The Atlanticist ideology behind our elite’s Israel obsession, & the far right’s backward “Jewish question” explanation

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.”

Something which has handicapped the left in its ability to rally Americans against Zionism is the widespread belief within today’s progressive spaces that the Zionist lobby doesn’t matter. This is what’s been argued by Noam Chomsky, who’s essentially concluded that the interests of U.S. imperialism make the Lobby’s role redundant:

The US-Israeli alliance was firmed up precisely when Israel performed a huge service to the US-Saudis-Energy corporations by smashing secular Arab nationalism, which threatened to divert resources to domestic needs. That’s also when the Lobby takes off (apart from the Christian evangelical component, by far the most numerous and arguably the most influential part, but that’s mostly the 90s). And it’s also when the intellectual-political class began their love affair with Israel, previously of little interest to them. They are a very influential part of the Lobby because of their role in media, scholarship, etc. From that point on it’s hard to distinguish “national interest” (in the usual perverse sense of the phrase) from the effects of the Lobby.

The problem with this analysis is that it frames the question of the Lobby’s influence in binary terms: either the Lobby and the Zionist entity are at the head of U.S. policy, or “Israel” is completely subordinate to Washington and therefore the Lobby isn’t a real driving factor. To truly understand the Zionist entity’s role within U.S. policy, and therefore know which stance America’s workers movement must take towards the Lobby, we must look at the ruling ideology that defines Washington’s global actions. This ideology being Atlanticism, the worldview in which the USA’s national interests are seen as being synonymous with those of the transnational, financial empire that our government is tasked with serving.

When we investigate what Atlanticism stands for, and where its material interests are based, it becomes even more apparent that the JQ comes from fallacy; there are attempts to depict the word “Atlanticism” as being an inherent JQ dog whistle, but the word does not actually refer to a theory in which Jewish interests are the core driving force. It refers to the objective reality that monopoly financial interests dominate our government, which refutes the JQ argument about how changing the racial character of our institutions would solve society’s problems; the crises we’re experiencing come from the imperial system, which would continue to exist with or without any Jewish leadership. 

This is what the JQers miss about Atlanticism when they refer to it as supposed proof for their position: Atlanticism isn’t about subordinating America towards Jewish interests, it’s about negating the American nation in service of international finance. Which is absolutely not synonymous with Jews, and isn’t dependent on Jewish leadership for its survival.

Another important thing to know about Atlanticism is that there’s a difference between what finance capital’s objective interests are, and what the adherents of the Atlanticist ideology subjectively believe is best for these interests. It’s very easy for the Atlanticists within our ruling institutions to overestimate the importance of serving one particular imperial outpost, and then end up harming the empire’s interests in the process. We’ve certainly seen this with Ukraine, where the Atlanticist wing of our government has been caught up in fighting a war that undermines U.S. power in many areas. This proxy conflict has driven Russia closer to China, worn down U.S. and European military resources, compelled most of the Global South to outwardly disregard Washington’s wishes by refusing to support Ukraine, accelerated the decline of the dollar, turned BRICS into the force that it is today, and radicalized many Americans by massively furthering inflation. 

It’s for these reasons that the right-wing nationalist wing within our ruling class has opposed the Ukraine war; this project has come with numerous severe costs for U.S. capital, so for those who care more about America’s local capitalist interests than the global banking apparatus, Ukraine is simply a liability. And an equivalent kind of inter-elite dispute is developing over the question of “Israel,” because the effort to prop up the Zionist state has entailed many of the same drawbacks. 

Washington’s doubling down on support for “Israel” has multiplied all of the blowback from the Ukraine war; it’s added another costly arms committment when Washington is already spread thin, it’s provoked popular anger towards the war machine that can’t be satiated, it’s left Washington more isolated than ever as the world sees its monstrous endeavor in Palestine, and it’s been a crucial factor in the collapse of the Democratic Party, which at the least means the revolutionary forces have gained an opening.

It’s getting harder for the strategic benefits of “Israel” to outweigh these costs, because “Israel” isn’t as necessary for maintaining U.S. hegemony as it was prior to Arab nationalism’s defeat. When Nasserism was crushed in the 1967 war, and then the U.S. repaired its relations with Saudi Arabia following the 1973 embargo, this gave Washington much broader control over West Asia; control that “Israel” still helps the empire fortify, but that’s no longer so dependent on “Israel” as it once was. The full capturing of Egypt into Washington’s orbit was a critical part of this transition; unlike “Israel,” Egypt is geographically capable of controlling the trade through the Red Sea. (Though this control has been superseded by Ansarallah through its blockade of the Suez Canal, which was started directly in response to what “Israel” is doing to Gaza.) 

The colonization of Palestine has been a critical stepping stone towards this imperial takeover of the region; but now that it’s gotten this far, there’s coming to be more disputes among our elites over whether to keep taking on all the liabilities which “Israel” creates for the United States. The main function that “Israel” actually serves is to wage Washington’s wars as a proxy, but Turkey does this just as well, if not better. It’s quite plausible that the empire will replace “Israel” with Turkey as the primary U.S. attack dog in West Asia, as well as receive increased backing in its efforts to coordinate jihadist attacks against China. The continued U.S. investment in “Israel” is in great part due to inertia; the inertia that comes from having a massive part of the ruling class which has long been genuinely in thrall to the cult of Zionist ideology.

The bulk of those within America’s ruling institutions believe their own propaganda about how “Israel” is absolutely and eternally indispensable to America’s strategic interests. They also truly believe the narratives about how “Israel” wants only the best for the Palestinian people, Hamas is stealing the aid, and all evidence of human rights abuses against Palestinians is “antisemitic” propaganda. This is the level of intelligence we’re dealing with when it comes to the typical pro-Zionist politician, religious leader, media producer, PAC head, or other figure who’s taken on a role as a stooge for the imperial state. Even a lot of the billionaires who fund the “Israel” lobby sincerely buy Zionism’s PR narratives, and believe “Israel” really is just defending itself. There are no doubt parts of the deep state that know how much of a liability “Israel” really is to Washington’s human rights image, because U.S. intelligence works in tandem with “Israel” and directly bears witness to its continuous atrocities. 

It’s likely because of this that certain elements within the deep state have been working to boost the “dissident right”: when you know the victim narrative about “Israel” is a cosmically gargantuan lie, but your task is to defend the empire, it becomes apparent that cultivating a controlled opposition towards Zionism is necessary. And now that the Biden-era ultra-leftist brands of controlled opposition have needed to be de-boosted, the far right represents the main “dissident” politics our ruling class is pushing. 

This is a politics that doesn’t even pretend to stand with Palestine’s resistance, because its motivation for opposing Zionism is based within pure racial obsession. And this is certainly damaging towards the Palestinian cause, but it also comes with that inescapable contradiction in every kind of “rightist” politics: the contradiction between claiming to want the defeat of liberalism’s excesses, while seeking to maintain the existing social order. The “dissident right” is going to remain ineffective at stopping the genocide, or at defeating capital’s other anti-human schemes. Which will leave our society ripe for the rise of a genuine revolutionary politics.

For our program to truly be revolutionary, it will need to take into account Lenin’s warning that “it is impossible to escape imperialist war, and imperialist peace…which inevitably engenders imperialist war, it is impossible to escape that inferno, except by a Bolshevik struggle and a Bolshevik revolution.” A Palestine supporter doesn’t need to identify as a communist to apply the lesson Lenin was conveying here, because whatever differences there are within the pro-Palestine coalition, the shared goal of our cause is to defeat the class interests behind the genocide against Palestine. Zionism can’t be defeated until capital is defeated, and this means the workers struggle is inseparable from the Palestinian struggle.

Once the class question is replaced with the “Jewish question,” and workers struggle is replaced with racial struggle, the movement stops being about freeing Palestine. The JQ movement doesn’t have to do with any kind of revolutionary or national liberation goal, it’s about rehabilitating Hitler. Which, despite what the JQers say, is a mission that’s completely compatible with liberal modernity. 21st century Hitlerism is just another part of the “dark woke” trend that’s coming to dominate ruling class politics; this is the trend where finance capital’s propagandists use the language of progress to promote genocidal ideologies, whether the particular ideology is Zionism or Nazism. The only answer to “dark woke” is the construction of an authentic working-class force that defeats the imperial state, and smashes its designs for expanded extermination.

Combating ultra-leftism is a critical part of this task, and though the PSL’s current within ultra-leftism has collapsed, we may soon need to confront a different version of this problem. What happens when the attempts at building a successful social movement have failed, and the state is on the advance in its efforts at crushing dissent? What happens is that the “ultras” within the protest movements come to be at the forefront of the activism efforts; which has already happened to an extent, but the next danger is that these wrecking forces will become the faces of the Palestinian cause. When leftists are being forced into a retreat, all too often they react by embracing adventurism, hoping that by lashing out they’ll suddenly reverse the course that history is taking. 

We only need to look to the Weather Underground for an example of this; the Weathermen and other adventuristic groups were able to gain as much relevance as they did because even during the most triumphant moments in the 60-70s upheavals, the United States was fundamentally lacking in the workers power which it used to have. It was this deficiency that allowed the popular movements to be diverted back then, and that’s threatening to make them lose during our era as well. When the basis for a serious proletarian movement  isn’t there, a movement’s participants will lack the direction they need, and they’ll be taken in by currents that play a negative role within the struggle.

Though Marxism-Leninism is the ideology that I espouse, someone certainly doesn’t need to be an ML to be part of the solution. By “currents that play a negative role,” I don’t mean “any ideology that isn’t Marxist”; I mean any political tendency that objectively harms the interests of the country’s popular masses, and by extension the interests of the Palestinian resistance. There are plenty of non-Marxist political actors who play a positive role, and part of being a serious Marxist is recognizing this. 

I’ve devoted so much space to refuting the ideas of non-Marxists, and of seriously flawed Marxists, because these ideological actors who I’ve focused on have a particularly harmful character. They represent the political currents that either work to defend the genocidal campaign of our ruling class, or render our popular movements unable to defend against the state’s counterinsurgency. Combating these damaging forces is one part of what we must do; the other big part is to build up the popular organizational power which can end the Nazistic project our elites are carrying out.

The actors who’ve been perpetrating the extermination of the Palestinians are directly tied in with Silicon Valley, and everything they’re doing to Palestine informs their activities in the United States. Palantir is an example of this Zionist big tech connection that America’s masses have already become aware of. Now that Trump has approved a plan to build a Palantir-run mass surveillance network, the MAGA base has caught on to this civil liberties threat from the Zionists, perhaps more acutely than most other Americans have. 

When it comes to the Lobby, or the Zionist-tied spying efforts, or the censorship against “antisemitism,” the masses have come to share a widespread consciousness about how Zionism is causing harm towards our own society. (Which is a secondary issue compared to the genocide, but is important to account for when seeking to bring in the masses.) There are opportunists who aim to turn this consciousness in the wrong direction by framing Zionism as an anti-“white” conspiracy, but their arguments will never be as effective or compelling as what a real workers movement can show the masses.

The parts of the pro-Palestine movement that have learned from history, and have investigated our conditions, will draw upon the unbeatable strength of the proletariat. They’ll build dual power, creating institutions that act independently from the capitalist class and provide the masses with the tools to fight back against capital’s attacks. They’ll do more than have the right form of organizational practice, where we say all the right things and argue against all the wrong ideas; their practice will also have the content which makes it actually mean something to hold the correct positions.

When it comes to rallying the USA’s people in particular, one of these positions we must take is that the Zionist lobby truly does mean something material. This is a lesson we must take from the persuasive successes of the JQers: the masses think of the anti-Zionist struggle in terms of their own government being controlled by a malign, transnational force, because this is in fact the situation that they’re facing. The American revolution has still not been completed, because the American people haven’t yet been liberated from the tyranny that monopoly finance capital has constructed. And the equivalent is the case throughout the rest of the countries in the imperial sphere, whose own masses are coming to similar conclusions. 

Any confusion that these masses have about the nature of this control is our own fault, because it’s our responsibility to put forth the materialist alternative towards the JQ’s arguments. When we assume this responsibility, we will be in place to fulfill our part within the great struggle that people all around the world are waging. A struggle which, by connecting ourselves to it, will give us both the practical and spiritual guidance that can let us prevail.

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Finance capital’s war on the people, & our mission to rescue the masses from this threat

We within the proletarian, anti-imperialist struggle have a mandate to fight back against the anti-human project that our ruling class is carrying out. This project has been formally named “dark woke,” with the phrase coming from a Democrat rebranding campaign aimed at taking back power through any means necessary. “Dark woke” has come to represent something bigger than the Democratic Party, though; it’s a fusion of the different wings of anti-social reactionary ideologies, both Hitlerite and Zionist, with the aim of crushing the people and making way for new extermination campaigns. 

This is a new evolution in the machinations of our ruling class, beyond what “dark woke” originally meant. It’s a way for the elites to repudiate all aspects of our society which embody community spirit, constructive industry, or class solidarity, with the aim being to destroy these things through any means necessary—including terrorism.

The right has been pointing to the menace which is “dark woke,” but the right is completely incapable of fighting against it, because dark woke gets its power from the same monopoly financial forces that are behind today’s “rightist” politics. You cannot defeat the destructive agenda of liberal modernism while you yourself seek to reinforce that liberal status quo; this is the reality that undermines both the soft, neocon Charlie Kirk right, and the “dissident” Nick Fuentes far right. 

These ideological currents are opposed to an independent organization by the working class, which is the only thing that can empower the masses. In the absence of popular dual power, where the people have built their own institutions which stand against capital, dark woke will win. It will cut through all of the flimsy democratic protections that the capitalist state has, and reshape our society to fit the elite’s psychopathic technocratic vision.

When we clarify this reality about dark woke—that it’s specifically a tool of finance capital—then we can lead the people to fight against the right enemy. This being a class enemy, the enemy that exists within the monopolies and the international banking interests which they’re fused with. 

As Dimitrov said about fascism, the predecessor to dark woke: “Fascism is not a form of state power ‘standing above both classes -- the proletariat and the bourgeoisie,’ as Otto Bauer, for instance, has asserted. It is not ‘the revolt of the petty bourgeoisie which has captured the machinery of the state,’ as the British Socialist Brailsford declares. No, fascism is not a power standing above class, nor government of the petty bourgeoisie or the lumpen-proletariat over finance capital. Fascism is the power of finance capital itself. It is the organization of terrorist vengeance against the working class and the revolutionary section of the peasantry and intelligentsia. In foreign policy, fascism is jingoism in its most brutal form, fomenting bestial hatred of other nations.”

I say that fascism is dark woke’s predecessor because within capital’s violence, fascism is no longer necessarily the operative force. Fascism, as it properly existed, defined a specific era in capitalism’s history; one where many of the core imperialist countries felt the need to utilize ultra-nationalism, and consolidate their power by unleashing the full violent power of the state. Finance capital is headed in a comparable direction now, but the nature of its violent campaign in our era is going to look different from Mussolini or Hitler. Instead, it’s going to look like Trotsky; like an aggressively militaristic project that seeks “permanent revolution” through the enactment of endless, borderless bloodshed, with some of the biggest targets being the rural or conservative masses who Trotskyism views as the enemy.

This is the distinction between traditional fascism, and the Trotskyist “progressivism” that dark woke represents. Fascism relied on nationalism, while dark woke is part of a distinctly transnational project. The Davos, WEF banking elites who are behind dark woke have centralized their empire in the United States, but they hold an intense disdain towards the American nation, as well as essentially every other nation. 

Their ideology is one of pure, postmodern disregard for the value of the collective and the value of humanity itself, which is why they promote not just national nihilism but also omnicidal propaganda about how “humans are earth’s virus.” Hitlerism had anarchist origins, but with dark woke, those anarchist aspects are made fully bare; the ideology that’s being pushed by today’s international financial order is compatible with the anarchist slogan of “no borders, no nations,” and ultimately compatible with the “anarcho-primitivist” elements that advocate for an end to industrial civilization.

Since the Biden era, the “dark woke” camp within the elites has needed to do a tactical retreat, and let Trump win out of hope that he’ll enact radical reforms which save the empire. But this camp is preparing to strike back, and when it does, there will be a greater chance that it successfully carries out its goals. That it uses climate, public health, or another pretext to orchestrate a rapid, unprecedented degrowth of our economy. The elites have been partially effective in advancing this goal, but they haven’t yet gotten nearly as far as they’d like. They want to collapse the economy, as well as the social fabric, to an extent where the masses have been not just brought to their knees but alienated from collective solidarity. 

The only way that finance capital can get the economic shocks it wants without this triggering a revolutionary crisis is if the crisis becomes demoralizing to the people, turning their anger towards cultural battles and putting them at each other’s throats. While finance capital has consolidated enough power to target the people in horrific new ways, though, it will find that the people won’t respond in such a self-destructive fashion.

The big encouraging sign when it comes to the United States is that our society already passed through a phase where people were at each other’s throats, and then overcame this in a matter of a few years. In 2020, the people reacted to the pandemic by becoming angry at one another, with the dual forces of public health panic and freedom-desiring anger clashing explosively. This division carried over into that year’s protest outbreak, which the state successfully diverted into the Democratic Party. Then, when the MAGA base, independents, and a growing number of former liberals came to agree that Biden had utterly failed the people, this disunity went away. 

By 2024, Americans were overwhelmingly unified in opposition to the status quo. And this unity will translate into a resistance against the next attempts by our government to destroy our living standards, start a new big war, or paralyze our communities with orchestrated shootings. The conditions for a popular front against the dark woke menace are there; let us organize the people with the confidence that they’re already on our side.

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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 liberal deep state is preparing to strike back, & Trump has weakened the people’s defenses against this

The myth about Trump 2.0 representing something genuinely anti-establishment has had a lot of damaging repercussions. One of them is that the Gaza genocide has been enabled to accelerate, as the expectations for Trump to be an antiwar president distracted from Trump’s actual policy of speeding up Palestine’s extermination. This development alone is enough to discredit the worldview behind the Trump 2.0 psyop, in which supposedly we can reform our way out of an imperialist government; and indeed, many within the MAGA base have been reacting to Gaza by turning against Trump, showing that mass consciousness is becoming more advanced.

The American people are coming to the same conclusion that the communist William Z. Foster did when he was faced with the opportunism of Earl Browder, who took the communist party in a direction of trailing behind the Democratic Party. Like the political actors who’ve promised that Trump will fight for the country’s people, Browder sought to obscure how class struggle works; he acted as if the capitalists would freely give the workers their rights, without any need for the workers to organize on their own. As Foster observed:

Browder attempts to liquidate the class struggle by preaching an illusory harmony of interest between the workers and their class enemies, the big capitalists, in the postwar period. For, if what Browder says were true, that the capitalists would, of their own volition, radically improve the workers’ real wages, there would remain little or no basis for the class struggle. Browder’s idea, too, that the American big capitalists, in their “true class interests” virtually must make them not only raise the workers’ living standards but live in friendly harmony with the U.S.S.R., has nothing in common with the Marxist conception of classes and their roles. There is no Marxian principle which holds that social classes “must” follow “their true class interests.” Indeed, history is replete with examples of classes which, under immediate economic, political or ideological pressures, have violated their “true class interests,” with disastrous consequences to themselves.

The revolt within MAGA represents a moment where the USA’s people are learning this same lesson, as they’re confronted with the reality that a capitalist party or politician will inevitably betray the masses. For us to turn this consciousness shift in a productive direction, though, we will need to anticipate the next big catastrophe which Trump 2.0 is going to help produce: the catastrophe where the liberal wing of our deep state, out of desire to reassert control, carries out unprecedented attacks against our liberty and prosperity. 

The Davos, WEF camp within the elites is absolutely planning to make a comeback after Trump is out; just because this camp allowed him to win without assassinating him, doesn’t mean the conflicts inside our ruling class have lessened. The dominant camp within the ruling class views Trump as a means for exacting radical reforms, ones that the elites hope will rescue the U.S. empire. It’s these reforms that are going to clear the way for what comes after Trump, which will be a “dark woke” techno-tyranny where all of the state’s repressive and surveillance tools get used to their full potential.

Two years ago, during the height of the Biden-era efforts at attacking the antiwar movement from the left, I predicted that finance capital would carry out a purge. A purge that would be about suppressing not just the working class, but also the lower rungs of capital. I still believe this crackdown is coming, and the events since then have given the highest levels of capital even more reasons to become aggressive; a split has emerged on the right over Palestine, and the conservative figures who’ve most vocally been speaking out on Zionism are likely to become subjected to serious retaliation. This doesn’t mean the “dissident right” isn’t controlled opposition; but if the Zionist fanatics among our elites have been exploding with fury over the Democrat Zohran Mamdani, the Palestine-sympathetic conservatives are going to be met with at least as much backlash.

The risk posed by the “dissident right” is similar to the risk posed by the Zohran campaign: that it will placate our popular movements, and leave us vulnerable to the state’s counterinsurgency. The system is setting up these compromised “dissident” politicians and commentators as fall guys, aiming to divert revolutionary sentiments into ineffective political projects. And when the deep state makes its big moves, these designated “anti-establishment” leaders could become swept up in the destruction. 

This almost happened to Trump last year, when he was nearly assassinated; the only reason why none of the assassination attempts on him since then have succeeded is because not enough people within the power structure want him gone. Trump has been able to please enough of these deep state actors to stay alive, and this has delayed the next inter-elite conflict escalations for the moment; but we are headed for a phase in which incidents like the July 2024 Trump rally shooting have become common.

The only way we’ll be able to resist this violent campaign from our rulers is by giving up the reformist illusions that produced the false hopes around Trump 2.0. One of these illusions mirrors the Browderist narrative that Foster rebuked; the narrative where we can win over one wing within the ruling class, as this wing will supposedly follow its “true class interests.” With Trump, one of the expectations was that he would defy the deep state because he’s a businessman with his own interests, which are distinct from those of the liberal establishment. Indeed, lower-level capitalists like him do have different interests from the financial monopolists; this doesn’t mean, though, that he or any other “outsider” figure can’t be used as controlled opposition leaders for finance capital.

The lesson to take from this is not that all parts of the capitalist class are synonymous; the industrial capitalists get their profits through different means than the monopolists do, and understanding this is crucial to winning the class war. The lesson is that when we rely on an “outsider” candidate, that candidate will be either eliminated or assimilated into the system, and the power of the masses will be weakened in turn.

As dark woke advances its assault on the people, we’re going to be offered more “solutions” from the dissident right that involve appealing to or trusting in one wing of bourgeois politics. To stand any chance against the menace we’re facing, we’ll need a political project that’s genuinely independent to the working class, and has the goal of replacing the capitalist state with a workers state. The right opportunist forces have quite effectively sold the idea of “class peace,” and obscured the need for a proletarian struggle. But with the capitalist assault that dark woke represents, the contradictions within the “class peace” idea will be exposed, and the need for workers revolution will be made all the more apparent. 

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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 patriotic struggle of the anti-imperialist forces, & the effort to bring this struggle back into America

Something my fellow Americans must be made aware of is that around the globe, the revolutionary ideas behind 1776 are still being actively put into practice. Our government doesn’t want us to know this; it’s created an encyclopedia’s worth of lies to demonize the popular movements and countries that are fighting against U.S. imperialism. And this propaganda has been effective, but only to an extent. The future of America’s people is tied in with the success of these global resistance forces, because we’re all up against the system of monopoly finance capitalism. And by connecting Americans to these anti-imperialist movements, we’ll enable the American people to complete the constitution of their own nation—which is itself a critical prerequisite to the rest of the world’s development.

I do not say this because I share any form of American exceptionalist ideology, where the historical rules that apply to the rest of the globe are seen as not applying to the USA. I say this because of how much I’m opposed to American exceptionalism; because I see that America’s role in liberating humanity is as significant as that of any other country. Recently, the American Communist Party’s chairman Haz Al-Din concluded that if America fails to become a complete and unified nation, the rest of the globe will feel the consequences from this failure as well. As under such circumstances, the world would be missing a piece in the puzzle of humanity’s collective evolution.

For this reason, when I emphasize the patriotic struggles of the peoples who are resisting imperialism, I do so with the intent of rousing my fellow Americans towards following in the example of these movements. Just because the revolutionary forces in the USA are weak compared to the ones abroad, doesn’t mean this won’t change; and it’s by drawing upon the lessons from these global struggles that we in America will gain the insights necessary for completing our own revolution.

Part of why this revolution wasn’t completed is that when it began, the most progressive forces within it weren’t able to prevail. The slave owners, with their ties to the British capitalist network, could keep a strong hold over the new republic. But as capitalism advanced to its next phase, the socialist movement gained the historical experience to be able to evolve beyond utopianism, and thereby offer something practical. This, observed Eugene Debs, was an essential factor in producing what Debs called “The American movement”:

As the inventive genius of man asserted itself in the industrial world; as the use of steam as motive power expanded and machinery was introduced and its application to industry became more general, with its inevitable effects upon artisans, laborers and small tradesmen, the movement was accelerated in varying forms, chiefly utopian, until many years afterward, toward the middle of the nineteenth century, when it was crystallized by the genius of Marx, Engels, Lassalle and others, who caught the revolutionary current, clarified it and sent it circling around the globe on its mission of freedom and fraternity. 

The earliest traces of socialism in the United States had their origin in the stream of immigration that flowed from the old world to the new and bore upon its bosom the germs of discontent warmed into life in the effete feudalism of European civilization…The times were fruitful of industrial and social unrest and the many schemes and plans that were proposed, utopian, impractical, impossible though they undoubtedly were, were at the same time the signs and symptoms of social gestation, the fore-runners of the mighty change that was laying hold of governments and institutions and destined to revolutionize them all and level the human race upward to the plane of an all-embracing civilization.

Even after all of the measures our ruling class has taken to crush this movement in the United States, it continues on across the world. And within the Marxist-Leninist parties in particular, the participants in these global liberation struggles still draw inspiration from a specifically American achievement: 1776. History’s biggest communist thinkers and leaders, from Marx to Lenin to Ho Chi Minh, have recognized 1776 as a revolutionary event from which communists must take example. 

This doesn’t mean that communism itself came from America; when I point to “the American movement,” I’m referring to the socialist movement within the United States itself. It’s undeniable, though, that the American revolution has had an ongoing influence on the world’s Marxist-Leninist parties. Ho Chi Minh believed that America’s accomplishment of breaking free from the monarchy is still relevant to today’s liberation movements, so much so that he quoted the Declaration of Independence at the beginning of his own founding statement for the Republic of Vietnam. 

Marxist-Leninists are the first ones to be aware of the larger historical context behind the founding of the United States, namely that it precipitated a project to expand the country through multiple genocides. Yet MLs know that America has made unique contributions to the class struggle, ones that can’t be discounted. And it’s only when we account for these positive parts of our history that we can bring balance to the imbalance which the anti-indigenous exterminations created.

The shape of this story is one where, over the course of centuries, the different participants in the class struggle help each other see the route towards final victory over the enemies of liberty. America did something that future freedom fighters would take inspiration from; and though America then became captured by monopoly finance capital, the forces which produced its original revolution lay dormant, and ready to liberate America a second time. The spirit of 1776 lives on within the movements that are resisting U.S. imperialism, and it’s through these efforts to continue 1776’s legacy that this spirit will find its way back into America.

When troops from socialist Korea fight against Washington’s fascist Ukrainian proxy regime, they’re carrying forth a patriotic struggle that Americans are fundamentally connected to. So is the case for the Palestinians, Yemenis, Venezuelans, and others who are resisting the U.S. government’s aggressions. Our ruling class has done all it can over the generations to convince us that patriotism is synonymous with support for imperialism. And this Big Lie has been effective in many ways, but like with the other lies, its success is limited. 

It’s doubtful that the present effort to rally support for invading Venezuela will work, like the Iraq invasion narrative worked; in only a generation, the consciousness of the American people has become much less conducive to imperialist propaganda, because the system of imperialism is inherently unstable. The country’s masses have experienced the economic destruction that comes from living under capitalism, so our government keeps finding it difficult to sell them the next big war. 

In response to the Venezuela war drive, American communists have been making the comparison between America’s anti-British struggle, and the self-defense struggle of the Venezuelan people. This is the right tactic to use, and it’s likely to have a real impact on the discourse; how big this impact will be, that depends on the size of our movement’s platforms. We must work to make this latest war provocation backfire on our government, to the effect that a new American revolution gets brought tangibly closer.

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Russia’s operation has led the masses to be radicalized, but it’s up to us to take advantage of this

At least since Washington started the conflict in Syria, we’ve been living through what’s essentially a third world war. And as Mao predicted, when a third world war came, this would compel the globe’s masses to carry out workers revolutions on an unprecedented scale:

We stand firmly for peace and against war. However, if the imperialists insist on unleashing another war, we should not be afraid of it. Our attitude on this question is the same as our attitude towards any disturbance: first, we are against it; second, we are not afraid of it. The First World War was followed by the birth of the Soviet Union with a population of 200 million. The Second World War was followed by the emergence of the socialist camp with a combined population of 900 million. If the imperialists insist on launching a third world war, it is certain that several hundred million more will turn to socialism, and then there will not be much room left on earth for the imperialists; it is also likely that the whole structure of imperialism will utterly collapse. 

Does this optimistic way of thinking about World War III still apply? It does, because now that the imperialists have instigated another worldwide conflict, hundreds of millions of workers are indeed being radicalized by the ensuing instability. Most of them haven’t yet turned to socialism, but they have been forced to respond to the upheavals that NATO’s provocations have brought about. 

I’m mainly talking about the economic chaos that’s been created by Washington’s proxy war against Russia, which has sped up the dollar’s decline while giving the capitalists an excuse to massively drive up prices. For the workers in the United States and its satellite countries, these shocks have been too much to accept; the only way for them to respond is by becoming disillusioned, and seeking out new political solutions. It’s quite plausible that the Ukraine proxy war, in combination with the other aggressions our government will launch during this period, are going to catalyze a new wave of workers revolutions. For this to happen, though, we are going to need to organize these radicalized workers. To give them the education and institutional power they’ll need for overthrowing their imperialist dictatorship, which is the only way that the global capitalist structure can truly collapse.

Something the anti-imperialist movement needs to understand about collapse is that without that aspect of collective organization, of active effort to advance the class struggle, what “collapse” will mean is a major worsening in the conditions of the underclass. At worst, it will mean extermination campaigns against entire peoples, like we’re seeing right now in Gaza. Crisis is not the enemy of capitalism, but a central part of capitalism; the only capitalist crises that bring revolution are the crises that happen when the people have already built up enough power of their own. As long as the capitalists are the ones with serious power, whatever collapse that happens is going to be used to expand the violence against the masses.

The factor that truly matters is whether the proletariat, and its class allies, have managed to construct a popular organ which can make the workers win. And in a moment like this, when the world’s workers movement is still a long way from rebuilding itself after its 20th century defeats, there are plenty of pseudo-revolutionary ideologies that seek to direct us away from the proletarian cause. That interpret a development like the Ukraine proxy war blowback not as a reason for redoubling our workers struggle efforts, but as some sort of proof that imperialism will inevitably fall apart on its own.

This is the dangerously naive expectation that gets propagated when we analyze U.S. hegemony’s decline not with a class perspective; but rather with a mechanistic thinking about how historical change happens. It would be mechanistic and idealistic to believe that when imperialism gets fully defeated, this will happen not through the overthrow of the U.S. capitalist class but through reforms to the U.S. government. Yet this is the notion that’s dominated “peace” discourse during the Trump 2.0 era. 

The Trump White House, especially its special envoy Steve Witkoff, have worked to sell the idea that they seek “peace” with Washington’s adversaries. And though Trump’s bombing of Iran this June largely discredited him as a “peace” president in the eyes of his base, Trump won’t be the last figure to try to use “detente” as a cover for imperial schemes. Washington still seeks to use diplomacy to draw in China’s strategic partnets, and accepting this as a serious “peace” strategy isn’t just dangerous because it helps advance the war on China; it’s also harmful because it diverts us from the class struggle. 

If we let the anti-capitalist struggle be separated from the anti-imperialist cause, this will make it no longer anti-imperialism, but a vehicle for bringing about imperialist “peace”; which is really just preparation for the next war. Lenin warned that “it is impossible to escape imperialist war, and imperialist peace … which inevitably engenders imperialist war, it is impossible to escape that inferno, except by a Bolshevik struggle and a Bolshevik revolution.”

What Lenin sought to combat with this statement was liberal pacifism, which both uncritically treats imperialist “peace” as something to strive for and opposes workers revolution on the basis of “class peace.” These two ideas have always been fundamentally connected, and Lenin’s response towards them was to affirm the need for centering the class war: “We are advancing towards the socialist revolution consciously, firmly and unswervingly, knowing that it is not separated from the bourgeois-democratic revolution by a Chinese Wall, and knowing…struggle alone will determine how far we shall advance, what part of this immense and lofty task we shall accomplish, and to what extent we shall succeed in consolidating our victories. Time will show.”

Since Russia started the operation, time has shown that certain anti-imperialist states weren’t prepared to survive the crises of this era. Syria has been lost for now, and so has Bolivia. We also still haven’t ended the Gaza holocaust, which is a task that represents the great test of strength for the workers movement in our time. The popular revolutionary forces have been strengthened in other areas, though. China keeps growing, Russia’s workers movement has kept it on a path of resistance, Palestine’s resistance has rendered Zionist victory untenable, Hezbollah remains a serious threat despite what U.S. propaganda has said, the DPRK has adopted a sterner posture towards Washington; these are among the biggest recent developments that aid our cause.

For those of us in the countries that are still under monopoly capitalist rule, a key task is to learn from the examples of these successes, particularly the Global South movements which have beaten back the empire’s violence. The reformist path of imperialist and class “peace” is suicide; the only future is in committing to the fight against the hegemon, and for the proletariat’s victory.

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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.