. The imperialists and their NGOs try to make it look like these things are equivalent, but it’s so far proving too hard to export the American culture war onto Chinese society. The separation between the story and the reality is simply too great.

Within the ostensibly pro-China wing of this liberal foreign influence network, the prevailing narrative is not that China’s government is like the Republican Party, but that it’s an essentially ideal end goal for the “left” side of the culture war. The perception is that the PRC and the DPRK are great avatars for wokeness, when the reality is that their societies are mostly detached from the woke vs anti-woke discourse psyop which dominates U.S. politics. China has in recent years come to have its first trans-affirming healthcare clinic, which is a good thing; that doesn’t mean its broader culture is now invested in the pro vs anti-LGBT discourse, though. This change has had to come of China’s own accord, not due to efforts by outside forces to impose their own wishes onto the country. What Singham does is back the types of American leftists who don’t understand China can resolve its own social questions, and think it’s their duty to get involved in other people’s cultural issues.

The outcome of this subtle kind of foreign interference is that through Singham and his NGOs, the anti-Russian element of the U.S. “left” has been able to gain greater access to China. And this element justifies its opposition towards Russia in large part through that ideology of American exceptionalist wokeness. It constructs a narrative where China is seen as the good guy due to its supposedly embodying modern U.S. leftism, while “fascist” Russia is seen as a threat to this alliance between “leftists.”

The mistake (or rather the purposeful distortion) of this ideology is to believe that the most important issue is whether a given country sufficiently fits the criteria for being “leftist.” Left vs right isn’t the framework we should be using, especially not for geopolitics. The primary issue is whether a country is on the side of international monopoly finance capital, which both Russia and China are not. This alone is enough of a reason to support the interests of both, and to refrain from concocting narratives about the two countries supposedly being destined to break up. This is the expectation for the future that the U.S. State Department wants us to embrace, there’s nothing to substantiate it. Russia’s decision to fully defy U.S. imperialism has made it have no choice but to continue strengthening its bond with the PRC, that’s the practical reality. Anybody who says otherwise is promoting an effort to divide and conquer Eurasia.

As much as the imperialism-compatible left tries to use China in its culture war fights, the country’s socialist project isn’t going to be corrupted, like the Soviet Union’s was. The PRC’s leadership is doing all it can to learn from the historical nihilist errors that led to the USSR’s dissolution, and of course the Sino-Soviet split isn’t going to be repeated. The best that these Brzeziński-aligned elements of the left can do is undermine the class struggle in the United States, which claiming to be pro-China better enables them to do. 

Because of this, in the last few years we’ve seen an increase in how much of the compatible left says it supports the PRC. What the Singham-aligned actors have done is use China’s Covid success as an argument in support of their pro-lockdown, pro-mandate stance. Which has created many more Marxists who love the PRC, but do so without truly understanding the conditions of China.

How can we tell who’s a reliable friend of China, and who’s using China for their own cynical interests? By seeing whether they act like China is simply an extension of American-style leftism, or they recognize that China is fundamentally different from this. We shouldn’t trust actors who try to bring U.S. culture war battles into other countries. We also shouldn’t trust actors who point to China’s pandemic response as evidence that the USA’s lockdowns and mandates have been worth supporting. China didn’t even have vaccine mandates, and its lockdowns were implemented along with measures to fulfill the people’s needs. The equivalent was not the case for the lockdowns in the USA, which only came along with a check of less than two thousand dollars. 

The CPC is not a more woke version of the Democratic Party, as the People’s Forum/PSL ideology essentially portrays it. The CPC is an authentic communist party, which places it in opposition to the anti-Eurasian agenda that these actors are advancing.

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WEF’s “Disease X” stunt is a threat of intensified economic & bio-assault on the people. Communists must help lead the resistance to this.

The last time a pandemic began, the political actors who proclaim themselves to be the best leaders of the socialist cause sided with the monopolists against the workers. They pretended that the pandemic response by the American empire’s capitalist state, and the pandemic response by socialist China, were equally deserving of support. Which could have no effect other than to aid our class enemies.

They endorsed the coercive vaccination policies, even though China didn’t even have an equivalent of the USA’s mandates. And they acted like the lockdowns weren’t a cover for an unprecedented power grab by monopoly capital. However much the liberalism-compatible socialists affirmed that these measures were essentially justified, the truth is that the lockdowns were a way for the country’s officials to make it look like they were doing something after they’d already failed to prevent a massive outbreak. This made them assist in a psyop that was designed to distract from a bailout of the biggest banks and corporations, a takeover by big tech, and a forcible distribution of big pharma’s latest experimental medicine.

The next time our ruling elites carry out an assault upon the working class under the guise of public health, we can expect these “left” actors to take the same complicit stance that they took four years ago. And given the developments within liberal technocracy that we’ve seen lately, we can anticipate this coming attack to be vastly more damaging than the last one. Our class enemies have been able to both use Covid-19 as an opportunity to experiment on such a project, and put the workers in an even more economically and psychologically vulnerable place than they were prior to Covid. The established elements of the left aren’t going to take the right side in this more intense next phase of the class war, so principled socialists must get ready to help combat these designs of the elites.

The way we can start to do this is by seizing control of the discourse away from the narrative managers who are promoting the next bio-assault’s early psyops. This is something that much of the masses are already doing on their own. In response to the BBC’s uncritical reporting on the “Disease X” warning put out by the World Economic Forum, the vast majority of BBC YouTube commenters can be seen pointing out the narrative’s absurdity. They make it clear that we can’t be expected to passively accept this story that our most powerful institutions are telling us, especially when it’s so purposefully vague. How can we feel assured by the news that big capital’s academic centers are researching a cure for a new super-flu if this virus doesn’t even exist, and we just saw the health authorities lie to us numerous times? Our natural and correct impulse is to be skeptical.

In their efforts to counteract this skepticism, the narrative managers aren’t making any arguments that truly disprove what we’re concerned about. The Associated Press fact-checkers assure us that “Disease X” is totally hypothetical, a point which doesn’t refute the essence of what we’re saying. The WEF doesn’t need to be cooking up a virus in a lab for us to have good reason to believe the elites are planning new bio-attacks on us, because there are many different kinds of bio-related means for waging warfare. There’s unsafe vaccinations, something that Bill Gates has especially been propagating throughout his activities in the formerly colonized world. There’s economic harm created by public health mismanagement, something that the working class was recently subjected to and hasn’t recovered from. There are lockdowns that the government implements when it isn’t willing to provide the people with the necessary assistance, and that therefore have a deadly effect.

Whether the next pandemic will be manmade, or will come from nature (which is an ambiguous distinction in an era when our ecological crisis is creating greater pathogen risks), the way our ruling institutions respond to it will be the same. They’ll exploit the catastrophe by using it as justification for consolidating capitalist power, profiteering with vaccines that they aren’t transparent about, and crushing opposition towards their liberal totalitarianism. We could even view the WEF’s Disease X psyop, and the systemic violence that’s going to follow it, as the biggest maneuvers in the U.S. government’s domestic counterinsurgency.

U.S. hegemony is in terminal decline, and because of this, capitalism’s crisis of overproduction can only grow more severe. Without the ability to compensate for this crisis by exporting more capital into the peripheral countries, the U.S. ruling class needs to intensify its exploitation of the empire’s center. And Disease X could be the main thing it uses to create narrative precedent for the degrowth and repressive measures this entails. 

Ten years ago, climate was the main narrative basis for this effort to justify the planned extreme austerity policies. The media was much more focused on the climate back then, and the highest-level elites were using the public’s growing horror to promote depopulation under an environmental cover. Then the narrative managers largely shifted their tactics away from this, at least for the time being. This is not because global warming stopped being a threat, but because the liberal technocrats wanted to start portraying “green” capitalism as having essentially solved the problem. Thereby, the media’s exaggerations of the extent of the problem went down. Which has translated to a new, subtler kind of climate denialism. As Kyle Paoletta of the relatively independent left-wing publication Harper’s concluded last year: 

It is, I promise, not quite as bad as you once imagined, but it is worse than you’ve lately been led to believe. The seas will rise, the summers will get hotter. There will be more red-sky days, more storms, more jungles turned into savannas and savannas turned into deserts. Global emissions may peak in a few years, but the subsequent decline will probably be too gradual to limit warming to even 2.5 degrees Celsius—the level that the United Nations projects the world’s net-zero pledges currently put it on track to reach. None of that constitutes an apocalypse, but it does suggest a world destabilized by hundreds of millions of people going hungry and being forced to flee their homes.

Because the elites have no reason to be concerned about all those future victims of environmental violence, at this point they’re much more focused on disease in their degrowth propaganda. Depopulation is what will come from the liberal order’s response to both of these threats. 

Few if any lives are going to be saved by the “progress” that liberals have supposedly made for the climate, and the next “solutions” they’ll sell for reducing viral fatalities are going to be as counterproductive as the last ones. Wherever the liberal-aligned socialists recognize these realities about our government’s bio-medical assaults upon the people, it’s not going to mean anything. Because these actors will nevertheless be in support of the bio-tyranny policies themselves. We must build a version of the socialist movement that doesn’t share this pro-ruling class stance on public health. That truly aligns with the People’s Republic of China on this issue, in that it opposes unjust mandates while resisting international monopoly capital.

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The Democrats seek to sell their wars by getting socialists to fixate on fighting MAGA. But this psyop is losing its effectiveness.

How can we successfully resist the proxy war that the imperial hegemon seeks to instigate in Taiwan, and that would add to the existing wars against Russia, Palestine, Yemen, and numerous other countries? By freeing the antiwar movement from its domination by compromised political actors who refuse to commit to fighting the liberal order.

Ever since the U.S. government succeeded at suppressing the country’s communist movement, and we’ve had to try to rebuild an authentic source of dissent, the movement’s biggest threat has been Democratic Party infiltrators. During the present moment, where the dominant section of the elites is trying to sell a world war, this is still true. Because of the increasing volatility of the circumstances, though, we have an unprecedented amount of potential to take away the leverage which the elites have gained in the class war. And the way we can do this is by building a version of the antiwar movement which isn’t covertly controlled by the Democrats.

This task is now easier than it was only a couple years ago, prior to when Russia’s Ukraine action accelerated the U.S. empire’s collapse and escalated our class struggle. Going into the 2024 election, the elites are using the same tactic for neutralizing the antiwar movement that they used in 2020, when they were working to stabilize the liberal order in anticipation of a war with Russia. Like back then, they’re carrying out a psyop designed to make developing radicals believe the most important task is to fight Trump. Which, if successful enough, will enable the pro-war narratives to be advanced without sufficient opposition. The elites want to make socialists distracted by a fixation on MAGA, and act like the lower levels of capital represent the primary threat while blankedly demonizing MAGA’s supporters.

This psyop was vastly more effective last time around than it’s able to be today. Because that was before the antiwar organizations which don’t tail liberals had been able to gain as much popularity and connections as they now have. In 2020, the default “socialist” perspective in the U.S. was one which tacitly sided with big pharma, and with the capitalist state’s efforts to consolidate monopolist power under cover of the lockdowns. All these actors on the left did was in effect state their support for these power grabs by monopoly capital, while offering critiques that didn’t truly mean anything. As these critiques were tangential to the central ideas being conveyed. 

They pointed out how vaccine distribution and lockdowns would work better under socialism, while refusing to challenge the designs of the elites at a moment when the workers were being attacked to an extraordinary degree. Moreover, they ignored the biggest difference between socialist China’s pandemic response, and the USA’s response: that in China, vaccines were never mandated. However many qualifiers these left actors added, they felt obligated to defend the actions of the capitalist state.

The reasoning behind this was that siding with the highest levels of capital on the pandemic placed these socialists in opposition to MAGA in that respect. Which proved to be a shallow achievement, as it made them complicit in an unprecedented institutional and financial power expansion by the liberal elites. They did the equivalent when the liberals continued this takeover after January 6, endorsing the suppression efforts of big tech and the national security state despite evidence that the storming of the Capitol was a product of FBI entrapment.

The outcome was that a year later, when the cold warriors succeeded at provoking Russia into intervening, the Ukraine psyop was able to be much more effective than could have otherwise been the case. The ones who were supposed to be fighting the U.S. empire gave life to the empire by reinforcing its most effective narrative at the moment: the narrative that Democrat policies and ideas must be advanced in order to combat “fascism.” Which within this liberal framework is defined as simply being social conservatism, rather than as the class warfare practice of finance capital.

If the “left” in this country had integrity, and prioritized combating monopoly finance capital rather than pandering to liberal sensibilities, our class struggle would be at a much more advanced stage. And if we enable the opportunistic “socialist” forces that capitulated to the monopolists four years ago, the efforts to resist our present war drives will fail to be effective. For decades, the ruling class has been able to shield itself by cultivating a controlled opposition within not just the broad left, but the communist movement in particular. It’s given media attention, and indirect funding via NGOs, to groups that claim to uphold Marx and Lenin but truly represent a red liberalism. Throughout the 2020s, though, we’ve been seeing this liberal-aligned element lose its monopoly, both over the organizing spaces and over the discourse.

Not only has Ukraine compelled communists, libertarians, and other anti-imperialists to form their own organizing coalition, which will hold another rally in DC next month. It’s also shifted the discourse closer towards a point where the hegemon’s narrative managers have lost their dominance. Where the anti-imperialist side has gained enough narrative strength that this starts to impede the functionings of the war machine.

There are liberal tailist actors, like Ben Norton, who usually take correct stances on the foreign policy aspect of the narrative war. But they subtly undermine the anti-imperialist cause by advancing key liberal elite narratives on domestic issues. When you look at Norton’s Twitter feed, you see tons of material rightly condemning the Zionists for their genocide. Yet at crucial moments in the struggle against monopoly capital, he’s sided with the most wealthy and powerful institutions. He’s promoted the one-sided view of the Covid vaccine that big pharma has put forth about its recent experimental medicine. He’s celebrated Daria Dugina’s murder by U.S.-backed Ukrainian Nazis. He’s worked to exacerbate needless divisions within the anti-imperialist movement by going after the anti-imperialists who are patriotic. 

Back when I was under the guidance of the liberal tailist leftists, I was guilty of the latter mistake. Because of Ukraine, though, I learned to reject such ideas and practices. I saw that the ruling class is trying to keep the antiwar movement confined to the leftist circles which Norton seeks the approval of. Then I saw that whenever somebody tries to expand the struggle beyond these circles, the liberal establishment gets upset to an extent that it never gets over actors like Norton. He represents a socialist element that’s allowed to have a major platform, because it’s indispensably useful to the elites. Its role is to make communism and anti-imperialism unable to gain enough mass support or momentum for our ruling institutions to actually be threatened. 

Norton’s camp has been able to co-opt the recent anti-imperialist mass energy over Gaza to an extent. But in the longer term, this project to gatekeep the struggle is increasingly in peril. This is because of the growing trend among the people—largely including the parts of the people outside the left—towards opposing the national security state and the war machine.

We’ve seen this with the emergence of the coalition behind next month’s Defeat the Deep State rally; with the rise of antiwar sentiments even among conservative-leaning Americans; with the Free Assange movement, which has included many elements beyond the left; with the increased public skepticism towards the intelligence agencies that’s come about from the Trump era’s ideological shakeups. The country has undergone a political reorientation, where liberals and many “leftists” have become more compatible with imperialism while the illiberal elements have grown more numerous and more antagonistic towards monopoly capital. If Marxists can recognize revolutionary potential where it now exists within our conditions, and nurture the people’s growing anti-imperialist impulses, we’ll be able to ruin the plans of the State Department.

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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 pressures amid 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. 

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As desperate U.S. empire tries to rally support for Taiwan war, we have an opportunity to vastly grow the anti-imperialist movement

My fellow anti-imperialists who live in the heart of the empire: while you see our ruling elites carry out their next scheme, do not despair. This plan they have is wildly dangerous, and is going to bring out all the darkest and most reactionary forces within our society. But it’s also going to have great potential to backfire, and give us an opening to unite many more of the people in our society behind the anti-imperialist cause.

What the elites seek to do is rally as many political elements as possible around a proxy war against China, initiated by Washington’s newly elected Taiwanese ally the Democratic Progressive Party. It's often the social democrats—or social fascists, as the Communist International described them—who are the most shameless and aggressive drivers of imperialist wars. Germany’s Green Party has been the leading force behind the country’s recent rearmament, and has done all it can to advance both NATO’s proxy war against Russia and prevent “Israel” from being held accountable for the Gaza genocide. The imperialists prefer the “leftist” parties as their vehicles for waging wars, because they’re able to make such projects appear disconnected from the openly sinister image of fascism. That’s what makes them so insidious and dangerous. And as Washington’s latest effort to pull humanity into a third world war develops, we can expect the U.S. State Department to make the best use of “left” imperialism’s deceptive nature.

This goes beyond merely getting social democrats to support the war on China. The empire’s goal is to rally support for the Taiwan proxy war among not just the right, or the liberals, or the Bernie Sanders “left” imperialists, but also the political strains that our government considers to be “extremist.” The narrative managers need the most radical kinds of libertarians to support the Taiwan conflict. Conversely, they need radical leftists to do the same. They’re trying to cultivate a layer of seemingly dissident political actors who’ve incorporated a fanatically anti-Chinese agenda into their ideology, which is already prone towards leading them in zealous directions. If imperialism’s propaganda can convince them that violently hating China is necessary for fighting the system, then the State Department can turn many people who would otherwise be threats towards it into its biggest assets.

The unfortunate reality is that plenty of these radicals, both left-wing and right-wing, are susceptible to such psyops. There are libertarians who can be brought towards white nationalist ideas. There are anarchists who can come to embrace the fanatical left anti-communism which dominates most modern “Antifa” branches. Javier Milei’s rise within the discourse has been diverting plenty in the dissident right away from being compatible with an anti-imperialist alliance, and towards seeing it as paramount to combat communism. Again, though, don’t let whatever reactionary developments you see throughout this process discourage you. Because the fact that the narrative managers are working so hard right now to co-opt radical sentiments across the ideological spectrum shows we have a great opportunity to expand antiwar alliances. And, therefore, to bring millions more people into participating in anti-imperialist activities.

Since the Rage Against the War Machine coalition between communists and libertarians held its first rally almost a year ago, there’s been a kind of counter-hegemonic movement building that we haven’t seen in decades. The disproportionate nature of the liberal backlash towards the RAWM coalition’s emergence has shown this. What these liberal movement gatekeepers now seek to do is perpetuate enough division among antiwar people for RAWM’s upcoming Defeat the Deep State DC rally to not make further progress, letting the Taiwan war drive proceed without any effective opposition.

The resistance towards the Taiwan proxy war of course doesn’t depend on Defeat the Deep State, but this rally certainty represents a potential way for us to make the resistance stronger. Even if you’re reading this after the rally’s February 17 date, it’s still going to provide a way for you to do damage towards the Taiwan psyop. Because at any moment in the future, we’ll be able to use this event and other events like it as evidence that true anti-imperialist coalitions are possible. That one doesn’t need to confine themselves to left-liberal circles in their efforts at combating the war machine.

The more aspiring antiwar activists we impart this lesson onto, the less the Taiwan psyop is going to be able to influence the discourse. A sneaky way that this psyop’s drivers are making their arguments more successful is by getting Marxists, even pro-China Marxists, to direct their attention towards attacking others who oppose Taiwan separatism. I won’t get into the many dramas that relate to this infighting, because it’s enough to simply say we need to be careful about which disputes we prioritize. U.S. hegemony is the primary contradiction at this stage in the class struggle, and everything we do needs to be informed by this. All criticism we engage in needs to be principled, and to not have the effect of aiding the hegemon. That’s essentially the point of the Rage Against the War Machine coalition: to do away with needless division among the hegemon’s opponents, and make advancing the anti-imperialist cause our primary focus.

The purpose of Defeat the Deep State, and of all the other future antiwar events which haven’t been co-opted by the Democratic Party, is to further reorient our organizing culture around this constructive way of operating. An idea this rally seeks to communicate to developing radicals, whether implicitly or explicitly, is that we can’t afford to sacrifice the interests of the struggle against the hegemon. That the danger of world war, and the imperative to free the globe from the rule of international monopoly capital, are too great for us to prioritize ideological purity or egotistical sectarian competitions.

Ever since the communist movement in the United States was successfully suppressed around half a century ago, these have been the things that define organizing in this country. Because when there isn’t any major authentic source of dissent, naturally the “left” becomes dominated by opportunism. Defeat the Deep State, and the coalition behind it, are part of an effort to rebuild what the people of this country lost when the Black Panther Party got crushed. That being the ability for social movements to get out of “the movement”—the niche of activists who aren’t capable of winning the class war on their own—and into the masses. 

As long as antiwar discourse is dominated by cynical actors who seek to exclusively reach those who are already within those circles, or who are ideologically compatible with the Democratic Party, the masses will remain detached from the antiwar struggle. And it will be the fault not of the people, but of the ones who claim to be this struggle’s best leaders.

In the last year, we’ve already made great progress towards redirecting the antiwar movement so that it’s focused on winning the people. Now we need to build on these gains enough for the war machine to start finding its Taiwan plans seriously endangered. Whether the moment when this happens comes next month with the DC rally, or at a later point, we can be certain it will come if we keep putting in the work.

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Security state is scared USA’s people will unify against monopoly capital, & get inspired by the globe’s anti-imperialist forces

Above image was made by Karl Paine of the Center for Political Innovation

Since 2008, when the U.S. working class entered into an ongoing depression, our national security state has been vocally worrying about an uprising. To see these admissions of fear from the highest levels of government, you only need to know where to look.

A 2016 U.S. Army War College study speculated about armed anti-government groups recruiting young people who’ve been dispossessed amid declining socioeconomic conditions, with the study outright listing numerous U.S. cities as being among the places where the armed forces may be confronted with such insurgents. A Pentagon training video from that same year predicted an “unavoidable” dystopian future where the biggest cities become strategic challenges for the armed forces, with the voice-over describing expanding poverty zones as being able to produce those kinds of guerrilla enemies. A 2018 Pentagon training resource told a fictional narrative about Generation Z using hybrid warfare tactics to rise up against our ruling institutions in response to growing inequality. 

When these officers and military academics have warned about the prospect of a threat coming from the country’s own people, though, they’ve been able to do so with a degree of hope that this type of threat won’t truly emerge. Because the only way the people of the United States could come to immediately endanger the rule of monopoly finance capital is if they were to unify behind an agenda of principled anti-imperialism. And the state has a way of preventing such an anti-monopoly alliance from winning; one which doesn’t involve the armed forces or the police. 

This way is by cultivating an imperialism-compatible “left” whose job is to gatekeep the struggle, and stop socialists from expanding their cause beyond the spaces which the Democratic Party controls. Its role is to keep the individuals who’ve learned Marxist theory held back by an aversion towards building anti-imperialist coalitions beyond the “left,” and connecting with the broader masses as opposed to the activist subculture. The state doesn’t feel threatened by the Marxists who’ve been absorbed into this insular way of thinking, because whatever progress they may make is undermined by their unwillingness to construct an effective movement. They can take the most radical positions, and they’ll still be viewed as an asset to the state so long as they do the state’s work of dividing the struggle. 

They’re allowed to praise the Houthis, praise Hezbollah, praise China and the DPRK, and even praise Russia if they wish, because at the same time they’re acting to undermine unity among imperialism’s enemies at home. If somebody is only willing to connect with the small minority of the people in the U.S. who are already part of the “leftist” niche, or who will accept the theories of this niche, then they won’t become a meaningful contributor to the class struggle.

This synthetic, compatible layer of the left is instrumental to the capitalist dictatorship’s survival. Because if the compatible left were to become unable to do its job, and the struggle were allowed to advance, the state would be forced to use counterinsurgency methods that are far less safe. If the scenarios of domestic military intervention that these security state documents describe were to become real, the revolutionary side wouldn’t be the one desperately fighting for its survival; the reactionary side would be. 

This is because the only way the struggle could ever advance to such a stage is if monopoly capital’s enemies were to have already in great part won the narrative war. To have gained enough perceived credibility among the masses that they’ve outmaneuvered all the obstacles the reactionaries have so far created for them, and become a source of leadership among significant amounts of the people. In a situation like that, where the people already know the revolutionary organizations and in large part love them, for the government to use force against the people would be wildly risky. As the people, seeing their government’s unrestrained vileness, would come to have a massive incentive to start supporting the revolutionaries.

Governments that have found themselves trying to crush a greatly inferior rebel force—especially one whose cause is sympathized with by vast amounts of the people—are always in a perilous place. When you’re the strong one, and you’re unleashing your forces upon the weak one, many are inevitably going to see you as being in the wrong. And the more excessive and disproportionate the response of the superior force is, the more condemnation it’s going to receive. 

The imperialists constantly try to exploit this principle by nurturing rebellious groups within the countries that challenge the hegemon, then trying to get their governments to react rashly. But because these governments don’t share the inherent bloodthirstiness of colonial states, this rarely works. Why have the Russian government’s responses to the recent protests failed to bring about any serious mass momentum behind Washington’s regime change goals for Russia, whereas the responses by “Israel” to Palestinian protests have created enough blowback to endanger the Zionist state’s future? Because Russia has been reasonable in its responses, while the Zionist state’s responses to even peaceful dissent have been nothing less than genocidal.

When a government is doing things that can’t be justified under any circumstances, even a violent resistance is going to be able to get substantial support. Given how willing the oppressors are to use violence, the rebels using violence is in this context seen as admirable. This has been shown by the story of Hamas in its struggle against Zionism, of the Houthis in their resistance to the U.S./Saudi genocidal alliance, and of Hezbollah in its defenses against imperialist aggression. All of these forces have great mass support, because what they do is self-evidently righteous from the perspective of the oppressed.

There’s a kinship between the USA’s people and the peoples behind these anti-colonial forces, in that Americans also have a history of confronting colonial oppression during the Revolutionary War. What the security state fears is that Americans will do the equivalent of what these global anti-imperialists have done, and defeat their monopolist government like how the early Americans defeated the Crown.

Why do you think the compatible left cares so much about upholding the ahistorical theories of Gerald Horne, who twists the facts to argue that 1776 was a reactionary event? The compatible left’s monopolist backers need to cultivate a false “Marxism” that tells the people it’s impossible for them to unify against the ruling class, because supposedly anybody who sees 1776 as progressive is nothing more than an irredeemable reactionary. 

The accusation is that the communists who reject Horne’s theories are defending colonialism, yet these communists and those aligned with them are the first ones to support Palestine’s anti-colonial struggle. Which absolutely translates to opposing the colonialism that Native American communities are still being subjected to on this continent. As the struggle develops, these mass-focused parts of the communist movement are naturally going to establish greater connections with the indigenous movement, as indigenous people are part of the masses and their interests must be accounted for.

The way to rectify the colonial contradiction, as well as monopoly capital’s other contradictions, is by building an anti-monopoly alliance. And monopoly capital’s survival depends on the anti-populist ideas promoted by Horne, whose ahistorical statements about 1776 relate to a more presently related goal. This goal is to depict working class whites as fundamentally reactionary, and thereby divide the movement which proletarians of all colors depend on. Such a Sakai-esque perception of the white working class is what one inevitably gets from accepting his analysis, which implicitly denies the reality that the Democratic Party’s embrace of neoliberal policies contributed to Trump’s rise. 

This is the idea conveyed by Horne’s statement that “when Euro-Americans vote across class lines for faux billionaires, we are instructed that the reason is that the opposition did not meet their exacting progressive standards.” It leads developing radicals to blame their neighbors for the left’s failings, and to continue on the insular path.

The more successful we become at building a communist movement that’s independent from the Democratic Party, the closer we get to that most intense stage of the class conflict which the security state anticipates. We shouldn’t assume that this stage will involve as much bloodshed as the security state says it will, though; in fact, we should do everything we can to reduce how much violence and destruction happens during the revolutionary process. Only our enemies wish for there to be violence, we simply seek to defend ourselves and the people from their aggression. They’re hoping for us to use our physical training in foolish ways, and turn to adventurism so that they can discredit our cause. We can’t embrace an ultra-left policy that goes ahead of the people and alienates them, that’s what comes from embracing the anti-popular dogmas. If we keep on our present path, in which we do everything with the goal of uniting the people against monopoly capital, we’ll be unstoppable.

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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 pressures amid 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. 

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