One of the most important lessons William Foster provided is that the American masses are not going to be won through a cultural struggle. The notion that the people of the United States or anywhere else are simply driven by religious or cultural values, to the effect that we should place culture above class, is a fundamentally bourgeois way of thinking about the people. The ruling class seeks to divide the people, so it’s cultivated a mentality where the people’s different religious or partisan affiliations make them separate from each other.
This is the belief that Foster warned against when he was pointing out the folly of the “dual union” strategy. With dual unionism, organizers would create alternative unions to try to bypass the necessary work of agitating amongst the already unionized workers. As Foster concluded, this came from a lack of faith in the people’s ability to be convinced on the basis of class struggle:
The workers organize in the industrial field not because they hold certain elaborate social beliefs jointly, but because through united action they can protect their common economic interests. Labor unions are built upon the solid rock of the material welfare of the workers, not upon their acceptance of stated political opinions. In the very nature of things labor unions at present must consist of the many sects and factions that go to make up the working class, Republicans, Democrats, Socialists, Communists, Anarchists, Syndicalists, Catholics, Protestants, etc., etc. The natural result of the dualists’ attempt to organize labor unions around their theories was a whole crop of new labor movements.
As fast as new conceptions, political and industrial, developed, their proponents organized separate labor unions to give expression to them. In some industries there were as many as five of these dual movements, each representing a different tendency and each engaged in the hopeless task of converting the masses to its particular point of view. Dual unionism, with its program of labor organization along the lines of fine-spun theory, not only devitalized the trade unions by robbing them of their best blood, but it also degenerated the revolutionary and progressive movement into a series of detached sects, out of touch with the masses and the real struggle and running off to all sorts of wild theories and impractical programs.
The dual unionists represented the leftist deviation within communism, because they had the goal of being the most radical and pure. There is another version of this culturally fixated thinking, though, that instead draws those within this struggle to the right. And this other deviation is even more dangerous; because when somebody embraces it, they can easily go so far as to give up worker organizing entirely, and to reject the very concept of class struggle.
One example of cultural beliefs superseding class consciousness, even when the thinker in question seeks to reject liberalism, is the Fourth Political Theory of Alexander Dugin. Dugin has written that “the Communist theories regarding historical materialism and the notion of unidirectional progress are inapplicable to our purposes. We have previously talked about the racist element, which is embedded in the idea of progress. It looks particularly revolting within historical materialism, which not only prioritises the future ahead of the past, brutally violating the ‘rights of the ancestors’, but also equates the living ‘human society’ (Richard Thurnwald) with a mechanical system operating independently of humanity, according to laws that are monotonic and uniform for all. Materialist reductionism and economic determinism comprise the most repulsive aspect of Marxism.”
I don’t bring up Dugin because I believe the western media narrative about how he’s “Putin’s brain.” Dugin is also a lot less of an anti-communist than “dissident” anti-China hawks like Tucker Carlson, who are the real problems at this moment when it comes to the right. I think Dugin is significant to this debate because he’s representative of a larger trend within modern anti-liberal thought. One that’s in conflict with the goal of rebuilding the international proletarian movement, and that therefore we need to reckon with even if many of this tendency’s propagators still have major value (as Dugin does). Understanding where he’s coming from helps us win over the many individuals who’ve become disillusioned with liberalism, but have been misled by anti-communist arguments.
Dugin made the statement above in the context of responding to the real errors that the Soviet government had committed in regard to the cultural question, where religion was too often treated as something inherently antagonistic towards the project of building socialism. Dugin’s response was to question the very idea of progress; which is a perspective that we must be able to understand, but not embrace. It’s the logical conclusion of the idea that the masses are fundamentally driven not by material need, but by culture. So when we treat the people as if they’ll be reached if we simply signal cultural conservatism to them, the class struggle gets demoted in importance, when it has to always be central to our practice.
We cannot respond to the left-wing errors within the communist movement, and to the other kinds of liberal bourgeois thinking, by conflating the working class with the most stereotypically conservative among the working class. Not even the MAGA communist strategy was ever truly about doing this; MAGA communism’s purpose was to free communism from ultra-leftism, which doesn’t equate to tailing the right. The liberal caricature of MAGA communism is that it’s just rightism, but none of the people who are putting MAGA communism into practice have adopted a position like that. What we must make sure to do is truly apply Foster’s advice, and continue reaching the people on the basis of their class interests.
This is how we can reconcile MAGA communism with the reality we’re facing today, where aside from the MAGA base, the biggest revolutionary mass element is the radicalized Gen Z members. These Gen Zers are definitely leftists, but this doesn’t make them less compatible with communism than the conservative base is. They’ve been radicalized in large part by witnessing U.S. imperialism’s crimes against the Palestinian people, and a very large part of them already support Palestine’s armed resistance. Communists are absolutely capable of winning both the MAGA crowd that’s grown so alienated from Trump over Epstein, and the Gen Z Palestine supporters; to do so, though, we’ll need to reject the idea that the masses can be won by simply appealing towards one of their political or religious affiliations.
This is how bourgeois politicians relate to the masses, but their goal is not actually to win the people; they only want to bring in select groups among the people, while furthering polarization along cultural lines. The goal of a communist is the opposite; we seek to unify the masses behind the revolutionary struggle. When we center that mission, our task becomes a lot simpler, as we see that it’s not necessary to tailor our messaging and outreach to either a “left” or “right” aesthetic. What we must do is build a movement that advances the material interests of the people, which is something that will guarantee us all the popular support we need.
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