The next attacks our ruling class is planning, & the unbreakable bond Americans will forge by resisting them

It’s through class struggle that the American nation came into being, and it’s through class struggle that America’s people will save their nation. This nation, the one which was built up when the USA’s people united against monarchy, defeated the slave-owning class, and fought for workers rights across racial lines, is now under threat. Under threat from the same international capitalist forces which Americans have resisted in these past instances. These forces are getting ready to launch massive new attacks against the popular masses, seeking to take their austerity schemes and anti-democratic assaults even further. 

The Zionist Palantir surveillance system will be used to expand the numbers of people who get targeted for speaking out against the Gaza genocide, or who challenge the government on any other untouchable issue. Our ruling class will use numerous means to terrorize the population, weaponizing not just the state itself but also lumpen elements to proliferate violence throughout our society. As the economy gets further degrown, we’ll see a revamp of the left-liberal austerity rhetoric that we’ve seen in recent times, where scarcity is portrayed as necessary for fighting pandemics or stopping climate change. And this rhetoric will be backed up by a techno-tyranny that’s now had at least several decades to develop. But these next attacks against the people are not going to be met with passivity. When the American people unify again in defiance of the capitalist forces which threaten their nation, it will make this nation stronger than it’s ever been.

In The American Road to Socialism, William Z. Foster observed how revolutionary struggle brings a people together: “Inexorably the masses must unite ever more strongly and fight with increasing vigor to combat the growing disasters of economic breakdown, destitution, fascism, and world war. The daily struggles around broader and ever more urgent demands, led increasingly by the Communist Party, finally culminate in a mighty movement to abolish the capitalist system itself, as the source of the intolerable evils from which the people suffer.”

When Foster wrote this in 1952, American communism was coming off of a period of great strength, so much that Foster believed socialism could plausibly be established in the United States through an elected government. Then the country’s communist movement was destroyed, and the USSR’s fall let the ruling class further its destruction of workers rights. This assault on the people reached a new phase in 2020, when lockdowns were used to create an ongoing unemployment crisis that’s correlated with massive new inflation. Yet it’s been these attacks we’ve collectively experienced throughout this decade that have compelled Americans to overcome the old culture war divisions, and unite around anger towards what our government is doing to us. The MAGA base has come to an agreement with many independents and former Democrat voters, with these groups sharing the feeling that our leaders have deeply failed us.

It’s this development that gives us reason for hope as the ruling class plans its next maneuvers. These military deployments in the streets are just the start of the crackdown, and there are parts of our ruling class that oppose this tactic because they don’t think it goes far enough. The liberal technocrats in Davos, the oligarchs who don’t just hate the working class but despise the American nation itself, are preparing to strike back. And when they do, Americans will be confronted with the reality of their task as freedom fighters: that in order to win against monopoly finance capital, the people will need to overthrow their government.

Foster didn’t believe this was necessarily the case; and though the conditions have since proven him wrong, his perspective is worth studying. Foster concluded that if a people’s government were to be elected in the USA, it would be able to survive capital’s counter-attacks by

…weakening the economic and political power of the monopolists by the nationalization of the banks, the basic industries, the press, radio, television, etc., and eventually by the reorganization of the army, police, etc., and by beginning to lay the basis for a planned economy. All of which measures the legally elected people's coalition government would have the full authority and national mandate to carry out. This course would be the path to a people's democracy.

Failure of a people's government to take such necessary measures would surely result in its downfall and probably bring about the victory of fascism in the United States. It was, for example, the fatal mistake of the pre-war people's government in Spain that it did not, from the outset, proceed to weaken the capitalists basically, as indicated, and did not nip in the bud the potential military rebellion which finally destroyed it. On the other hand, the fulfillment of the above historic tasks by an American people's government would so strengthen the working class and all the forces of socialism, while weakening those of reaction, that a peaceful transition from capitalism to socialism would become possible through a people's democracy, in its American forms.

This idea of electing a people’s government is actually something that a great number of the American masses have sought out as a solution. When so many of the Americans who’ve become disillusioned with liberalism voted Trump, their hope was that he would break from the established paradigm, freeing our country from the war machine, big pharma, and the national security state. Now that this idea of revolution through electoralism has been tested, and these masses have seen its lack of viability, the people are becoming more advanced in their consciousness. And the prospect of a popular revolutionary front is coming closer.

Prior to the 2024 election, the parts of the American communist movement which understood Foster already knew that electing a “populist” government wouldn’t be a step towards defeating monopoly power. They also knew, however, that the MAGA base is motivated by real class-conscious desires, and that therefore this base does not deserve to be treated as synonymous with Trump. The MAGA movement was born out of the popular wish for a new American revolution, and now that Trump has betrayed this revolutionary vision at a critical moment, much of his base has turned against him. Americans, including conservative Americans, are learning the same lesson that U.S. communists have learned about whether we can reform our way into freedom.

The American Marxist-Leninists who are serious no longer speak about electing a workers government, mainly because we’ve already seen the country’s workers movement be devastated by state suppression. A pivotal historical experience of U.S. communists has been to see their efforts crushed, right after they’d gotten so far in building power in the early 20th century. We’ve also looked at how so many popular movements around the world have come to power through elections, only to have their leaders overthrown by U.S. coups and have their members massacred. 

These atrocities of the Cold War turned out to be much bigger than what the earlier communists had anticipated; and the knowledge of this history has contributed to a new culture among U.S. communists, in which elections are no longer seen as a potential route to power. They’re still treated as necessary tools for advancing the working-class cause, but it’s now understood that the only way the American masses will win is by overthrowing their monopolist dictatorship. 

The people won’t be in place to do this until the former workers movement has been reconstituted; organizing the masses is the task we need to focus on at this stage. There is a desire among the people to unify against the ruling class; that desire has been there for a while, it’s just been exploited and misdirected by controlled opposition figures like Trump. Now, when Trump’s brand is collapsing and MAGA is looking for a new place to go, represents a unique opportunity for organizing the people—and thereby fortifying the American nation against the menaces it faces.

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Gaza is the testing ground for capital’s schemes, & Gaza’s resistance shows the world how to fight back

Above: a mercenary makes a heart sign to the people in Gaza’s “humanitarian aid” cages while the fence bulges from overcrowding. (Telegram via BBC.)

U.S. imperialism has not been able to carry out an extermination of Gaza’s people because Washington is strong. It’s been able to because the international workers movement is weak, which has let the global capitalist class successfully carry out a new holocaust. In terms of its military dominance, as well as its ability to sway the Global South on issues like Ukraine or Gaza, the hegemon has objectively been in decline; but as long as the proletariat doesn’t regain its strength from the 20th century, and carry out a new wave of workers revolutions, Washington will have numerous openings to inflict Gaza-level violence upon the peoples of the world.

Through emphasizing this reality, I seek to combat the idealistic iterations of antiwar or “multipolar” politics, which have instilled a widespread sense of hubris about where the globe’s liberation struggles stand. My core critique of the “multipolarist” stance is that it doesn’t account for the class struggle, instead propagating a logic in which the shift away from unipolarity will by itself defeat monopoly finance capital. Gaza is proof on its own that this mindset is mistaken, as well as dangerous; the coming of multipolarity has not been able to stop the Palestinian genocide from accelerating, nor has it prevented serious blows against the resistance like the fall of Syria.

The genocidal offensive that the empire has undertaken in West Asia is a reaction to the anti-imperialist movement’s gains, and in that sense it shows the enemy’s weakness. This offensive has still been able to bring about the murder of hundreds of thousands of people, though, and millions more lives are in danger from it. The 21st century’s world has a massive workers state in China, but China isn’t in a position to liberate the concentration camps; it’s able to do a lot of good, just not enough for the Palestinians. I don’t make this observation to encourage despair; my goal is to help orient our popular movements around the practical realities that we must confront in order to be effective. And with the obstacles that we’re facing, becoming effective will require taking example from the Global South forces that have been building successful resistance movements.

There are many things that popular movements all around the globe can learn from Gaza’s resistance, despite Gaza’s situation being exceptionally extreme in the degree of the empire’s violence. For example, Gaza has taught us the limitations on the enemy’s power. Gaza’s Operation Al Aqsa Flood proved that even the most advanced surveillance systems can be worked around by resistance forces, meaning there are always ways to continue your org’s operations amid whatever repression you may face. 

In the United States and the other imperial countries, repression is a major threat that these movements can expect to meet, and they’re already experiencing many unprecedented efforts to criminalize their work. To continue making connections with the masses amid the crackdown, these imperiled organizers can also learn from their counterparts across the formerly colonized world. It’s these movements in Latin America, Africa, and south Asia which have needed to navigate conditions that aren’t as extreme as Gaza’s, but are certainly more extreme than those of the first world. As the technologies from the Gaza genocide get exported across both the Global South and the imperial countries, we all need to learn from those who’ve been battling against this violence from the front.

A practice that I’ve advocated for is to master “secret work,” as the Communist Party of South Africa instructed its members to do; and this is certainly a necessary task, but it’s only a way of giving one’s organization insurance against emergencies. The primary way that Global South popular movements have defied neo-colonial repression, and made inroads with the masses, is by giving these masses viable outlets for defying their governments. Bolivia’s popular struggle from this last decade is a good example of this; and amid Bolivian socialism’s recent setback, this recent history provides instruction in how to overcome the crises our movement is now experiencing. 

When Bolivia’s popular revolutionary forces have succeeded in defending against the reactionaries, the methods these forces have used are ones reminiscent of those from Palestine’s liberation struggle. After the CIA carried out a coup against president Evo Morales in 2019, Bolivia’s masses could only fight back against the dictatorship by abandoning reformism’s illusions. They engaged in armed struggle, seizing large parts of the country from the dictatorship; they also utilized the power of the country’s unions and other collective workers orgs, involving the broad masses within their protest actions. The resistance had demands, namely for the government to hold new elections; but it was fully prepared to continue advancing the people’s war if these demands weren’t met.

This is what it looks like when a people are faced with reactionary violence that’s too direct for reformism to be seen as a serious option, and when the revolutionary institutions are strong enough for the people to actually have recourse. It’s not that an effective revolutionary movement is guaranteed to emerge when repressive violence gets bad enough; for the people to effectively resist, there also must be a robust structure of popular power. 

In Bolivia, this power was strong enough in 2019 for the people to defeat a coup regime, but it hasn’t remained strong enough to defend against the insidious destruction which capital brings. A new Movement for Socialism Party government was voted in, but this government represented the party’s U.S.-aligned wing, and has therefore failed to adequately build upon the gains made by Morales. It’s let capitalism’s crises afflict the masses while not mounting a serious class-based defense against this problem, so the masses have rejected the new version of MAS. Now Bolivia is going to return to a fully liberal, neo-colonial paradigm, leaving the working-class forces weakened and without the immediate conditions for a new people’s war. 

The entire world is seeing the ramifications of these kinds of working-class setbacks. Because the popular masses haven’t yet recovered their organizational fortitude, the capitalists are being enabled to carry out an extermination. Will the popular reaction to this madness lead toward new mass radicalization? In many ways it already has, but whether this translates into restored mass power depends on what each of us do. We have to respond to these catastrophes by staying focused on the core revolutionary goals for this moment: build up workers power, build up the international united front against imperialism, and give the capitalist world’s masses the means to overcome their respective bourgeoisies.

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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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The two breeds of today’s right-wing grift, & how they both advance liberalism’s schemes

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.”

During the first months after the Palestinian genocide reached its accelerated phase, which influencer was the most aggressive and successful in promoting the idea that October 7 had been a false flag? It wasn’t even anybody who falls under the “alt media” brand, though alt media has often echoed this rhetoric about Al Aqsa Flood; the commentator who pushed this narrative the hardest was Charlie Kirk, the neocon Zionist spokesman who has the role of running America’s astroturf right-wing campus activism network.

The “October 7 false flag” narrative as a setup for defending Zionism

It’s because of Kirk’s proximity to the Trump-Adelson Zionists that his arguments for this theory could have so much impact; when these arguments came from him, this made it seem like what he said was more credible, with the perception being that he was an insider who’d exposed forbidden knowledge. The thing Kirk said about October 7 that’s since received widespread attention for supposedly being so transgressive was from an episode of the Patrick Bet-David podcast, where less than a week after Al Aqsa Flood, Kirk provided a seemingly candid view on this development. In response to the idea that the Zionist entity’s leadership didn’t see Al Aqsa Flood coming, Kirk said:

So I’ve been in Israel many times. The whole country’s a fortress. When I first heard the story, I still had the same gut instinct that I did initially. I find this very hard to believe. I’ve been to that Gaza border. You cannot go ten feet without running into a 19-year-old with an AR-15 or an automatic machine gun. That’s an IDF soldier. The whole country is surveilled…We don’t talk about Israeli politics very often, and most Americans don’t know this. The last nine months, Israel was on the brink of civil war. It’s not an exaggeration. This judicial stuff, there were hundreds of thousands of Israelis taking to the streets, because Bibi Netanyahu is basically redefining the Israeli constitution. That’s not an exaggeration. He said the judicial branch has too much power…there were protests planned this week against Netanyahu, where they anticipated tens of thousands of people to take to the streets. That’s all gone, Patrick. Netanyahu now has an emergency government and a mandate to lead. I’m not willing to say that Netanyahu knew, or there was intelligence here, but I think some questions need to be asked.

There’s a reason why Kirk wasn’t kicked out of Trump’s closely Netanyahu-tied circle for saying this: he hadn’t said anything that actually threatened the Zionist project’s future. Instead he’d promoted an argument that was instrumental in the fortification of Zionism at that moment; this was the narrative that the resistance had played into the occupier’s hands.

Whether somebody believes this because they think October 7 was planned by Netanyahu, or because they think the resistance was duped into doing something unwise, the impact this idea has is to undermine solidarity with Palestine. To make it seem like the very goal of resisting colonization goes against the interests of the Palestinians, who according to this narrative can only see their situation improve through negotiating with the colonizers. Hamas is cast as the impediment to such negotiations, even though Hamas has gone so far as to offer stepping down from power for the sake of getting peace. No matter how good-faith Hamas shows itself to be, and no matter how many times the occupier sabotages negotiations, Hamas is portrayed as part of the problem. 

The notion about Hamas being a tool of Netanyahu only reinforces the occupier’s narrative justification for continuing the genocide, because this notion comes from that lie about Hamas not being interested in reaching a resolution. It reaffirms the occupier government’s PR line about how Hamas is the only thing preventing an end to the suffering, and how the occupier therefore has no choice but to keep attacking until it’s eliminated Hamas. So when a Zionist mouthpiece like Kirk feeds the suspicions about Hamas having been used for Netanyahu’s designs, this is only a ploy to strengthen the arguments which deny or defend the genocide.

To refute the false flag theory about October 7, we only need to look at the actual, material factors that made the resistance able and willing to carry out this operation. The idea that Netanyahu let October 7 occur to advance his career would seemingly make sense, if one were to ignore the larger context behind what had driven Hamas to take an action like this one at that particular time. The operation was a response to new provocations by the occupier against Islam, and the resistance largely felt empowered to retaliate in this way because of recent gains by the world’s other anti-imperialist forces. 

During the leadup to October 7, these developments were far more significant in producing Al Aqsa Flood than the protests within Zionist colonizer society, or Netanyahu’s efforts to consolidate colonial power. If the latter events had any role in bringing about October 7, it was because the resistance felt emboldened by the settler state’s accelerating internal collapse. Not because Netanyahu had hatched a plan to allow Al Aqsa Flood to happen.

The failures within the occupier’s security on October 7 were not due to any conspiracy. They happened because the occupier had truly been caught off guard by the resistance, and we have a clear explanation for why it was caught off guard: because the occupier had increasingly been coming to rely on fancy surveillance technologies, which gave the colonizers an overconfidence about their ability to detect threats. The shift away from human surveillance was what created new flaws in the occupier’s supposedly omnipotent spying system, flaws which could be exploited by a guerrilla force.

This explanation for the occupier’s security breach makes far more sense than the explanations that have been come up with by anti-resistance voices. But to divert the discourse away from national liberation, and thereby defend Zionism, these voices have needed to spin a story in which Netanyahu masterminded October 7. Or, in the case of Kirk’s argument, a story where October 7 at least served to strengthen the occupier’s power. Nothing the resistance does can be recognized as beneficial to the Palestinians; its actions must be either products of a conspiracy with “Israel,” or mistakes that have ended up helping the occupier. 

The last thing that Zionism’s propagandists want anti-Zionists to do is treat the resistance as a positive force; they’ll make up whatever narratives they need to in order to make us demoralized about the liberation struggle’s prospects, and make us think that there are no good sides in this fight.

This is how the narrative managers can recapture the growing element of conservatives, including in Kirk’s own fan base, who despise “Israel.” When everyone who sees reason knows that the Zionist entity is a force for evil, the best way to protect Zionism is by turning anti-Zionists against the resistance. This tactic certainly helps Zionists defend their position, as we’ve seen Kirk do since his pivot towards aggressively pushing Gaza genocide denial. But it’s not as if this has let Kirk and the other Trump loyalists successfully bring Zionism back to its former popularity within the conservative base. So for the foreseeable future, we can expect the primary right-wing propaganda tactic to be the “Jewish question” narrative; which is functionally Zionist psyop, despite what its propagators say.

Replacing resistance & class struggle with racial obsession

The JQ is based within the Zionist premise that Jews are fundamentally a racial group, and the JQ’s role in the discourse is to isolate the pro-Palestine movement by making anti-Zionism appear synonymous with anti-Jewish bigotry. It also overlaps with Zionism in that it encourages Jews to leave “white” society and become concentrated in their own designated land, which was what formed the basis for Hitler’s collaborations with the Zionist movement. To combat the JQ psyop, though, we must do more than point out the hypocrisies of its historical or present leaders. Foremost, we need to build the working-class power which can show the masses what the true path to salvation looks like. Which can provide a real means for defeating our monopoly-controlled government, as opposed to the false opposition that the JQ’s propagators have to offer.

The bulk of the USA’s people, including the MAGA base, see that their leaders are determined to keep funding a genocide while refusing to do anything about our country’s crises. With the collapse of the narrative about Trump being anti-deep state, they’ve also seen that there is no voting our way out of the present system of government. The “solution” that the JQers have to this systemic obstacle, as explained by the white nationalist ideological leader Nick Fuentes, is to carry out a reformist effort: “My end game is that I radicalize a hundred thousand brilliant young American men, and over the next thirty years, they hide their power level, they conceal the fact that they love this show, and every single day, they work to get richer, stronger, smarter, more powerful, more influential, and one day they’re running the country. One day they’re in position to change the course of history.”

This is where the far right’s claims to having a practical solution fall apart, and where it becomes apparent just how much of an advantage the proletarian movement has over the far right. Fuentes and the other JQ proponents say that if we put an end to the alleged racialized conspiracy against “white” people, Zionism will lose its grip over our government, and the country will be freed from monopoly financial rule. Yet at the core of what these rightists are preaching, there’s a desire to prevent a revolutionary scenario, not to bring one about; whatever seemingly revolutionary aspects of what they promote are purely aesthetic, because they seek to preserve the existing social order above all else. 

This is the inescapable contradiction within “rightist” politics that’s been pointed out by Haz Al-Din, the chairman of the American Communist Party: 

The problem with all of today’s ‘Rightist’ politics is that, when it becomes a definite ideology and definite community - with very few exceptions - it stagnates, paralyzes and immobilizes the partisan politics it attempts to give articulation to. Rather than act as a conduit of movement, it acts as a conduit for the formation of enclosed community.

Organic populist movements are constantly ‘spawning’ ideologies, and these, spontaneously, take on a Rightist character, only because they attempt to give immediate articulation to the meaning of the very real partisan position that created the need for this articulation - with the readymade conceptual tools, prejudices, and ideals of the status quo. It is in a sense similar to the various ‘socialisms’ outlined in the Communist manifesto, which, while anti-capitalist, do not articulate their anti-capitalism in an effective way. Rightist politics will never successfully lead the MAGA movement to victory, because they are outright impossible to have.

“Rightist” politics are inherently self-defeating because they always end up reproducing the destructive liberal trends which they’re supposed to combat. The Nick Fuentes “groyper” movement, and any other “rightist” tendency, will simply be assimilated into the liberal order. It can only ever bring aesthetic change, the same way that Trump 2.0’s “anti-woke” crusade has only been a rebrand of the Biden era’s policy model.

It’s inevitable that the present policy model would continue under a U.S. government ruled by the “groypers” because imperialism is not a policy; its control over the state does not come from this state being governed by the wrong individuals. It comes from the material demands of capital, which during the monopoly era can only exist in the form that it does now. A form where core financial institutions make all capital around the globe revolve around them, and exercise truly dictatorial control over the state within the imperial center. “Rightism” is about reinforcing the established order, and therefore can only keep us tethered to this financial system. 

As the extermination intensifies, and Washington expands its genocidal attacks to ever-more places, these contradictions within the “dissident” influencer sphere will become clearer. The white nationalist wing within alt media has gotten a boost because of the disillusionment over Trump, but in the long term, most of our society is going to become burned out over alt media in general. What will remain is a cultural landscape where ideas like Hitlerism can be successfully sold to large parts of the masses, while the population is kept demobilized due to seeing all the failures of organized political action. That is, if we don’t build an organizational force which functions truly independently from the State Department, and that can therefore provide an alternative radicalization path towards “groyperism.”

This will mean taking advantage of the divisions within the imperial establishment, and the wider ruling class, over how best to wage the present third world war. That’s one of the ingredients which has been missing from modern left movements: the dialectical know-how which lets revolutionaries exploit the ways that their enemies are at odds. Throughout these efforts, whatever alliances we may make with any parts of the bourgeoisie will need to be purely tactical; we must have the workers maintain their independence as a political force, and not lose sight of the class struggle. It’s only by staying on this principled path, where notions of “class peace” aren’t allowed to corrupt the movement, that we can effectively draw support away from the JQ right.

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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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Luigi exposed a revolutionary crisis, & our ruling class is trying to cover it up with a manufactured crisis

Not everything is always as it seems, and there are many variables in today’s societal chaos that our ruling class hasn’t been able to account for. One example of these unforeseen developments is that during this last year alone, there’s emerged a popular movement in support of vigilante attacks on the criminals within corporate leadership; and recently this movement produced a new vigilante act, though the nature of this act has been hidden by the media.

On July 29, Blackstone CEO Wesley LePatner was shot and killed at the company’s Manhattan headquarters, which the media has framed as an accident but is clearly connected to Luigi. Blackstone is an asset manager that oversees one of the biggest housing monopolies, creating entire neighborhoods where homes are no longer for sale and entire areas that are subject to its prices. Its executives are guilty of “social murder”—where the capitalist class destroys human beings by taking away their means to live—as much as Brian Thompson and United Healthcare are. They’re to blame for homelessness, financial ruin, and the disappearance of economic opportunities. Our rulers know this, so they’ve spun a story about the shooter having been confused in order to prevent another cultural conversation about capital’s violence.

Another example is the disruptions that our recent economic chaos has brought upon the neoliberal status quo, with a crucial catalyst being Trump’s tariffs. Trump was allowed to win, and to implement these radical measures, because our elites have decided that drastic reforms must be pursued in order to save the system. Faced with imperial collapse, they’ve welcomed certain shocks to the established order, hoping this is what can rescue the empire from further decline. But this has come with a cost, because the tariffs have opened up new opportunities for alternative economic ideas to take hold. The liberal wing of the establishment, especially within academia, has been in uproar over the tariffs because they see these policies as signaling the death of their cultural dominance. Which means that programs which genuinely threaten capital, including Marxist programs, have gained an unprecedented opening within America.

Because of the tariffs, Marxist economists like Michael Hudson are going to see a growth in the popularity and influence of their ideas. With this crisis our rulers have engineered, it’s been demonstrated why socialism is the only practical path forward; this is what Hudson observed this spring in response to the tariffs, with his argument being that the tariffs could strengthen BRICS if more BRICS countries implement nationalization efforts. And this logic applies to the United States as well, where the destructive designs of our ruling class are creating a mass mandate for a new system. 

In the United States, there is a historical basis for this phenomenon, where the actions of capital make socialism a widely accepted necessity. “When the American takeoff occurred in the late 19th century, everybody called it socialist,” said Hudson. “The whole of Europe and America, almost everybody in the 1880s, the 1890s, was calling the future ‘socialism.’ There was Christian socialism, libertarian socialism, Marxian socialism, all sorts of socialism. Everybody realized there had to be a mixed economy, there was no such thing as an ‘automatic adjustment process’ that made equilibrium; governments are needed to play a role in allocating resources. If this is left to bankers, as the United States has done, then you let the economy be financialized.”

This financialization and its consequences are what the Blackstone shooter was responding to. And though the masses have had this story concealed from them, they’re experiencing capital’s destructive process, and they’re seeking out solutions. The potential for these Americans to come to solutions that lie beyond the capitalist framework, and get behind a real popular revolutionary movement, is what unites the ruling class in fear. The different wings of the elites have conflicting ideas about how to respond to this threat from the masses, though; whereas the Trump wing wants to militarily occupy the country, the liberal technocratic wing wants to revamp policies like the lockdowns. The disagreement stems from how the Trump wing is aligned with the lower levels of capital, while the liberal wing represents monopoly finance. And we can use this divide to our advantage. 

The reactions towards our revolutionary crisis that we’re seeing from the ruling class, and the infighting that will come from this, represent more disruptions that weaken our class enemies. The question is how well we’ll be able to outmaneuver these enemies.

Something Trump’s military crackdown effort has shown us is that the revolutionary forces cannot rely on the cities. The workers movement must establish a serious presence throughout rural America, where the state has far less of a repressive advantage. Understanding this crucial strategic reality is part of how we translate these sharpenings in capitalism’s contradictions into a movement that can actually overthrow the system.

A crisis does not in itself bring the defeat of the ruling class; this is something that we’ve learned from how only a tiny number of history’s capitalist crises have been the ones to directly precede revolutions. When those challenging the system know how to organize the popular masses, though, these crises in between the pivotal moments come to have a more significant impact.

Rather than being pulled along by a historical process that they don’t know how to respond to, the masses become part of a collective struggle, one whose participants learn from each new development. With the guidance of a revolutionary organization, and the insights that come from studying the struggle’s theories and histories, the people gain the strength to stand up to the state’s intimidation. Efforts to crush dissent, like the ones we’re seeing right now in the cities, cannot succeed in chilling a people who’ve been prepared in these ways.

Our task is to unite the masses, urban and rural, so that they can effectively fight off the suppressive efforts of our divided ruling class. The disputes among the capitalists are only going to grow larger; this is one of the developments that’s guaranteed by the empire’s decline. And these fights between our enemies have the potential to let the masses prevail, if we overcome the divisions which our class enemies are trying to sow among the people.

They want the people of the city and the country to hate each other, want us at odds over culture war issues, etc. Just five years ago, during the pandemic’s first year, these efforts to sow division were extremely successful; yet within just a few years, Americans found a new unity, based around a shared anger over their government’s failures to solve our crises. The Luigi movement was the next step in this change to the popular consciousness, and the phase after this one will involve an actual organization of the masses. This process of mass radicalization cannot be stopped, it’s going to keep unfolding as a response to the measures our rulers are taking. Our role as is to give the masses the means to win this fight.

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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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DSA Zionist opportunism vs. pro-resistance politics: the fight to save the pro-Palestine movement

It’s best to present this call to action as a coalition-building project, because though it involves the ACP, not all of my audience are communists and most aren’t ACP members. The most effective mass strategy for the party and its supporters is to emphasize how our politics align with all people who seek to end the Palestinian genocide, especially the millions of Gen Z-ers who support Palestine’s resistance. They already share our stance on the question of whether Palestinians have the right to fight back; they’ve made that leap within their consciousness. And now that DSA has shown how pro-Zionist it is, we within America’s communist movement need to show we’re the right alternative to this imperialist “socialism.”

To bring in the radicalized younger generation, we’ll need to combat the liberal efforts at obfuscating what anti-Zionism means. Anti-Zionism is a very specific position; it means opposing the idea of having any form of a Jewish state on Palestinian land. Anti-Zionism is not what the DSA has to offer, even though a slight majority of the DSA’s delegates recently voted for an anti-Zionist resolution. Within the DSA’s petty-bourgeois liberal leadership, there is a substantial element that doesn’t want to be perceived as pro-Zionist, but is Zionist in practice, as this element condones the statement that “Israel has the right to exist.”  

This is a statement that’s been affirmed by the DSA’s candidate Zohran Mamdani, who’s among the prominent Zionist DSA members which have adopted this particular rhetorical strategy. It’s a strategy where they don’t claim the Zionist label, but concede to the Zionists on their core argument about Jews needing a state in Palestine. It depends on the perception that “Zionism” is not a concrete political stance with a clear goal, but rather a vibe; if someone is outwardly bigoted towards Arabs, they’re a Zionist, but as long as they give off an inclusive vibe, they’re not a Zionist.

This is one of the sneakier ways that liberal or “progressive” Zionists have been trying to recapture pro-Palestine sentiment. It’s far from a universally shared approach among these Zionists, though, and the DSA’s infamous convention vote exposed this divide among the left opportunists. The 43% of the delegates who said no to affiliating with the “anti-Zionist” title could easily have taken a more underhanded route, and claimed to be anti-Zionists so that they could push their agenda covertly. But they chose the brazen path, and this is because they fall under a particular type of liberal Zionist category; one that’s more closely aligned with the most outward Jewish supremacists than liberal Zionists want to portray themselves as. Which helps us show the pro-Palestine masses how harmful of a role the DSA’s leadership is playing, and why we must build a pro-resistance united front.

The DSA leadership’s argument for not expelling these delegates is that doing so would cause too much trouble; which parallels every other argument that reformists make for helping strengthen the reactionary forces. Supposedly Zohran needed to take a pro-Zionist stance for the sake of political expediency; supposedly the Palestinian resistance should stop fighting back for the sake of “peace.” This is the kind of reasoning that drives those outwardly reactionary delegates, as well as the many covertly reactionary DSA leaders who align with Zionism while not stating as such. When the pro-resistance youth see what truly motivates these opportunists, and what kind of trap the opportunists are trying to set for the pro-Palestine movement, the DSA leadership will lose the influence it now has.

The only reason why the opportunists in DSA still have enough relevance to be worth treating like a threat, as opposed to the other kinds of left opportunists, is that DSA’s leaders are able to fill the role of a “left” current which advances outright pro-Zionist politics. The imperial state needs such a current to become the only mainstream iteration of the left, because then there won’t be any presence for those who support Palestine’s resistance. Which is where the ACP comes in. ACP, and those who are willing to work with it, are our best option for building an authentic and principled pro-Palestine movement. This is because the politics of the ACP are true American working-class politics.

These are politics that come from the studying of America’s unique history with class struggle, and with anti-imperialist solidarity. To carry the lessons from this history into our present-day struggle, you don’t even need to be in the party; you merely need to investigate what our forebears in this country’s liberation movements have done, and apply this knowledge to our modern conditions. The ACP represents a larger, global project for constantly improved practice, where all the participants are striving to translate the insights gained from past struggles into new victories. This is why the party’s official ideology is Marxism-Leninism unified tendency, which incorporates all of the positive aspects from past and present existing socialism.

For the party’s founders to have come to the stage where they would form a party, they first needed to formulate a mode of operating which could prove itself to be based within this learned experience method. They had to show their path to be superior towards that of the left opportunists in the CPUSA, who’d subverted democracy within their own org to keep it aligned with the Democratic Party. 

Throughout its first year or so of existence, the new communist party has brought results in a way that these Democrat tailist orgs aren’t capable of doing. We’ve seen its cadres assist the people and lead workers struggles in much more serious ways than any of the other biggest U.S. socialist orgs have. Which gives the party further credibility as a revolutionary vehicle when its leaders build ties with the anti-Zionist resistance forces.

This is the most important historical lesson that the party has applied, and that others must apply in order to succeed: we must center the actual class struggle. The DSA leadership treats class struggle as an entirely theoretical notion, focusing instead on how to gain more favor from the liberal wing of capital. Only a political current that’s centered around fighting for the working class is capable of defeating the bigger ideological threat, that being the far right. The “Jewish question” is the new major trend that the feds are boosting, with the goal being to divert anti-Zionist sentiment into a controlled opposition project. 

Only the ACP’s mode of practice can effectively combat this malign ideological force. Whether or not you personally are in the party, if you share its commitment to working-class politics I consider you part of this same trend. Together, let’s win the next phase in this battle.

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