At this moment, the U.S. ruling class and its allies are using a myriad of tricks to derail the anti-imperialist struggle. These psyops are both small and big; they range from efforts at dividing and disrupting our organizations, to street provocations designed to inflame the culture wars. With the inauguration, the forces of reaction are attempting to manufacture a major amount of drama; the radical liberal wing of this reaction is organizing rallies that center Donald Trump, which only acts to weaken the pro-Palestine cause. It diverts attention away from the genocide, and from the domestic class struggle, in favor of a personality obsession.
The hope of the narrative managers is that these actions will strengthen the anti-Palestine, anti-China, and anti-woke psyops, enabling greater repression while aiding the far right. At this point, that’s the effect the organized left is having: to unintentionally advance the state’s propaganda campaigns. These radlib groups will keep being mobilized, as will the other controlled opposition forces, with the goal of pushing anti-imperialism out of the discourse. That’s the empire’s strategy for our era: to create greater chaos, both abroad and in the U.S. itself, so that those opposed to imperialism become disempowered.
A problem with this plan is that every ideology which the ruling class has set up to counter revolutionary politics is now either in decline, or struggling to find its role within today’s political landscape. Which gives communists and their allies an unprecedented opportunity to build mass power. The crisis which all the different reactionary forces are facing is that they can’t gain substantial connections with the masses, no matter how much they may try to mimic the revolutionary spirit.
The Democratic Party has reached a new stage of collapse, and hasn’t learned anything from the last election; neocons are only going to have even greater control over the party from here on. There are elements of the Democrats who want to create their own version of the MAGA brand, embodied by John Fetterman with his faux-populism. But this can’t turn the Democrats into a successful tool for managing mass discontent, because it’s taken on a role as the ideological appendage of the national security state. The Democrats are fundamentally anti-populist in nature, like the organized left is; which is why the Democrats have become barren of any working-class momentum, while the left has made itself isolated.
The ruling class actors which try to posture as populists are now undergoing their own decline. Silicon Valley MAGA, the high-tech oligarchic clique which has bought off Trump, cannot go through Trump’s second term without having its true character be utterly exposed. Musk and Trump’s support for the H-1B immigration visa program has provoked a backlash from parts of Trump’s base; one that’s even greater than the outrage which erupted over Trump’s appointing neocons. These early troubles are only the start. When Trump gets the chance to fail, and doesn’t fulfill his anti-war, anti-monopoly mandates, it will create splits within his coalition that MAGA can’t handle.
The populist ideas behind MAGA will live on, of course, and they’ll become more prevalent than ever as the country’s crises get worse; but the version of MAGA that its leadership has created cannot survive. The idealism of Silicon Valley MAGA is going to clash with the material realities of our times, and take away the movement’s momentum. Actors like Ron DeSantis will then try to portray themselves as the true embodiments of MAGA, but they’ll be limited in their effectiveness. As will the other kinds of opportunists who seek to fill the hole which Trump is going to leave.
The far right also seeks to pick up the MAGA elements which are becoming disillusioned, selling frustrated conservatives a narrative about a Jewish anti-white conspiracy. And the far right has gotten algorithmic success, but that only helps it so much. The problem of the online Hitlerite “groypers” is that success on social media doesn’t translate to a mass base; not unless you have the program and the will to materially aid the masses. The country’s serious communists have these things; they’ve been feeding the homeless, assisting workers on strike, and handing out disaster aid that the state won’t provide.
The groypers have the support of the deep state and its tech monopolies, but they’re divorced from the people, which cripples them. There are rural parts of the far right that have community aid programs, but how much effect they’ll be able to have is negligible; in the last two decades, the white nationalist movement has massively migrated online, and this will hurt it in the long term.
The thing that truly matters is who will earn the people’s allyship; who will prove themselves to be friends of the people, and give them what they need to overthrow the imperial state. The Hitlerite pitch has had a degree of success in winning over this country’s young men, but the groyper psyop is built upon the online, and this contradiction is increasingly apparent. At this point, when leftism has lost its relevance, the groyper psyop is the best controlled opposition tool that our ruling class has available; yet it’s not enough to halt the revolutionary process which we’re seeing unfold.
There’s no stopping the resurgence of authentic U.S. communism; the synthetic nature of the ruling class ideologies keeps being exposed, so the only ideologies that can make serious gains are the ones which threaten monopolist power. Communism isn’t the only one among these ideologies, but it has an indispensable role within this unfolding revolt against the liberal order. Communists will unify with the Libertarians; with the MAGA supporters who oppose the Silicon Valley wing; with the workers who’ve been alienated from bourgeois politics; with everyone who shares our interests.
In response, monopoly capital will do all it can to crush us. With the breakdown of the state’s narrative control, it’s becoming clear to the ruling class that we can’t be defeated through psyops alone, so they’ll resort to more aggressive means. The state will try to dismantle our organizations through repression and terror, justified by new psyops that are designed to demonize us. But for these psyops to work, and for the suppression to be successful, the revolutionary forces will need to have failed in our tasks. Which we won’t do, not if we take this mission seriously.
We’ve gained an unprecedented opportunity for advancing the class war. Now we need to position ourselves for the struggle’s next stage. We must prepare to defend our organizations against all potential attacks, whether from law enforcement or from reactionary vigilantes. We must build enough mass connections that we won’t be left isolated when the state launches its big assault. The people are waiting for someone to present them with a serious solution; the inability of the ruling class ideologies to do this is why they’ve lost. It’s the revolutionary forces that are in place to win.
————————————————————————
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.
To keep this platform effective amid the censorship against dissenting voices, join my Telegram channel.
No comments:
Post a Comment