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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