Gaza, East Timor, & the popular struggle we must sustain in order to stop Washington’s extermination efforts

The East Timor genocide of 1975 to 1999 is what happens when the balance of forces has been successfully tipped in favor of the capitalist class. The genocide could only come into being, or last as long as it did, because the era when it happened was a time of retreat for the globe’s revolutionary forces. Which teaches us that if we want to end the extermination effort our government is facilitating in Palestine, we will need to prioritize the rebuilding of the workers movement, which was largely destroyed during the late 20th century.

The imperial hegemon had created the conditions for the East Timor holocaust in 1965, when the CIA overthrew Indonesia’s anti-imperialist government in a military coup. The dictatorship had already murdered hundreds of thousands of Indonesians before East Timor became a target. And because of Indonesia’s strategic significance, it was this extermination campaign that gave Washington the advantages which would let it win the Cold War. One of the outcomes was that the dictatorship could use the military as a tool for slaughtering East Timor’s people, while not being met with sufficient opposition until a full generation later.

During the Gaza genocide, the revolutionary elements have advantages that they didn’t with East Timor. Today, the anti-imperialist countries and movements are overall on the advance, with China building up an alternative economy as popular struggles make new gains across Africa, Latin America, and elsewhere. It’s this empowerment of the multipolar and proletarian forces that Washington is reacting to when it doubles down on supporting the Zionist occupier; the empire hopes that if its proxy inflicts enough violence on Gaza, Syria, Lebanon, and other nations, then the world will view the United States as strong, and continue to appease it. This accelerated phase of the Palestinian genocide started as a response to the unprecedented strategic victory the resistance gained on October 7, which was partly inspired by Russia’s successes in fighting NATO.

If these factors alone were capable of winning the fight against imperialism, though, then the Gaza genocide would have been stopped a long time ago. The slaughter and torture of Gaza’s people is happening at a rate that’s much faster than was the case for East Timor; yet this is supposed to be the era when anti-imperialism is on the upswing, compared to when it was on the retreat during the time of the East Timor slaughter. Our movement is on the upswing; the problem is that just because the revolutionary side is making gains in one area, or even many areas, doesn’t mean our enemies won’t be able to keep committing the very worst of crimes.

They will act to eliminate entire peoples as long as they have the means to do so; they can also make advances of their own, and bring their barbarism to countries that have seemed secure. This is what’s happened with Syria since October 7, and it will keep happening to more places unless we make a more serious change. Unless the political actors who care about stopping this genocide, and about rectifying the horrors our government is inflicting on countries like Syria, take the initiative in reconstructing our lost proletarian power.

This project can not be merely about re-creating the institutions that the workers had during the peak of communism’s 20th century strength. It wouldn’t be feasible to re-create the past, because this is no longer the past; moreover, even when that peak moment came at around 1970, the hegemon had already succeeded in bringing the political genocide to Indonesia. Which was an event that made way for numerous other anti-communist coups and genocides, where Washington used Indonesia’s “Jakarta method” to carry out anti-communist purges in numerous countries. This was what let monopoly finance capital crush the revolutionary movement in Chile, and use Chile to experiment with the neoliberal policies that would soon be imposed worldwide. It was something that helped catalyze the downfall of the Soviet bloc, and the subsequent crippling of global workers movements.

These developments proved that the old workers movement was itself not nearly strong enough; which doesn’t mean we should abandon Marxism-Leninism, but in fact the opposite. It’s because not enough of the world’s popular movements applied dialectical materialism that the reactionary forces got their great triumphs throughout the 20th century, and became in position to commit the present holocaust. 

Indonesia’s communist party failed to sufficiently warn or arm the masses in preparation for the coup, because it had become enamored with the idea of making the national bourgeoisie into a partner. This great error came from the Khrushchevite trend, where as part of his campaign to “de-Stalinize” the USSR, Khrushchev tried to reach a “peaceful coexistence” between the Soviets and the imperialist bloc. Not only did this idea start off the internal unraveling that brought the USSR’s fall, but it proliferated the ideology of class collaborationism, which is the logical conclusion of the notion that workers can live in peace with capital.

The new international workers movement can either learn from these errors, or perish before it even gets built. A popular struggle can only have hope for surviving capital’s violence if it rejects all reformist, class collaborationist illusions, and decides to stand on its own. That’s why though this is an international project, we need to treat our local connections as the most important ones, with our international ties being second. Unless we master the “secret work” aspect of revolutionary struggle, and build networks that can keep operating even if we’re forced underground, then we’ll be vulnerable in avoidable ways. When we neglect the question of how to survive once our enemies use all of their weapons, we will be defeated, even if we’ve already largely won the masses like Indonesia’s communists had.

The other essential lesson is that no revolutionary effort can survive without a serious project to go into the masses, even when its members themselves are well-ordered and trained. In the absence of a real campaign to connect with organized labor, to lead the worker struggles, to build actual organizations that sustain a presence within their communities, whatever else we do is going to fizzle out. Focusing only on the internal training and structure, while ignoring mass work, can only produce insular social clubs that wage self-delusional battles; this is a scenario that we need to consciously avoid, because it’s materialized countless times within radical politics.

For those of us in the United States, this risk of becoming detached from the people is acute, because we’re having to rebuild a workers movement that was thoroughly crippled a long time ago. We’ve been separated from the practical experience that a strong mass movement allows for. To overcome any potential hubris that this condition of ours could create, we need to take example from the struggles of those from the Global South and occupied Palestine, who’ve been forced to confront state violence in its most extreme forms.

Our ruling class will no doubt try to bring the Jakarta Method to where we are, and this is something that I personally have been speculating about for a while. In these last couple years, though, as we’ve all witnessed an actual, modern mass killing take place, these anxieties about hypothetical worst-case scenarios among U.S. radicals have been redirected towards a different place. A place that’s more productive, because now we’re being made to stop thinking about ourselves so much and instead fully account for the evils our government is inflicting upon others.

Gaza has shown us what the worst potential violence of capitalism looks like, and proven that a people can successfully resist this violence. It’s driven many people outside Gaza to become connected to this struggle against annihilation, and therefore start getting a better sense of what popular struggle entails. When the Jakarta Method does come for us, we’ll have Gaza in mind, as will the millions around the globe who’ve also been taking part in this fight against the 21st century holocaust. Our ruling class will try to bring this holocaust to more places, because it sees Gaza as a testing ground. But those of us within this struggle are building a worldwide counter-force against this scheme, and the genocide’s perpetrators are not going to be able to act with impunity. They’ll have to reckon with the collective might of a global mass which has been compelled to unify, and to fight back in ways that are unprecedented.

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Zionism’s attack dogs are working to cancel Zohran, & the danger is that he’ll respond by giving up BDS

This is from the book I’m writing, which will be called “When Tears Can’t Save Them: Why The Pro-Palestine Movement Failed To Stop A Holocaust, & How It Can Still Win.”

To find the problems with someone like Zohran, you don’t need to discover any conspiratorial NGO link. You just need to admit that it’s inherently reformist for somebody to run within the Democratic Party; as well as that it’s inherently Zionist to say “Israel has the right to exist,” or to condemn October 7, as Zohran has also done.

These are the core contradictions with Zohran to focus on, and recognizing them doesn’t mean we should become ankle-biters towards the problematic leader in question; it means we need to wait for those contradictions to come to the surface, and hold the leader accountable to the promises they’ve made. Zohran has promised that he’ll divest NYC from the Zionist occupier, and he won’t be the last Democratic politician to say they’ll implement a divestment plan. In the case of both Zohran and these other Democrats who endorse BDS, the best strategy is to nurture the movement behind them, while guiding that movement away from the Democratic Party and its NGOs.

What these establishment forces seek to do with Zohran, and with every other populist leader in bourgeois politics, is get the leader’s support base to passively accept whatever compromises these politicians will inevitably make. To combat this pacification effort, we must apply the kinds of criticisms that truly expose the essence of why these politicians are flawed; that speak to how these figures have gotten influenced by the pro-normalization forces, or how they may further get influenced by them. 

BDS is the core issue we’ll need to focus on in these critiques. Zohran’s divestment promise is something he does deserve credit for making, especially while facing an opposition that’s so obsessively and aggressively hateful. And if it were implemented in NYC, that would open up the potential for many other cities to divest. We can’t uncritically believe a promise that’s this incredible, though. Whether Zohran keeps that promise, or gets successfully pushed into going back on it, has yet to be determined.

When that question is answered, we’ll know how well the imperial state can truly enforce its preferences across all levels of government. Nothing is guaranteed when you’re hoping for a reformist to deliver, but one green flag is that J Street hasn’t provided any backing for Zohran; additionally, since the primary J Street has effectively gone on the offensive against him. In one July 2025 post, J Street linked to a podcast hosted by the PAC’s president, Jeremy Ben-Ami, where the guests accused Zohran of enabling “antisemitism.” 

This was the message from the author Talia Benamy, who said about Zohran that “his activism for years and his rhetoric of late included a lot of things that I really find incredibly troubling. And even in the past week when he's been given easy opportunities to show that he's listening, he swings and he misses. So there are a lot of things that are concerning about how he has comported himself, and I think that if he's not able to listen to the concerns that we as Jews have now, I'm not sure that he will do better.”

These are the standard rhetorical weapons that Zionists use: appeals towards empathy, and appeals towards lived experience. To portray all serious pro-Palestine activities as anti-Jewish, they need to portray the Jewish experience as something which Zionists hold sole ownership over; within this reasoning, a Jewish person who interprets supporting Palestine as an act of bigotry must necessarily be correct, just because they are Jewish. And it’s this same discourse manipulation tactic that’s been adopted by the compatible left.

This is how the “anything but class” left makes its arguments: by casting anyone who challenges the prevailing liberal doctrines, and puts too much emphasis on workers struggle, as disregarding the perspectives of those from a given identity group. There’s a reason why Finkelstein is someone whose experiences have led him to put major focus on our modern version of cancel culture: the overlap between the Jewish supremacists who’ve slandered him, and the empire-aligned leftists who’ve worked to isolate anti-imperialists, is big enough that these two categories can feel interchangeable. 

The leftist iteration of cancel culture is an extension of what Zionism has been doing for many decades; in our modern discourse, Zionists were the first ones to utilize the tactic of claiming victimhood in order to shut down one’s opponents. As Finkelstein wrote in his 2022 book I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Get To It, cancellation is historically something that’s been weaponized against those who challenge injustice, with Palestine supporters being one of cancellation’s biggest modern targets: 

Cancel culture is as old as culture itself…Julien Benda, in La Trahison des Clercs (The Treason of the Intellectuals), posited that, if you’re faithful to the values of Truth and Justice, it must inevitably come to pass that you’ll be ostracized—or, in the current idiom, ‘cancelled’—by society: ‘A clerk who is popular with the laymen is a traitor to his office.’ He gestured to Socrates and Christ. A true clerk, according to Benda, accepts Christ’s dictum that ‘My kingdom is not of this world.’ Had Benda lived longer, he could have added to this martyrs’ pantheon Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, both of whom, it is now forgotten, were reviled at the time of their respective assassinations.

The cancellation attempts against Zohran–particularly when they come from actors who are working with liberal Zionist PACs or NGOs–have the purpose of shoving aside all political forces which truly advance resistance towards the occupier. Though Zohran condemns the resistance itself, which is not good, his divestment promise is something that would accelerate the occupier’s collapse if it were implemented. So liberal Zionist forces like J Street are working to reinforce the smear narratives against Zohran–and his supporters by extension–with the aim of making it so that there’s no mainstream presence for a real pro-Palestine movement. 

These liberals want the only “pro-Palestine” current to be the one that postures against Netanyahu specifically while defending Zionism itself, and that seeks endless Israeli-Palestinian “dialogue” while undermining any actions that would endanger the occupier’s future.

The problem with Zohran is not that he’s synonymous with these actors, but that he’s made concessions to them which have weakened his ability to challenge their agenda. The “soft” Zionists depend on there being Palestine supporters who treat Zionism sympathetically, and who recognize “Israel’s right to exist” while condemning the resistance. Even if Zohran has only taken these stances in order not to alienate New York’s substantial Jewish Zionist population, the effect is the same: the pro-Palestine movement gets weakened. And whenever someone takes a position for the sake of not provoking reactionaries, this gives the reactionaries a greater advantage.

For Zohran to come to a place where conceding towards the Zionists would seem like it makes strategic sense, he first had to enter into the Democratic Party, with its carefully managed controlled opposition wing. If Zohran and the movement behind him can use the Democratic Party as a vehicle for divestment, we must defend this effort against the Zohran ankle-biters. But we cannot repeat Zohran’s error of seeking out the Democratic Party as an option for trying to advance one’s progressive goals.

The biggest reason why we can’t let ourselves even partially be pulled into the Democratic Party is that if we do, we’ll give the Zionists leverage which they wouldn’t have otherwise. They’ll be better able to impose their agenda of normalization onto the pro-Palestine movement, and silence voices which represent Palestine from a perspective of national liberation. Zionists want to make it so that the only Palestine-related figures with a mainstream platform are the ones who align with the Palestinian Authority, and who share its vitriolic hatred towards the liberation fighters.

When the P.A.’s president Mahmoud Abbas attacks the resistance, he does so in a way that’s exceptionally damaging, because his goal is not to argue that the occupier isn’t committing crimes. He seeks to position the P.A.’s collaborationist camp as the true ally of the Palestinian people by casting Hamas as an asset to the occupier, in contrast to the P.A.’s supposedly principled and “peaceful” efforts to help the Palestinians. 

This is what Abbas did in April 2025, when he said that “Hamas has given the criminal occupation excuses to commit its crimes in the Gaza Strip, the most prominent being the holding of hostages. I’m the one paying the price, our people are paying the price, not Israel. My brother, just hand them over. Every day there are deaths. You sons of dogs, hand over what you have and get us out of this.”

Note the psychological slip where Abbas said he personally is “paying the price,” which in the context of the Gaza genocide reveals just how grotesquely self-centered his mentality is. Abbas is one of the Palestinian elites who’s been assigned by the occupier to facilitate the colonial violence against the West Bank’s people, with the P.A. being nothing more than a tool for occupier to round up Palestinians while pretending that it’s given the Palestinians autonomy. 

When Abbas and these other collaborators use language about how they view “Israel” as a criminal occupier, they’re playing their part in this theatrical ruse; in this story where the normalization agents who arrest Palestinians for “Israel” are somehow fighting the occupation.

The entire narrative these controlled opposition actors are promoting is an obvious absurdity, but there are ways that the Zionists can make the marketing of this narrative successful. As long as there’s a layer of ostensibly pro-Palestine commentators, politicians, and organizations that reinforce liberal Zionism’s key beliefs, the occupier will continue to be able to blunt opposition towards its crimes. It will keep having covert allies who lead Palestine supporters away from supporting the resistance—and by extension from practical actions like divestment—while upholding the collaborators as the “good” Palestinians who oppose “extremism.”

These are the agendas that always get reinforced when somebody pushes soft Zionism, like Zohran does. When Sanders and the others within Zionism’s J Street wing refuse to endorse BDS, this of course can’t stop the individuals who support BDS from participating in it. But because of the concessions that the Zohran wing makes, the anti-divestment obstructionists are further empowered.

The Zohran camp is the most left-wing current within American Zionism, but it’s still Zionist. Which means that even though Zohran himself isn’t an NGO agent, the NGO wing has many openings to influence where his potential term will go. And if we fail to sufficiently build up an independent pro-Palestine movement, this wing will also be able to neutralize the mass energy behind Zohran, which is what Zohran’s antagonists are truly so frightened of.

Building up that organizational strength is the only solution. We in the world’s working class have the exceptional advantage of being able to paralyze the core economic functions of the machine behind this holocaust, and we must use that power. There is a path towards getting the proletariat in the position where it can do this, but to follow that path, we will need to reject all opportunities for making deals with our ruling institutions.

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Stalin’s message to American communists: with iron discipline, you’ll overcome the threats you face

When Stalin addressed the USA’s communist movement in 1929, he identified one of this movement’s core enemies as being “unprincipled factionalism.” This is of course a key foe for communists in every country; but in his speech to the Executive Committee of the Communist International on the American Question, it was something Stalin had a particular reason to focus on. As Stalin observed, factionalism was such a problem in the United States because of American exceptionalism; because within the country’s communist movement at the time, there tended to be two factions that either based their entire practice around the specific features of American capitalism, or disregarded the particular characteristics of America’s conditions. 

Both errors treat the U.S. as a country where the normal rules of class conflict don’t apply, which leads U.S. communists to adopt opportunistic habits where they treat themselves as being above other communist formations. A key part of curing this error, concluded Stalin, is to recognize that the U.S. is not and will not be exempt from the crises within global capitalism; because for U.S. communists to navigate this crisis, we’ll need to eliminate factionalism from our movement:

When a revolutionary crisis develops in America, that will be the beginning of the end of world capitalism as a whole. It is essential that the American Communist Party should be capable of meeting that historical moment fully prepared and of assuming the leadership of the impending class struggle in America. Every effort and every means must be employed in preparing for that, comrades. For that end the American Communist Party must be improved and bolshevized. For that end we must work for the complete liquidation of factionalism and deviations in the Party. For that end we must work for the reestablishment of unity in the Communist Party of America. For that end we must work in order to forge real revolutionary cadres and a real revolutionary leadership of the proletariat, capable of leading the many millions of the American working class toward the revolutionary class struggles. For that end all personal factors and factional considerations must be laid aside and the revolutionary education of the working class of America must be placed above all.

What do these lessons mean for American communists in our era? Are they still relevant to our conditions? They are relevant, because in the USA we still have that problem of hubris. Of being inclined to act like the crises faced by communists in other countries–particularly the Global South–won’t apply to us.

A hundred years ago, this hubris looked like U.S. communists not expecting that a serious economic depression would come. “Many now think that the general crisis of world capitalism will not affect America,” said Stalin. “That, of course, is not true. It is entirely untrue, comrades. The crisis of world capitalism is developing with increasing rapidity and cannot but affect American capitalism. The three million now unemployed in America are the first swallows indicating the ripening of the economic crisis in America.” Since then, awareness about the potential for catastrophes has come to no longer be a problem; if anything, catastrophism has become too much of a problem, because our ruling institutions have cultivated doomism in order to paralyze radical politics. American socialist circles still have a false sense of security in another area, though: the area in which we think and talk about state repression.

The only reason why the state’s violence in the U.S. hasn’t so far reached the same extremes which it has throughout the Global South is that our ruling class here manages to keep dissent fairly under control. This success in the counterrevolutionary activities of our ruling class can make the country seem “exceptional,” and it’s one of the factors that’s stemmed from the USA’s role as the center of modern global capital; because the USA is the core imperialist power, its ruling class has been able to recruit a strong layer of collaborators from within the unions and the political left. Which is the aspect that’s made all of the state repression we’ve faced so much more effective, as solidarity can be easily undermined by those collaborators.

This is the context behind the sense of “nothing ever happens” that exists throughout the imperialist countries, and that tends to be shared by our “socialist” organizations. Because of how substantial the collaborationist element is, our ruling class has been able to maintain an equilibrium for a long time now, keeping the genuinely threatening political actors isolated and ill-equipped to defend themselves. This is the situation that we within the country’s popular struggles will continue to face, even as we gain more allies among the masses; there are objective limitations on how much of the state’s violence we can withstand, we just haven’t met those limitations yet. Something we can do, though, is combat the kind of American exceptionalist mentality that encourages us to believe our location makes us exempt from such threats.

That so many “socialists” or “dissidents” in our society haven’t taken into account these realities of the class war is what leads to the modern versions of the old movement’s factionalism. Only in a radical organizing space where many people have a false sense of security, and aren’t concerned about unifying against their class enemies, would we see as many sectarian attacks as we’ve seen against today’s American Communist Party. The new ACP was formed as a response to the actions of the capitalist collaborators in CPUSA, who didn’t want to give representation to the element which was actually upholding Marxist-Leninist traditions. They could have unified with this current, but instead they used foul play to avoid upholding democracy; and the rationale was that this current doesn’t center identity politics, so therefore it’s supposedly a right-wing deviation.

Because of these antagonisms from the compatible left, where communists who align with the Democratic Party have attacked us from a woke angle, those of us in the ACP’s camp have needed to go into this mission ready for a fight. But we must remember that just because there are many actors in the U.S. communist movement who are committed to tearing us down, doesn’t mean we should be dragged into their factionalist patterns of behavior.

The only way we’ll survive the state’s next crackdowns, and win the masses to our side, is if we come to a practice that’s ultimately non-sectarian. Not the kind of “non-sectarianism” that the established left practices, where it seeks to accommodate imperialism’s left wing; but rather a mode of operating that will let communists connect with all revolutionary mass elements. That will gain us support both from the MAGA base, and the massive current within Gen Z that’s come to support the Palestinian resistance.

These radicalized Gen Z members are “woke,” in that they share left-wing social values; but this certainly doesn’t put them in conflict with the communist movement. And it’s precisely because of the skills that we’ve gained through pursuing the “MAGA communist” strategy, where Marxists have worked to reach Trump’s supporters, that communists in our camp are capable of reaching Gen Z regardless of their cultural values. The ACP’s membership is on average probably more culturally conservative than the average Gen Z member, but this won’t stop a lot of these radicalized people in Gen Z from coming to ACP’s position; not if we put in the work to bring them towards it. To discard Gen Z would be unprincipled factionalism, in parallel to how the established left discarded the MAGA base. 

Stalin warned that “factionalism, by weakening the will for unity in the Party and by undermining its iron discipline, creates within the Party a peculiar factional regime, as a result of which the whole internal life of our Party is robbed of its conspirative protection in the face of the class enemy, and the Party itself runs the danger of being transformed into a plaything of the agents of the bourgeoisie.” There are definitely agents of the bourgeoisie who seek to draw our own ranks away from the masses, and convince us to go in a purely “right” direction; I’m talking about the Nick Fuentes “groypers,” who absolutely will try to infiltrate us.

Through their fed-backed social media momentum, they seek to create a temptation for communists to tail after them, and start repeating their arguments. With iron discipline, and an unyielding focus on our mission of winning the people, we will foil this latest scheme against the revolution.

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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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Class struggle will bring Russia to final victory, & will cure the anti-imperialist movement's internal problems

In his contribution to the April 2025 issue of The Platform, the anti-imperialist Dimitrios Patelis came to a shrewd analysis about Russia’s Ukraine operation: that disruptions from the country’s capitalist ruling class have brought major stagnation for the war’s progress. This problem is part of a much larger issue, one where the global anti-imperialist movement remains plagued by damaging capitalist influences. These influences can and will be thrown off, but that will require the world’s workers massively building up their power as a class.

The deficiencies in Russia’s military initiative are a direct symptom of the proletariat not yet having enough power. When you look at the data sets on the weeks when Russia has gained new territories, you find large stretches where Russia’s gains have indeed been stalled; between March 2023 and February 2024, in the vast majority of weeks Russia had no new breakthroughs, and the gains it did make during that time were quite small compared to the ones from earlier months. Since then, the Russian gains have increased again, but they’ve never gotten as substantial as they were during the operation’s first year. According to Patelis, these inconsistencies are not simply inevitable delays; they’re the product of a confusion in priorities, one that comes from the influence of liberal bourgeois elements within Russia.

“The tactics used by the RF Armed Forces―under the orders of the political leadership―the means, methods, forces involved and the direction of operations, do not seem to achieve the strategic initiative on the battlefields,” observed Patelis. “The initially declared ‘strategic objectives’ (‘denazification’ and ‘demilitarisation’ of Ukraine) remain vague, while even greater confusion is sown by political officials and diplomats as to the constantly changing territorial claims... This ambiguity of the objectives, combined with ideological confusion, is affecting the morale of the armed forces.”

A key part of the problem, concluded Patelis, is that Russia’s bourgeois government has not been willing to make the total destruction of Ukraine’s fascist state one of its objectives:

It is unequivocally clear that the forces of the imperialist axis have systematically constructed the Nazi regime in Kyiv as a “battering ram” and “strike force” for the destruction and dissolution/conquest of the RF itself. Therefore, if even the smallest territory of this entity remains as a state formation, it will continue to serve as a fascist instrument of the axis, available for new murderous adventurism of a revanchist nature. A formation that will not only be “anti-Russian”, but will be promoted as a model for the fascisation of European and other countries, in the framework of the militarisation of the economy and society that imperialism will need for the further spread of war. Consequently, despite the rhetoric and tactics of the political leadership of the RF, any objective other than the total defeat and unconditional surrender of this regime is, in reality, inconsistent with the character of the conflict in the Ukrainian theatre of WWIII and works to the advantage of the axis of aggression.

Since Patelis  made this assessment, the objective conditions for victory over fascism have gotten better. The Trump administration’s insistence on taking a neocon posture towards Russia is actually the thing that’s brought this improvement; because Washington has kept making demands which Russia would never agree to, Russia’s anti-imperialist forces are now much better able to make their argument. 

The external circumstances have created a mandate for Russia's government to commit to this war, which is a key reason why Russia has continued on its recent streak of territory expansions. But the extent and scale of these gains are still being limited by the subjective limitations upon the anti-fascist effort; by the fundamental control the capitalist class holds over the country, which the workers movement hasn’t yet managed to throw off. Until this class contradiction within the anti-imperialist camp is sufficiently overcome, the imperial forces will maintain advantages in key areas.

It’s not just on the European front where this problem exists for the anti-imperialist movement, and Russia isn’t the only place in which bourgeois elements are having a corrosive effect on the struggle. Iran is the other major example of a country that’s come to be in conflict with the imperialists due to internal revolutionary influence, but that remains a capitalist state, and so vacillates between resistance and appeasement. I’ve brought up many times the problems that Iran’s liberal reformers have caused for the Ayatollah’s resistance efforts. But what those of us in the United States primarily need to focus on are the ways that bourgeois ideology–and the profit-driven influencers who’ve propagated that ideology across “alt” media–have set back our own movement-building efforts.

In a country where the anti-imperialist movement has at least already managed to gain substantial sway over the government, the problem of capitalist influence looks like the bourgeoisie undermining anti-imperialist policies. In a country whose government and state effectively act under the total dictatorship of monopoly capital, and that exists as the center of global financial power, this problem instead looks like the ruling class cultivating a controlled opposition. It looks like certain “dissident” commentators being boosted by the algorithms so that they can propagate ideas which will neutralize the popular struggle, making it tied into idealistic notions about what victory for the masses will mean.

In both cases, lack of sufficient power for the proletariat is at the root of the ill. The U.S. workers movement was crippled, largely in tandem with the destruction of the Soviet Union; and in the absence of the institutional strength that the workers used to enjoy, any antiwar or dissident movement that emerges can easily be absorbed by the false opposition forces. The outcome is that those who enter into dissident politics tend to get pulled to the right; that was what Caitlin Johnstone observed this year in response to the betrayals from Tulsi Gabbard and RFK:

While the power and influence offered by right wing “populist” factions can be tempting, that power and influence only exists because those factions are supported and defended by the empire itself. Public discontent is being corralled toward establishment-friendly political structures so that it doesn’t head anywhere that can threaten the mechanics of the empire, while authentic opposition to capitalism, militarism and empire building is viciously subverted by any means necessary. Bernie Sanders and AOC play the same role on the other side of the aisle, by the way, as do ostensibly leftist media like TYT who herd people back into support for the Democratic Party. Real opposition to real power is not permitted to ascend to the presidency of the world’s most powerful government. It is marginalized, smeared and subverted, and kept as small as possible.

These co-optation efforts by our own ruling class, and the sabotage efforts of the Russian or Iranian elites, are intertwined–as these foreign bourgeoisies are not independent from the world capitalist center. These different wings of global capital have been collaborating by selling a false concept of “peace,” where supposedly if Washington simply makes deals with Russia and Iran, the U.S. will no longer be a war-maker. The big, glaring factors which disprove such ideas are the Gaza genocide, and the empire’s plans for war with China. The U.S. seeks to draw China’s partners into Washington’s orbit, thereby isolating both the Palestinians and the PRC; this has been the imperial strategy hidden behind Trump’s “peace” rhetoric.

Every time such diplomatic tricks have succeeded in influencing our country’s antiwar movement, it’s hurt our ability to assist the Palestinian struggle, and to defend China; which are two of the biggest priorities right now. We’ll either learn from the errors that have contributed to these problems, and orient ourselves around the class struggle; or stay stuck in a cycle of defeats, to the consequence that our present catastrophes grow even larger.

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The mass will to defeat monopoly capital is there. The question is whether we'll rebuild the workers movement.

One of the biggest challenges which U.S. communists and their allies are about to confront is that of bringing Americans away from apathy. Burnout and lethargy have of course always been problems organizers face, but we’ve reached a moment when a very large part of the masses are at risk of losing the will to politically engage. And it’s these same masses who represent the biggest portion of Americans that have already gained a considerable class consciousness.

I’m talking about the MAGA base, as well as the Libertarian Party’s base, a big section of independents, and a lot of the former Democrat voters who’ve become disillusioned over the Gaza genocide. It’s these demographics which have been increasingly breaking out of the old two-party dichotomy that our ruling class has imposed onto us, and seeking out paths towards ending monopolist control. For most of these Americans who’ve gained revolutionary potential, “the deep state” is what to call the source of the problem, which is why many communists have adopted that phrase while speaking to the masses. 

Part of our goal with this is of course to lead more people towards a class analysis, and the theory which comes with it. And as this consciousness upheaval has gone on, more of us have realized that Marxists won’t win over the bulk of the people by talking about Marxist theory. Communists who’ve succeeded have never won their country’s people by showing off their theoretical knowledge, that’s a habit of the Marxists who don’t understand mass work. Communists have won the masses by showing them how and why they’re the ones capable of leading them towards the attainment of better conditions; and they’ve done this not just by aspiring to lead the people, but by acting as allies to the people in their struggles. No people will accept a workers party as their leader unless that party demonstrates itself to be on their side, which is another one of these lessons that experience gives you.

It’s good that so many of us in the United States have managed to internalize these practical realities. To apply these lessons to the conditions we’re now facing, though, we’ll have to grasp what’s driving great numbers of the people to retreat from political life–and what they’ll need to see from us for us to be viewed as a credible alternative.

The essence of the problem is that Americans have already sought out an alternative, or a series of alternatives, and then seen these supposed sources of hope keep letting them down. The people elected Trump in reaction to how Obama didn’t end the post-2008 depression, and Obama himself was supposed to be a figure that broke the old political patterns; that’s an obvious reason why a crucial number of Obama voters voted for Trump in 2016. When Biden and the Democrats were given a chance to be the ones which made our conditions even worse, there then appeared a new effort to sell Trump as anti-establishment; one that was this time much less organic than the original Trumpian sensation had been. 

Trump has been assigned the role of another Obama; a role where the given leader is marketed as a genuine threat to the system, and then expands all of our capitalist dictatorship’s destructive policies. It’s certainly a good sign that the MAGA base has been getting angry at Trump’s betrayals a lot more vocally than Obama’s base had; this shows that the masses view the crises our society faces as more urgent than they’ve been at any other moment in our lifetime. The danger is that this discontent will be either exploited by the far right, or turned into apathy, both of which the ruling class would be pleased to see happen. 

The hope is that a combination of the two will come into being; that’s why Hitlerites like Nick Fuentes are being boosted by the algorithms, while on a broader scale Americans are being encouraged to give up on any sort of political struggle. This was always the logical conclusion of an effort to instill false hope: a rise in nihilistic attitudes, which can be taken advantage of by those who preach race ideology.

The only way to break this anti-revolutionary cycle is by providing the masses with a real path forward. The mass will is there to end the wars, to throw off corporate rule, to defeat the deep state; and the USA’s people have become almost incomparably more unified on this than they were just five years ago, during the insane culture war psyops of 2020. The only way that the masses could not develop further in their revolutionary consciousness is if we fail to rebuild the workers movement, whose destruction in the 20th century was the source of all the greatest difficulties our movement faces today.

To accomplish this task, we will need to emphasize the class struggle as a central part of what we’re doing. The path towards victory is in this way quite simple, because we know that at every decision point, the right choice is the one that best advances the class struggle. The risk comes from our own potential to fall for diversions, and be tempted by opportunistic paths that take us away from the proletarian cause. With the project to boost the far right, big tech is now presenting a new trend to hop on, one where people get rewarded for Hitler-posting; and we must watch closely for any infiltrators who push this trend, as they’ll do so using covert rhetoric. All of their tricks will be rendered ineffectual, though, if we reconstruct the great power that the proletariat used to have in this country.

If we build a serious presence in the unions, if we build independent worker orgs that can bypass the labor bosses, if we do the work which a communist party is supposed to do for the people, then we will create real momentum for the proletarian cause. This momentum has already been coming into being, thanks to the American Communist Party’s work in serving our communities, assisting workers with strikes, and giving them welcome guidance. I understand not everyone in this movement will join the ACP itself, but if somebody is serious about advancing the class struggle, whatever actions they carry out will be to the benefit of what communist party members are doing. 

This is a united front, one that will bring in millions of Americans if the organized core puts in the work. We will carve out a presence beyond the controlled discourse spaces, and give the people a way to fight back against what their government is doing.

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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. 

To keep this platform effective amid the censorship against dissenting voices, join my Telegram channel.