To understand Zohran Mamdani, and why he acts as an impediment to revolutionary struggle, we need to look at the last generation’s effort to cultivate a non-communist left. Such an effort has been underway ever since communism became a serious threat towards capitalism, but in the post-Soviet era, left-wing anti-communism has taken on a new character; one that’s particularly suited to the agenda of color revolutions, which have come to be the predominant type of imperialist psyop. This is the agenda that Zohran advanced when he attacked Venezuela and Cuba last month, and the forces which incentivized him to promote such blatant imperial propaganda are the same ones that have influenced other major figures of the compatible left. One example being Noam Chomsky, the pivotal shaper of academic leftism who we recently learned has been compromised in critical ways.
Chomsky is so relevant to the present moment because according to the Epstein communications records, Chomsky had been close friends with Epstein, and received financial support from an account tied to him. This doesn’t prove Chomsky participated in Epstein’s crimes, but it does show he’d become entangled in circles that make their members constrained in what they can say or do. This reveals a critical part of how the non-communist left has been propped up: by elevating personalities which aren’t supposed to step out of their role within imperialist propaganda. And especially during the last decade or so of his life as an active participant in the discourse, Chomsky filled such a role; for one example of this behavior on his part, he was among the “progressive” voices who called for intervention in Syria, with the rationale being that this was necessary to protect the Kurds.
This “save the Kurds” justification was, famously, the same reasoning that Christopher Hitchens used to argue that the Iraq invasion had been righteous. And that Hitchens had origins in Western Marxism, particularly of the Trotskyist variety, further shows the centrality of “State Department socialism” within projects which advance U.S. hegemony. To combat the non-communist left, and thereby make way for an authentic working-class solidarity movement, we must examine how this inauthentic left could gain such prominence.
Losurdo provides us with great clarity on this. He identifies how even among the tendencies in the “collective west” that do still call themselves “Marxist,” the pro-imperialist ideology has become predominant. Such was the problem he described in Western Marxism: How It was Born, How It Died, How It can be Reborn. Wrote Losurdo:
Reduced to a religion, and indeed a religion of evasion, Western Marxism cannot provide an answer to the problems of the present, particularly the worsening of the international situation. We have seen what has happened in the past few years. On the occasion of the war against Libya in 2011, authoritative organs of the Western press recognized its neocolonial character. Neocolonial and bloody. An eminent French philosopher, very distant from Marxism, observed, "today we know that the war resulted in at least 30,000 deaths, against 300 victims of the initial repression" carried out by Qaddafi. According to other estimates, the toll of the NATO intervention would be even greater. And the tragedy continues: the country has been destroyed, and people have been forced to choose between desperation at home or fleeing to the unknown, which could be fatal.
I am not aware of any exponent of "Western Marxism" or of "Libertarian Western Marxism" that denounced this horror. Indeed, a personality such as Rossana Rossanda, who, as the founder of the communist daily Il Manifesto can be included in the category of "Western Marxism" or "Libertarian Western Marxism," went to the very threshold of calling for armed intervention against Qaddafi's Libya. It is a threshold that Susanna Camusso, Secretary-General of the CGIL—a union federation that has left long behind its onetime links to the Communist Party and to Eastern Marxism—happily crossed over.
It’s this culture within today’s academic and dogmatic opportunist “Marxism,” the culture that aligns with U.S. hegemony’s interests, which makes up the foundations for the politics Zohran represents. We know that Zohran’s meeting with Trump was corrupt in nature, rather than something tactical, because Zohran has shown he’s behind the Trump White House’s schemes for new aggressions against Latin America’s workers governments. The anti-worker policies that Zohran has embraced on a practical level, like refusing to re-hire workers who got fired over the unjust Covid work rules, are downstream from these pro-imperialist positions.
We have yet to see if this means he’ll break his promise to implement BDS in New York City; but if he does, we will need to use it as an opportunity to provide an alternative path for his supporters. A path in which anti-Zionists and class-conscious Americans revive the authentic Marxism, the Marxism that serves as the ultimate weapon of revolutionary solidarity.
Being betrayed by a leader who posed as an ally to the workers is the initial entry point into Marxism for most people who end up becoming Marxists. It was how the bulk of modern America’s new generation of communists came to where they are, as most of them started out hoping for Bernie Sanders to lead a real working-class movement. Lenin talked about the importance of this learning experience for the masses; he explained why communists must let the false socialist leaders bring about their own demise, and discredit themselves in the eyes of the workers who’d initially gravitated towards them. The way that Lenin said communists can do this is by demonstrating how we actually would be open to an alliance with the reformists, if only the reformists were to stop opportunistically sabotaging hopes for a united front:
If the Hendersons and the Snowdens reject a bloc with the Communists, the latter will immediately gain by winning the sympathy of the masses and discrediting the Hendersons and Snowdens; if, as a result, we do lose a few parliamentary seats, it is a matter of no significance to us. We would put up our candidates in a very few but absolutely safe constituencies, namely, constituencies where our candidatures would not give any seats to the Liberals at the expense of the Labour candidates. We would take part in the election campaign, distribute leaflets agitating for communism, and, in all constituencies where we have no candidates, we would urge the electors to vote for the Labour candidate and against the bourgeois candidate. Comrades Sylvia Pankhurst and Gallacher are mistaken in thinking that this is a betrayal of communism, or a renunciation of the struggle against the social-traitors. On the contrary, the cause of communist revolution would undoubtedly gain thereby.
Applying this strategy to the social democratic movement as it exists in today’s America, or to any other bourgeois populist trend, does not look exactly like this. It wouldn’t be productive for us to advocate voting blue, any more than it would be productive for us to have advocated voting Trump; this is because the modern American communist movement holds far less leverage than Russia’s communists did in Lenin’s time, and U.S. electoralism is much better able to compromise a mass movement. The Democratic Party is where movements go to die, and this makes it unwise to treat the Democrats the same way that Lenin treated the Labour Party.
However, we can apply Lenin’s strategy by going into the masses who’ve been drawn towards social democracy. A top priority are the DSA members who’ve gotten disillusioned with the Zionists in their organization’s leadership; if we reach them, we will be able to not just grow the communist movement, but cut off academic leftism from being able to influence the most important parts of its target audience. We can win over the pro-Palestine Gen Z masses, who the academic left and the “soft” Zionists are anxious to capture right now. This part of the masses already mostly supports Palestine’s armed resistance, and the false left is trying to de-radicalize them; but such a mission is highly impractical. We are the ones who have the advantage in this battle, because we align with the pro-resistance beliefs of Gen Z.
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