War on Iran & Venezuela is the U.S. banking regime’s attempt to manage an upheaval that’s beyond its scope

If the U.S. empire decides to pursue war with Venezuela or Iran, it will be risking a new level of resistance from the forces of popular revolution. Resistance that builds upon the gains made by the Donbass separatist movement, which has been fighting against Washington’s U.S.-installed coup regime in Kiev; as well as the strategic progress of the Palestinian resistance, whose intensifying anti-colonial war has also catalyzed new anti-U.S. maneuvers by Yemen, Iran, Lebanon, and other heroic nations. It will also follow the recent revolutions in Africa’s Sahel region, which the Russian resistance to Washington’s assaults helped catalyze; and should this next phase of anti-imperialist struggle be successful enough, it will force the hegemon to divert its resources away from fronts like Syria, where a resistance is still fighting and is seeking to reverse last year’s defeat.

Whether these forces do mobilize to that degree depends on whether we put in the work; it won’t happen on its own. But should the imperial enemy expand its aggressions to just one or two more fronts, it will bring about the kind of chaos that Mao said would happen during a third world war. Chaos that Mao believed the working class will absolutely be able to turn in its favor:

People all over the world are now discussing whether a third world war will break out. On this question, too, we must be mentally prepared and do some analysis. 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.

The imperialists have already launched a third world war, and it began at least as far back as when they started their proxy war on Syria in 2011. This was after Washington had begun its “pivot to Asia,” which made China the new central target and thereby entailed a new wave of regime change campaigns. These destructive efforts have been successful to a much greater degree than the bulk of anti-imperialists had anticipated, and Syria’s fall proved such a deficiency in the strategic understanding we’d previously held. Yet when we look at the fronts in this conflict where the anti-imperialist side has been gaining, and at where the Global South is successfully building up an alternative economy, the path to victory becomes clearer.

We know that Venezuela’s capacity for resistance is stronger than Ba’athist Syria’s had been. This is because Venezuela’s Bolivarian government has managed to build and deepen a relationship with the country’s working masses, enabling it to fortify its armed strength in a way that’s optimal. Insofar as critiques of Assad’s Syria are relevant, among its problems was that it was too far from being a worker’s government, and this weakened the integrity of its armed structures. Revolutionary Venezuela has only been strengthening the government’s ties to the workers, and this has been crucial in the assembly of the country’s vast civilian militia.

The Venezuelan revolution’s strength comes from the same place as the strength of China, and the DPRK, and the other anti-imperialist projects that have continued to fortify themselves amid Washington’s present offensive. These countries could gain such an advantage because they invested themselves within the popular masses, to a degree which has made it so that when the empire picks a fight with the government, really it’s picking a fight with the people. When the banking regime figured out that such popular power had prevailed in China, and China would therefore keep developing on its own rather than becoming subservient to U.S. capital, it decided to start the third world war.

In its effort to manage this global war, and prevent it from bringing a resurgence for socialism, the empire turned towards Azovism—the ruling Ukrainian fascist ideology which synthesizes Nazi anti-communism with woke liberalism. But the media’s efforts to propagate this ideology couldn’t stop the masses from turning against NATO’s Ukraine war, nor could it prevent the breakdown in support for the Zionist entity. Our ruling class has reacted to these developments by pivoting from wokeism towards right-wing “trad” imperialism, which is why the establishment chose Trump as its candidate in 2024. This revival of Reaganist politics forms the core narrative basis for the wars on Iran and Venezuela; yet within these politics, there’s a rift forming. Because the MAGA base is not willing to simply accept another two wars, on top of the two that Americans have already been dragged into during the 2020s.

Rallying MAGA in revolt against the war machine is part of how communists must respond to these developments. Within this story, though, there is a much broader context; one that doesn’t negate the “MAGA communism” thesis, but rather puts it in a larger perspective. This context is that since 2020, our material reality has changed in an unprecedented way, and we must account for this shift in order to rally the other biggest revolutionary element; that being the post-Covid generation.

Finance capital’s project to deliberately mismanage and weaponize the pandemic broke our society, making those who’ve come-of-age after that moment left behind. These youngest parts of the adult masses are as a rule being cut off from the job market, as well as from the strange social arrangement of the “dating market” (which in retrospect was always just waiting to fall apart). Unemployment, the “incel crisis,” and all other disruptions of our era are now being exacerbated by capital’s abuses of AI. The hope of our ruling class is that the American masses will become further atomized by these events, with the “left-behinds” being driven to reactionary violence. Yet among Gen Z, we are seeing an unprecedented will towards solidarity. The solid majority of Gen Z support Palestine’s armed resistance over the Zionist entity, and this has driven the Zionist establishment to take drastic measures.

There is real hope that the American nation will become collectively unified against its ruling banking regime. Such an outcome is a critical part of how the rest of the world will overcome imperialism’s wounds, and for this to happen, we must unite America’s working class with China. There is real hope for this as well; that China managed Covid so well contributed towards a rise in global admiration for China’s socialist model, and now China’s positive uses of AI are creating further inspiration. The gains that China has made in its mission to overcome its material contradictions, and build up its civilizational strength, are having an impact on global revolutionary politics. So are the gains of Palestine, Yemen, and the other countries which have been fighting the armed aspect of the revolutionary struggle. 

For Venezuela’s people to be compelled towards also joining in this part of the fight would represent a pivotal global moment. So would be the case if Iran’s people were provoked in such a way. The world’s working masses will respond to imperialism’s next aggressions, and to the resistance against them, by coming to a clearer sense of where their allies are. There’s no doubt about this. Our task is to lead the people towards importing the revolutionary struggle which they’re witnessing throughout these places, opening up ever-more new fronts in this fight.

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As AI speeds up capitalist society’s collapse, the hinterland is where we must look to find our way out

When pundits talk about AI’s disruptions of jobs, as a rule they focus not on the actual working families who are being impacted, but on the “creative class.” We hear about how difficult it’s becoming for those seeking careers in tech, which is something that a fraction of a fraction of the people can relate to; this is commentary that’s created for residents of the high-end metropole bubble. To know what the true effects of this technological upheaval are, you need to look at the experience of the worker, who had already been living through a generations-long collapse prior to when AI became a central issue. 

A breakdown that can only be reversed by the proletariat

The decline we’re seeing is not a novel thing, and most of us are aware of this despite the elite media’s pretending otherwise. The question is where to find the genuine class allies, the ones who will join in a collective workers organization and fight for the emancipation of the proletariat. In our search for these allies, a crucial place to look is the “hinterlands,” the areas that have been stripped of their old industry and left to decline. These spaces are among where we can find mass elements which aren’t invested in skimming off the imperial super-profits, like the high-end metropolitans are, and therefore have created a critical buffer against the designs of our ruling technocrats.

Any authentic left-wing organization will not try to rely on the “creative class,” or on its appendages within academia and other PMC spaces. The parts of the masses we need to reach most urgently right now are the trade unionists (who are in position to disrupt the Gaza holocaust), the unorganized workers, and the rural workers especially (as they’ve been the most neglected by organizers). This is speaking very broadly, but these are the demographics we need to orient our practice around. When we’ve gotten the right priorities regarding who to reach, and lived up to the title of proletarian organizers, we’ll be able to gain a real understanding of what this new technological disruption means. Of how the material producers within our society are being impacted by it, and how to lead them towards victory against capital.

Something critical to understand about the proletariat’s relationship to AI is that AI isn’t the worker’s enemy, despite the efforts of the “creative class” to convince us as such. AI is simply a part of humanity’s evolution, one we cannot and should not wish away; and it’s the proletariat that’s capable of building the socialist system which can maximize AI’s usefulness, unlike the creative class which doesn’t know how to coherently respond to AI. Civilization’s progression is making the boutique labor aristocrats outmoded; for those who drive the means of production, this progress will bring unprecedented strength. 

When the working class becomes in control of the state, and therefore in control of AI, it will make AI more fully embody the progressive role that it already has; this follows the revolutionary principle Marx described in Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: “By heralding the dissolution of the hereto existing world order, the proletariat merely proclaims the secret of its own existence, for it is the factual dissolution of that world order. By demanding the negation of private property, the proletariat merely raises to the rank of a principle of society what society has raised to the rank of its principle, what is already incorporated in it as the negative result of society without its own participation.” This is the vital piece of context behind all the ways AI is right now being used to hurt the working class: by its nature, AI is actually an ally of the workers.

When we understand this, we can figure out how to locate the counter-forces against our techno-dystopia, and to make allies out of these forces. Under our financial capitalist dictatorship, AI is being used to accelerate the rise in unemployment, a crisis which the big banks have explicitly desired to engineer; thanks to AI, companies can trap job-seekers in an endless cycle of fake applications, designed to grow the reserve army of labor and let employers reduce head count. This has countless domino effects; greater unemployment means fewer career prospects, most of all within the rural. The “youth drain” from the rural to the metropole increases, while poverty grows in both the countryside and the cities. Social cohesion becomes even more damaged, and the birth rate further drops. 

These are the cascading crises that the post-Covid generation has found itself thrust into; and though this collapse isn’t something new, from 2020 onward its developments have been more chaotic than ever. This is because technology’s progression has accelerated to an unprecedented degree, meaning our lives are being shaken up in ways that leave us blindsided if we aren’t paying constant attention. 

Amid these upheavals, there are certain social forces that remain as pillars of the old social order, organized religion being one of them. I have said that the prevalence of America’s religious communities is the only reason I don’t expect America to go the way of south Korea, where falling birth rates and “youth drain” have put the country on a path to virtual extinction. And I know this is a bold claim, but its boldness is proportional to the severity of the destabilization that’s befallen Gen Z; the level of isolation and “terminal singlehood” that’s emerged for those who came of age post-Covid is the new normal. 

The capitalist abuses of AI have reinforced this trend, and provided the first visible pieces of evidence that the next generation will be at least as lonely as Gen Z; there’s been a rise in “AI girlfriends” among young teens, which isn’t even the core source of the problem but rather a symptom of it. More than ever, the standard is to grow up isolated, socially stunted, and desperate for the bare minimum parts of the human experience. Everyone up to the millennials had been born early enough to escape being defined by this dark shift, which is why our society hasn’t yet reached a more extreme birth rate crisis; but time marches on relentlessly, and it’s going to become apparent that what’s happening with Gen Z is not a fluke. It’s a terminal illness of capitalism’s new era, one that’s gone overlooked within both mainstream discourse and our social movements.

The role of the hinterland’s traditional communities

This is where the counter-force to the crisis comes in; and this counter-force is largely located in the hinterland, away from the metropolitan centers. America’s religious communities are the only place where Gen Z still has the social structures that are conducive to starting families, and I say this as an atheist who was raised secular. What should Marxists do with this information? 

We need to respond to it by bringing our working-class politics into this especially cohesive part of the masses; not to the effect that we act like religious conservatives are the “most advanced” among the people, but in a way that makes American Marxism account for the actual conditions of today’s America. Conditions which include a breakdown of biological reproduction in most parts of society, and need to be analyzed accordingly. What I am advocating is not to curate Marxism for a religious audience, which would be unnecessary and would miss the point; but rather to incorporate these realities of fertility crisis and “youth drain” into how we speak and operate. These developments are a wake-up call for the communist movement within the “collective west,” one that compels us to stop acting as if we were living in the world of a generation ago.

As for how to bring Marxism to a religious element that’s deeply anti-communist: firstly, our society in general is anti-communist, as ruling-class propaganda has pervaded all levels of education and media. Second, the average American does not hate “communism,” but hates a caricature of communism, one that’s been crafted to mirror their own banking regime. Marxists can and will make communism into a popular counter-force against this regime; and part of how we’ll do so is by applying the dialectical principle which Marx described in his Critique. This is the principle where counter-forces to capitalist modernity, like religion, get their power by speaking to a real alienation from what capital is doing to us; and where therefore, the only way to defeat these reactionary political forces is by ending the sick social order that they’re reacting to. Wrote Marx:

The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man – state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion. 

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo. 

Therefore when I say that the hinterlands are where we can find how to defeat capital, and that religious structures are a buffer against this collapse, I do so with the awareness that historical conflicts can’t be resolved simply by supporting the good side within a given dispute. America maintains strong collectivist elements, ones that will stave off the kind of depopulation scenario that south Korea has experienced; but these elements exist as a reaction to history’s progression. As a means for pushing back against the destructive machinations of capitalist modernity, which seek to destroy community and the family. It is a good thing that these religious counter-forces exist, but any honest Marxist analysis will account for this context in which they exist, where the condition of class society has perpetuated a need for religion. 

This bleakness and alienation within our social system is going to get worse the longer the capitalists maintain control over AI. And this will create greater reactions from these traditionalist societal forces, in a way that parallels the reactions from the liberal “creative class.” Yet if we understand dialectics, we’ll know how to guide the elements with revolutionary potential towards the path of class struggle. 

We must show these Americans who seek an escape from this collapse, from this dystopia, that the proletarian cause is completely compatible with such a desire. If all that socialism truly means is the revealing of the proletariat’s nature as the material arbiter for civilization, then socialism can be embraced by all who share an interest in freeing ourselves from the present social order, which seeks to keep this reality hidden. When we go into the rural, the hinterland, and the other overlooked parts of the masses, what we’re doing is finding the others who lack ties to the ruling lie; the lie which says that the proletariat has no meaningful role, and that the collapse we’re experiencing is incurable.

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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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Ultra-leftism grows out from the metropole. To defeat it, we must expand the workers struggle into the rural.

Right now, ultra-leftism of the adventurist kind is rapidly growing in its relevance, and in the threat it poses to the working-class movement. Even though anarchism has been declining in its presence, and so has “Maoism,” we are seeing the rise of a politics that’s in many ways more dangerous than these other kinds of ultra-leftism. What’s happening is that especially in the cities, and also in certain college towns, the recent failures of leftism are giving way to desperate and reckless measures. You can find this within essentially any group which affiliates with the “antifa” label: a culture in which wanton vandalism and violence is seen as a valid approach. 

History shows that this culture doesn’t even need to be created by federal infiltrators, though feds are of course deeply involved in these spaces; adventurist leftism arose as a trend unto its own, with a prime example being Russia’s Narodniks. And in this era, Narodnik politics are going to be the main kind of ultra-leftism, as they’re what the American left will logically gravitate to amid the present stage of imperial collapse.

The way that we defeat the new Narodnik politics is by refusing to operate on the same playing field in which this politics dominates. By not centering our organizing efforts within the metropole, or confining it to the student elements; but rather following Lenin’s advice to go lower and deeper into the real masses. And a critical part of this is to expand the communist movement into the rural, thereby building a support base that goes far beyond the narrow space the Narodniks inhabit. 

This new ultra-left current is based within a very contemporary kind of identity politics, with its rhetoric and mentality mainly coming from 2010s wokeism; but its relationship to the workers movement is equivalent to that of the Narodniks, anarchists, or other problems from the left which Marxists have needed to deal with in the past. And in the realm of American worker organizing, William Z. Foster provides clarity on which types of harmful ideas such forces propagate:

The organized left wing must make a scientific study and application of strike leadership. It must study carefully every mass strike or other movement of the workers and learn their lessons. It must be courageous, militant, and flexible in its policies. It must know how to struggle for power in the unions, before, during, and after strikes. It must work consistently for the building up of an energetic and capable trade union leadership, defeating on the one hand, tendencies towards a merely opportunistic scramble for union office, and on the other hand, the ultra-leftism which looks upon all office holders in trade unions, whether good or bad, as parasites and grafters.

It must combat the anarchistic conception that the workers need no leaders and that union officials shall serve not more than one term -- an illusion cultivated by the I. W. W. which has effectively prevented the growth of a real leadership in that body. It must colonize with militants those industries and plants entering into strike conditions which are not producing leaders capable of handling the approaching strikes. It must know how to practice the principles of democratic centralism: that is, while keeping a firm grip on the strike situation and preserving an iron discipline, at the same time maintaining close contact with the masses and securing their support for every move that is made. Such an organized left leadership must act as a real general staff, conceiving and working out its problems largely in the sense of military strategy.

To truly overcome these types of infantile notions about how political struggle works, American communism will need to undergo a process that parallels the one which China’s communists went through. This was the process in which the Communist Party of China, after being driven out of the metropole, was forced to stop neglecting the rural masses. Our task is to achieve this forward evolution in our thinking and practice, without needing to be forced into it by circumstance; we shouldn’t do the right thing only after having already faced the repercussions for wrongheaded actions. And Mao has already given us a guide on how to carry out such a broadening within our movement’s geographical scope:

If you are to win over the peasants and rely on them, you must conduct investigations in the rural areas. The method is to investigate one or more villages and spend a few weeks there to get a clear idea of the class forces, the economic situation, living conditions and so on, in the countryside. The principal leaders, such as the general secretary of the Party, should themselves undertake this work and get to know one or two villages; they should try to find the time, for it is well worth the effort. Though there are plenty of sparrows , it is not necessary to dissect every one of them; to dissect one or two is enough. 

When the general secretary of the Party has investigated one or two villages and knows what's what, he will be able to help his comrades to become acquainted with the villages and attach importance to dissecting one or two "sparrows"; true, they know something about the countryside, but their knowledge doesn't go very deep, and therefore the directives they issued do not quite fit the rural conditions. Likewise, the comrades in charge of the leading bodies of the Party at the central, provincial and county levels should themselves investigate one or two villages, or dissect one or two "sparrows ". This is called "anatomy".

Only by taking these measures, or the equivalent measures for our own conditions, can we effectively combat ultra-leftism. The same applies to combating the far right, or any of our other ideological enemies. Their strength depends on the failure of an authentic working-class movement to go into the masses in a serious way, and to comprehend the conditions of our society beyond one or two specific mass elements. This is part of why Mao’s historical lesson about China’s communists being driven to the countryside has such utility: taking that leap into the neglected aspects of mass work will largely free our movement from ultra-left influence. It will also provide us with the critical part of a revolutionary base that’s missing when you only focus on the metropole; we cannot defeat our class enemies while operating entirely within the spaces where they have the greatest advantage.

This effort to go into rural America is how we repudiate the CIA-backed, ultra-left “Maoism,” and instead apply the Mao Zedong Thought which guides modern China. It doesn’t resolve the entire battle against incorrect ideas, but that battle is going to continue regardless; the testing of ideas is a never-ending process, and once we’ve progressed into being a rural movement, we’ll have new problems to resolve. Likely a major debate will be over the strategy of how to counter the American class enemy, which we’ll likely need to continue fighting for decades of protracted struggle. When we reach that later stage, though, we’ll be in an infinitely better position if we’ve already internalized the lessons from our mass work. 

Our movement won't be in an immediate position to gain victory until we’ve won support from a broad range of the people, and undertaking such a mission will give us a level of experience that American communists haven’t so far reached. We must translate this experience into a wisdom that lasts, and informs how we tackle every new problem from there on.

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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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Trump’s betrayal of MAGA, the rural “youth drain,” & the class battle for America’s hinterland

The only path forward for the class struggle is one where we confront the war that finance capital is waging against our social structures, especially the ones in the rural areas. It’s this civilizational collapse that the MAGA base was responding to when it voted for Trump; the desire was to restore America’s economic strength and social stability, which have been taken away by a global corporate and banking scheme. 

Now, almost a year into Trump 2.0, the bulk of MAGA has realized that Trump will not rescue America from this assault. The subjective awareness of the masses, particularly the rural masses who gravitated to Trump, is catching up with the objective reality we’re facing. And if communists want to earn a position of leadership over the working class, we will need to fully confront this reality; we’ll have to reckon with the whole scope of the crisis our ruling class has engineered, which goes beyond merely widening society’s inequality.

The unique crisis of rural America, & our society’s “south Korea-fication”

What we must know about this inequality is that it looks different for the rural than it does for the metropole. The countryside is in itself being left behind, and thereby made to die out, in a way that the cities are not. This is the nature of the contradiction between urban and rural, which has existed since the start of agricultural civilization but is now being magnified to unprecedented effect. What’s happening in the 21st century, when capitalism has reached its new phase of techno-social upheaval, is that the rural is getting hollowed out at the expense of humanity’s capacity for biological reproduction. 

South Korea is the logical conclusion of this problem; it’s the country where the “youth drain” phenomenon, in which working-age people get incentived to concentrate within the metropole, has become most advanced. And because the country’s capital city has been turned into a maximally efficient machine for exploiting workers, the outcome is that almost nobody is starting families anymore. Capital has gotten to the point where it’s making entire countries on track to “go extinct.”

America is absolutely being “south Korea-fied,” and the only reason why I don’t expect America to go extinct is because of the prevalence of its religious communities. Outside those communities, the post-Covid generation fundamentally lacks the social structures that a person requires in order to have children. And this problem, in which those who came of age during Covid aren’t even coming into contact with potential mates, is the very worst within the rural. Because the rural young people of the 2020s have less and less incentive to stay rooted within their hometowns, and those of them who can move are increasingly migrating to the metropole.

This is an important piece of context behind how the rural masses joined MAGA, then had to reckon with the betrayals from Trump himself. The primary MAGA age demographics are decidedly older than Gen Z; the supposed youth migration to MAGA has been greatly overblown, with most of the post-Covid generation being far to the left. Amid the rural “youth drain,” and the accelerating economic collapse that will accelerate this trend, these demographics mean that rural America will need to overcome a new set of obstacles. Obstacles in which even though large parts of rural Gen X have been getting radicalized by MAGA’s betrayal, much of these Americans are getting divided from their children in a geographic sense, and many others aren’t getting grandchildren. This is part of how our ruling class is trying to weaken the rural’s political power: by robbing these countryside communities of their will to physically reproduce, and to thereby maintain their social cohesion.

This birthrate/youth drain angle isn’t everything there is to today’s rural conditions, but such issues are vital to account for when we think about the rural question. Any working-class organizer must study problems like this, the same way that past communists have undergone a learning process about the rural conditions within their countries. Mao described how the Communist Party of China needed to make up for a gap in its collective knowledge about what the needs of the countryside’s masses are:

At first, our Party wasn't successful in its work among the peasants. The intellectuals had a certain air about them, an intellectual air. Therefore, they were unwilling to go to the countryside, which they looked down on. The peasants, for their part, looked askance at the intellectuals. Besides, our Party had not yet found the way to understand the countryside. Later when we went there again, we found the way, analysed the various classes in the rural areas and came to understand the peasants' revolutionary demands. During the first period, we didn't have clear ideas about the countryside. Under the Right opportunist line of Chen Tu-hsiu, the peasants, our chief ally, were abandoned. Many of our comrades looked on the countryside as a plane rather than a solid, that is to say, they did not know how to look at the countryside from the class viewpoint. It was only after they had some grasp of Marxism that they began to adopt the class viewpoint in looking at the countryside. 

The countryside turned out to be not a plane, but stratified into the rich, the poor and the very poor, into farm labourers, poor peasants, middle peasants, rich peasants and landlords. During this period I made a study of the countryside and opened peasant movement institutes which ran for several terms. Though I knew some Marxism, my understanding of the countryside was not deep. During the second period, we had to thank our good teacher, Chiang Kai-shek. He drove us to the countryside. This was a long period, a period of ten years of civil war, in which we fought against him, and thus we were obliged to make a study of the countryside.

I’ve felt the need to explain the “youth drain” problem at such length, and to connect it with this past rural class struggle experience, because the workers movement will only be able to truly progress when it’s accounted for all of the primary problems the working masses are facing. And this is a primary issue, one that’s been overlooked within both general discourse as well as our social movements. Which is understandable, because this crisis has crept up on our society without us having had the time to process or anticipate it. But to fight back against the war our ruling elites are waging against America’s people, we are going to need to have our reckoning with this crisis.

Mastering the art of dialectics

We will have to wage the class war in a way that’s attuned to the world as it exists today, as opposed to the world which used to exist. We’ll have to account for just how deeply capital’s new technological destabilizations have damaged the social fabric, and how much of the post-Covid generation has been cut off from the most basic economic opportunities and relationships. And to truly grasp this crisis, we must truly understand the conflict between city and country. This is a conflict that comes from how our ruling class has been sacrificing the rural most of all, so that neither the rural nor urban workers can mount an effective resistance against capital.

Our task is to bridge this gap, and unify the workers throughout the country’s different areas. Part of this has to do with carrying out our own investigation into the needs of the rural, like China’s revolutionaries were impelled to do. Part of this means struggling against the versions of “communism” that are stuck in a bygone era, and aren’t interested in applying Marxism to the conditions of today. This conflict within the workers movement certainly involves a generational divide; the boomers were brought up in a fundamentally different reality than the one the post-Covid generation has needed to navigate, and the movement can’t progress without being informed by this new generation’s experiences. The most important part of how we have to respond to these realities, though, is where we learn the skill of strategic adaptation. 

This is something that anyone of any age can learn: the ability to not be blindsided by new information, but instead constantly update your strategy as developments unfold. Though Americans—especially the ones who grew up prior to the 21st century’s crises—were blindsided about the collapse that’s now befallen younger people, they did respond to the 2008 crisis by radically changing their worldviews. The MAGA movement was a reaction to the failures of our institutions, and those who came to form its core base had undergone an epiphany of historical importance; a decisive part of Trump’s voters had voted Obama in 2008, showing the zig-zags that can happen when an individual or a society are forced to process events which weren’t supposed to happen. The post-2008 depression wasn’t supposed to last for years and years, but it did, so many responded by adopting a proto-revolutionary mindset.

This process that Americans have been undergoing in these last couple decades is a first step in a much bigger evolutionary shift. One where we’ve come to collectively master the art of dialectics; which is to say gain the versatility to discard ideas and practices which do not work, while incorporating our existing wisdom into efforts at solving problems. It’s how a society escapes stagnation, and China has come very far along in this. It’s evolved out of feudal-capitalist rule, and truly embodied the meaning of socialism—which in practice looks like a society that’s figured out how to continuously re-invent itself. China’s development, its technology, its ability to utilize this technology in a way that enriches its people; all this is the product of having tried a series of social systems which hadn’t worked, and then applying the lessons from these past failures. 

Mao concluded that correct ideas come from testing different social practices, which his party needed to do in order to make an ally of the rural masses. We must take the same kind of leap, and find out the interests of rural America. As Mao said, this means recognizing that the rural is not a monolith, but has different classes within it; and it’s in this nuance that we can find how to overcome the obstacles towards organizing our cause’s class allies throughout the countryside. 

These obstacles include drug addiction, they include lumpenization, they include the danger of fascist radicalization; these are among the dark paths that the remaining rural young people are especially at risk of falling into, because it’s these people who are “left-behinds” in multiple ways at once. They’re not just lacking in spaces to meet others organically, but are increasingly isolated from their peers, who haven’t had a reason to stay in their hometowns. This is a reality about our conditions that we’re going to keep facing until these forsaken places get re-industrialized, and have economic life poured back into them. 

In its pre-revolutionary phase, our movement cannot stop the “youth drain,” or reverse the birth rate crisis that this drain has been instrumental in creating. What our movement can do is construct collective organizations that truly act in accordance with these conditions, and face them with full honesty. If this is the reality we must confront, then the workers movement will have no choice but to reinvent itself; and history shows which factors lead to such a transformation. The state’s violent crackdowns within the cities are going to expose the weaknesses of the metropolitan-centered “socialist” orgs, and the workers movement will have to go into the rural masses like Mao did. The question is which routes it will then need to take in order to prevail within America’s protracted class war. 

That is to be answered elsewhere, but we know that among our main tasks is to win the battle for the “hinterland”; to organize these masses who’ve been most neglected and isolated. The ideology of intellectual-class arrogance says we should leave these people behind, and the system is set up to make rural mass work harder in many ways; yet there’s absolutely no way around it. And the more we put into this work, the more we’ll find ourselves getting out of it, to the effect that our fortunes within the class war will start to turn.

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Zionism & anti-communism are part of a British effort to hold back the American revolution’s completion

To figure out how to defeat America’s financial dictatorship, and end Zionist settler-colonialism, we must investigate the British empire’s role behind both. When we examine this story, we find the origins of the Gaza genocide, the intensifying war against socialist China, and the multiple genocides against America’s indigenous peoples, which in essence are still ongoing. We also find that if the American working class is to win, it must orient its practice around the struggle against finance capital, for which Britain itself is only one tool.

Finance created settler-colonialism, & extended its ideological hold over America

Zionism was a creation of British imperialism, which took up the centuries-old mission of the reactionary Christian elements that sought to turn Palestine back into so-called “ancient Israel.” And during the same time that the British were helping lay the foundations for Jewish settler-colonialism, they were also working to ensure that racial supremacy would fortify its control within America. 

Both projects were about preventing the forces of national liberation and proletarian struggle from gaining further ground; which in America’s case meant proliferating white nativist politics that substituted working-class politics. This was an extension of a much older settler-colonial project, one that grew out from Britain’s core financial center the City of London. The City of London was the institution that first engineered settler-colonialism; when the coming of capitalism threw much of England’s population into destitution and vagrancy, the City responded by blocking efforts to re-incorporate them. The outcome was that these “excess” people would be compelled to migrate around the globe, and take on the role of shock troops for colonizing indigenous lands. The formation of the KKK, the implementation of Jim Crow, and the rise of anti-immigrant exclusion laws were how international finance acted to reinforce this racial paradigm in America.

This task presented a challenge for these reactionary forces, because by the end of the 19th century, the United States had come to no longer be settler-colonial in character. With the essential completion of the land accumulation process, and the coming of capitalism’s monopoly era, the USA’s primary contradiction had changed. Rather than colonizers vs. colonized, it was now mainly a conflict between a multiracial proletariat and an international financial ruling class. This doesn’t mean the legacy of American settler-colonialism hasn’t since remained important; the question of liberation and justice for the continent’s indigenous peoples is still something which must be reckoned with if we want to end financial rule. And to do so, we need to account for how the British empire worked towards extending settler-colonialism’s cultural lifespan; how these financial forces made it so that even long after America had objectively transitioned out of its settler-colonial form, there remains a subjective perception within our culture that aligns with this system.

Zionism, the version of settler-colonialism as it exists today, has managed to rally so much support among Americans because of a centuries-long psychological operation. Zionism’s support within the American masses is now slipping, but Christian Zionism still needs to be tackled; and if we try to fight for Palestine while unaware of the British connection, we’ll be handicapping our cause anyhow.

To understand how this long-term psyop started, we have to examine the moment within American history when capital came to feel unprecedentedly threatened. This was the era immediately following the economic crisis of 1857, when America’s workers mobilized and organized to a greater capacity than they ever had before. This was just prior to when America would fight its war against the British-backed slaveocracy, and to when Britain would merge with the U.S. ruling class in critical ways. After the Civil War, what Britain did was make a deal with America’s capitalists that would inextricably connect the experiences of the Chinese and American working classes. As described by John Foster in A Century of American Diplomacy:

The Anglo-French war with China of 1858-60, which resulted in the occupation of Peking by the allied forces and the opening of a number of additional ports to foreign commerce, was a rude awakening of the Celestial Empire from its seclusion and conservatism, and its public men began to see that a new policy of broader and freer intercourse with foreign nations must be adopted. Anson Burlingame, who since 1861 had resided at Peking as minister from the United States, and by his tact and friendly conduct had gained the confidence of the Chinese government, was invited by it in 1868 to become the head of an imperial embassy, to visit all the leading Christian nations, and through treaties and personal intercourse establish amicable and freer political and commercial relations with them.

This notable embassy first visited the United States, where it was received by the Executive, by Congress, and by the leading cities with distinguished attention. The government of the United States being in full sympathy with the objects of the embassy, a treaty (1868) was readily negotiated with its plenipotentiaries by Secretary Seward, wherein the rights of China were protected respecting all grants of lands or concessions to foreigners for internal improvements, freedom of conscience and religious worship were guaranteed, unnecessary dictation and intervention in internal affairs were to be discouraged, change of home and allegiance and free emigration were stipulated, and the privilege of unrestricted travel and residence in China and the United States, upon the basis of the most favored nation, was agreed to.

This arrangement was the next step in China’s “century of humiliation,” from which it’s only recently been able to truly recover. It was also what incorporated the Chinese working class into America’s working class, a development that the white supremacist movement took advantage of by stoking anti-Chinese resentment. When the anti-communist union bosses joined in on these racial hate campaigns, they were advancing a scheme set into motion by both the American and British ruling classes. As these classes had made the China deal not just to expand their market reach, but to manage America’s revolutionary masses.

These elites had seen the recent progression in the American workers movement, and the unprecedented progress towards racial equality which the country’s popular forces initially achieved via the Reconstruction. The capitalist class was also undergoing an internal transformation, wherein its economic system was evolving to the monopoly stage. So the financiers expanded their efforts to exploit China, and in doing so created new opportunities for ruling-class demagogy to be directed at America’s people. 

This is the same tactic that our ruling class is using today when it blames China for the American people’s declining living standards. And combating this narrative is critical to combating the U.S. war machine, as well as to leading the masses towards communism. There is another aspect of today’s American working-class mission, though, that this country’s workers movement has never truly reckoned with. This is the part that involves truly understanding the nature of settler-colonialism, and coming to a synthesis that can let us combine the anti-colonial struggle with the proletarian struggle.

Using Palestine as a vehicle for the new war on China

Settler-colonialism may no longer be present in America, but it’s obviously still present in Palestine; and there’s a reason why it’s been able to live on, but only in the form of an imperial outpost. It’s because Zionism was finance capital’s project to revive a dying mode of exploitation, for the purpose of fortifying the new dominant mode (that being financial imperialism).

The only way we’ll be able to strike the decisive blow against the U.S. empire, and thereby let “Israel” be dismantled, is by making our anti-Zionist practice fundamentally tied in with working-class organizing. As J. Sykes has noted: “in the era of imperialism, the national question is bound up with proletarian socialist revolution. No longer is the bourgeoisie a revolutionary class. Imperialism closes off the path of independent capitalist development for the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nations. The national liberation movements therefore must ally themselves with the working class struggle, with an orientation towards socialism – or find themselves diverted into neocolonialism. In the U.S. this means that the strategic alliance between the multinational working class and the liberation movements of the oppressed nationalities is central to the united front against monopoly capitalism.”

To truly grasp this principle, and build a working-class movement that reaches into the broad masses, we must avoid dogmatically equating occupied Palestine’s conditions to modern America’s. This is a lesson that I’ve sought to convey by explaining how America transitioned out of its settler-colonial phase, and it’s the main point of the argument J. Sykes makes in the quoted article. That ultra-leftist perspectives on modern America’s conditions are so prevalent is why I’ve said American Marxists have yet to really address this continent’s indigenous genocides, even though these ultra-left arguments have the intent of addressing that history. 

The objective effect of ultra-left politics is to isolate the organized minority from the masses, with the “critical” academic theories about modern American “white settlers” being a major part of this. Ultra-leftism, and its increasingly prevalent adventurist trends, grow out from the academic left; therefore, the workers movement must unpack this part of imperialism’s institutional power, and solidify a united front against the new war that these forces are waging against China.

This war is inextricably tied to Zionism, and it’s a connection that’s exceptionally insidious. The primary way Zionists attack China is not by calling China “antisemitic,” but by slandering China as a human rights abuser against Muslims; and usually, the Zionists who promote this lie are those who present themselves as the “progressive” Zionists, as the ones who supposedly want the best for the Palestinians. It’s a deception designed for a very different era than the 19th century, but it relies on the same deficiency that the psyops of old did: a failure to properly understand the process of violent extraction which finance unleashed upon our world. 

The anti-Chinese, anti-communist, and white nativist narratives of old America were enabled by how even among America’s Marxists, there was an unwillingness to confront the holocaust of the indigenous; in his 1952 book History of the Communist Party of the United States, William Z. Foster observed how “For all their relative sensitivity to the position of the white workers, the Negroes, the immigrants, and all other oppressed sections of the population, the pioneer Marxists did not, however, become aware of the significance of the struggle of the Indian tribes, who during these years were being viciously robbed and butchered by the ruthless white invaders of their lands. Indeed, in the whole period from Jefferson right down to our own day, the long series of workers’ trade unions and political parties have almost completely ignored the plight and sufferings of the abused and heroic Indian peoples. The story of labor’s relations with the Indians is practically a blank.”

When China and other countries underwent revolutionary upheavals during the mid-20th century, and this greatly helped enable the progressive forces within America, the ensuing rise in left-wing U.S. politics was supposed to be what rectified this contradiction. The American workers movement had the opportunity to come to a synthesis with the indigenous struggle; and to a certain extent it did do this when the Panthers aligned with the American Indian Movement. But because American communism was then forced into retreat, and captured by left academia, what came about was a widespread ultra-leftist attitude towards the national question. 

The modern U.S. “Marxist” organizations that proclaim their solidarity with indigenous peoples the loudest are actually doing a disservice to the indigenous struggle, because they’re using America’s Native holocaust as an emotional weapon for the “white settlers” rhetoric. This only serves to cut off the indigenous struggle from the potential for a proletarian united front, which is the same thing that the pioneer Marxists did. And this kind of imperialism-compatible left politics is connected with the covertly Zionist “pro-Palestine” elements that agitate for a Uyghur uprising in China.

It’s within this critique of today’s ultra-left “Marxism” that we can find the path to defeating our government’s anti-China war drive, defeating Zionism, and constituting the American nation in a way that it’s so far never been able to be. Winning workers victory in America will have to mean reconciling the fundamental contradictions which have always existed within the American project, contradictions so massive that they’ve involved the extermination of entire nations. Just because a society’s issues can take centuries for it to truly reckon with, though, does not mean time stands still for it. History is constantly in motion, and historical experience necessarily affects what happens next; this is the nature of dialectics. 

Right now, America’s people are faced with a series of dangers that are existential, and that come from the ever-more destructive ways monopoly capital is responding to its crises. They’re realizing the urgent need to end our wars, and to reverse our society’s accelerating collapse. They haven’t yet come to Marxism, but they’re already much more advanced than many Marxists tend to think they are. And this will translate into a mass united front against the current schemes of the financial empire, if we provide them with the proper leadership. The British empire will be dealt another blow from America, this time the fatal blow. In the process, the Zionist project that grew out from the City of London will be ended, and American civilization will stop being pitted against Chinese civilization; because America will have overcome the Zionist mentality, and thereby reckoned with the colonial ideology which the City kept it tethered to.

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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.