Nick Fuentes has merged with the Zionist right over support for ICE. Marxists must fill the populist power vacuum.

Nick Fuentes, or rather the controlled opposition ideology he represents, has reached the end of a political “half-life.” Now that Fuentes has called for ICE to keep escalating its violence, and asserted that ICE has nothing to do with Zionism even though “Israel” trains ICE, there’s no way for Fuentes to be someone who picks up support from people who are serious about being anti-Zionist. He discredited himself as an anti-Zionist a while ago by using the “low IQ antisemite” smear, but this development has solidified his role as a Zionist gatekeeper at a critical moment in history. Now he’s separated the “dissident right” from a key part of the revolutionary masses, and thereby created a new opening for Marxists to go into the people.

I’m not just talking about the former followers of Fuentes who’ve abandoned him after he’s revealed his true purpose, though they are important to reach. The main demographic I’m referring to is one that for the most part hasn’t yet become drawn towards any kind of political ideology, because its members are among our society’s very most alienated. These are the “excess males,” the ones whose lives have remained trapped in a state of arrested development that’s become very common for the post-Covid generation. Due to a combination of decline in opportunities for success, and the fact that capitalist society never offered a meaningful kind of “success” in the first place, they are estranged from the path towards starting a family. Which they’re reacting to in many different ways, including by embracing Nick Fuentes or (in a growing number of cases) by joining ICE.

Though our government and its psyops have been able to exploit the rise of “left-behinds” to this extent, this is still a crisis that the system didn’t want to happen, and that it can’t control. Within the class war, a critical tipping point would be if the bulk of the “left-behinds” were to get successfully brought into an authentic, sustainable structure of proletarian militancy. If Marxists were to reach not just the alienated men who’ve become disillusioned with Fuentes, but also the much larger element who’ve thus far stayed inert, and detached from politics due to their having been cast out of society itself.

The class war will only go forward if we collectively overcome the inertia which is holding it back. If we launch a series of ruthless struggles against the ruling-class political forces, both right and left, that seek to keep us trapped within the patterns which have let the conditions get this bad. We can’t defeat ICE, Zionism, anti-worker policies, or any of the other creations by international banking unless we wage war against class society as it actually exists at this stage.

An unprecedented aspect of today’s capitalism is that it is interrupting social relations and biological reproduction, to an extent which was relatively much smaller less than a decade ago. 2020 was the turning point, catalyzing an acceleration in the growth of the “left-behinds.” This growth has happened in the context of a massive expansion in big tech’s influence, in finance capital’s power over housing and land, and in the presence of the sex industry. With these developments, we’ve seen a massive growth in the lumpenproletariat, with women being the first and biggest demographic to become part of this trend towards joining the lumpen. At the same time, we’ve seen a historically unparalleled growth in the proportion of “excess males.” 

It is obvious how these things are connected, and our ruling class certainly understands this link between lumpenization and a rise in “excess men.” These are largely the same phenomenon, since many men are of course adopting lumpen means for subsistence as well. There’s a layer of the left-behinds who are simply retreating into sedation, and consuming ever-more of the sex industry’s products; but as time goes on, we are going to keep seeing them adopt a criminal lifestyle. This will at least be true for the ones who don’t want to just sit around until they die, or become destitute as the economy gets worse. What we have to do is re-proletarianize these people who’ve been pushed out of the working class, giving them the subsistence and purpose that comes from doing labor for a revolutionary infrastructure.

The only way forward is by building dual power; this is easy to figure out. What we need to better understand when it comes to the “left-behinds,” and to the lumpen masses who they overlap with, is the particular type of alienation which motivates them. This is an alienation that’s going to be experienced by anybody who’s been pushed aside by capital, and who hasn’t had the benefits which come from being part of a revolutionary community. As Bruce Franklin observed during the mass upheavals of the mid-20th century, part of how these left-behinds will respond is through crime and unfocused violence, and Marxists have to turn these responses into something coherent:

Lenin himself deals with one aspect of the lumpenproletariat quite relevant at the present moment– their tendency to engage in spontaneous and disorganized armed struggle against the state and in “expropriation” of state property. Lenin violently condemns those Bolsheviks who disassociate themselves from this by “proudly and smugly declaring ’we are not anarchists, thieves, robbers, we are superior to all this.” (“Guerilla Warfare,” Collected Works, XI, 220.) He attacks “the usual appraisal” which sees this struggle as merely ”anarchism, Blanquism, the old terrorism, the acts of individuals isolated from the masses, which demoralize the workers, repel wide strata of the population, disorganize the movement and injure the revolution.” (Works, XI, 216-17). Lenin draws the following keen lesson from the disorganized state of this struggle: it is not these actions “which disorganize the movement, but the weakness of a party which is incapable of taking such actions under its control.” (p. 219). The Bolsheviks must organize these spontaneous acts and “must train and prepare their organizations to be really able to act as a belligerent side which does not miss a single opportunity of inflicting damage on the enemy’s forces.”

After at least six years of living as left-behinds, the misfits of post-Covid society have had enough time to figure out how bad a deal they’ve been handed. They see how bleak their futures will look if they stay trapped in inertia, and many of them will do anything to find a way out. There are still many of them who’ve been successfully brought into a sedated state, but there is no telling how long they’ll stay there; this is why our government views them as ticking time bombs, and has deployed psyops like Nick Fuentes to try to bring them into forces such as ICE. Pseudo-intellectual Reddit “Marxism” and wokeist “communism” are utterly detached from today’s social conditions, which is why they’re irrelevant and won’t win over any of these alienated masses. 

The only form of Marxism that will win them over is one which has rejected the illusions of boomerism, which come from a time before the “normal” life path got cut off for the bulk of the masses. The average Gen Z member is absolutely not on track to have children, and is being forced to choose between a slow death of stagnation or an entry into the lumpen career criminal path. There are working-class organizers who’ve been making a real effort to keep up with what’s happening, and they’re making progress; but we have to be constantly adapting our practice to the new developments among the masses. And the shift that we are seeing right now, at an accelerating rate, is one where societal cast-outs are scrambling for an escape. 

Will we give them what they need, and provide the leadership that’s required for letting them overthrow our Satanic banking dictatorship? We will be able to give them this guidance, if we keep ourselves in the right mindset. Always we must stay on top of the patterns and trends that are unfolding, looking for the wars behind things. On the surface, we are seeing the rapid growth of a fascist paramilitary. Behind it, there is an ocean of individuals who are growing more desperate every day, and some of them see no way forward other than what this degenerate and Satanic army offers them. The only thing that can defeat a degenerate army is a militant force which is dedicated to delivering humanity from evil, and gets its strength from the unbreakable fighting spirit of the proletariat.

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The U.S. empire’s attempt to traumatize the world, & the resistance forces that refuse to stop pressing forward

As the forces of capitalist reaction expand their terror campaign on all fronts, we must draw the people’s attention to the revolutionary forces which are still on the advance. In a place like the United States, where fascist terror is closing in on the people and rapidly quickening the pace of political killings, the people must be made aware of who’s been successfully beating back this monstrous machine. 

They need to know about the gains by the Palestinian resistance, and by Yemen’s anti-imperialist revolt, and by Haiti’s armed revolutionary movement. They must know of how several African countries have broken from neo-colonial control, a development that’s partly come from the morale boost that Russia’s anti-fascist resistance has provided. They must be made aware of the recent mobilizations by Latin America’s anti-imperialist militias, which are a critical defense against Washington’s attempts at destroying Venezuela. These popular struggles represent today’s biggest counter-balance against our government’s genocidal global offensive, and against the domestic mass murder campaign that we’re also experiencing.

Focusing on today’s active revolutionary advances, and on how they can be expanded to more fronts, is essential towards guiding our popular movements. It’s also essential towards the success of Marxism in particular; because though Marxists are the ones who’ve already gained knowledge about proletarian theory and history, we are useless unless we apply this knowledge to what’s happening within today’s conditions. In response to the ICE killings, the expanding global bombing campaigns, the starvation of Gaza, and all of this moment’s other assaults from the enemy, we have to bring the lessons from history’s other dark moments into our modern revolutionary practice.

One of these critical learning moments is 1965, the year when the CIA installed a dictatorship in Indonesia that would murder hundreds of thousands of class-conscious workers. This was the event that let Washington win the Cold War, and establish the “Jakarta method” for political mass murder which became used by Latin America’s dictatorships. We are still far from recovering the losses that these catastrophes represented, and the present genocidal terror is proof of this. But at the same time that the imperial enemy was enacting its big counter-offensive, the recent gains by the global working class had provided practical lessons which would be forever useful. 

Wrote Lin Bao in 1965 about what everyone could learn from the model of people’s war, which had just been put in practice to unprecedented success:

The essence of Comrade Mao Tse-tung’s theory of army building is that in building a people’s army prominence must be given to politics, i.e., the army must first and foremost be built on a political basis. Politics is the commander, politics is the soul of everything. Political work is the lifeline of our army. True, a people’s army must pay attention to the constant improvement of its weapons and equipment and its military technique, but in its fighting it does not rely purely on weapons and technique, it relies mainly on politics, on the proletarian revolutionary consciousness and courage of the commanders and fighters, on the support and backing of the masses.

Owing to the application of Comrade Mao Tse-tung’s line on army building, there has prevailed in our army at all times a high level of proletarian political consciousness, an atmosphere of keenness to study the thought of Mao Tse-tung, an excellent morale, a solid unity and a deep hatred for the enemy, and thus a gigantic moral force has been brought into being. In battle it has feared neither hardships nor death, it has been able to charge or hold its ground as the conditions require. One man can play the role of several, dozens or even hundreds, and miracles can be performed. All this makes the people’s army led by the Chinese Communist Party fundamentally different from any bourgeois army, and from all the armies of the old type which served the exploiting classes and were driven and utilized by a handful of people. The experience of the people’s war in China shows that a people’s army created in accordance with Comrade Mao Tse-tung’s theory of army building is incomparably strong and invincible.

Through the political genocides and working-class defeats that the global proletariat endured during the 20th century, the organizations that had internalized these lessons would carry on the revolutionary offensive. They would maintain a chain of victories for the liberation forces, one that today’s successful Global South struggles are a part of.

Vietnam’s people would use the people’s war model to defeat the empire. Iran’s people would defeat the Shah, and create a government that’s socialist in many respects. Palestine’s people would start up an unprecedented offensive against settler-colonialism with the Intifada, which began its first major wave in the 1987 uprising. Nicaragua’s masses would win, then Venezuela’s people would establish a revolutionary government, then Yemen would start upon its own popular anti-imperialist revolt. There have also been recent setbacks, of course, but even in these setbacks we can glean critical insights about which revolutionary paths are proving to be sustainable. 

What we see from the destruction of Libya and Syria, as well as the color revolution in Nepal and the defeat of Bolivia’s socialist party, is that the masses prevail only when their revolutionary project has kept building on its defenses, and moving forward in the effort at strengthening workers power. There is a reason why the DPRK, the proletarian state with nuclear weapons, has endured while many other small anti-imperialist states have been defeated. This is a part of our revolutionary education that will become more applicable after we’ve actually begun building a workers state, but it’s worth mentioning even for those who are far from revolution in their own countries. As the overarching lesson is that one cannot overcome a superior enemy without consistently attending to defense, and to the proper organization of this defense.

How do we apply these insights to conditions where the people are disorganized, and where the reactionary state is working to re-create the “Jakarta method?” There are many countries right now that fit this description, because the workers movement hasn’t yet been restored; and within these countries, the movement’s participants will need to find the right path for their particular conditions. What I’m certain of as someone in the United States, though, is that my country will only be able to defeat international bankers’ power by reconnecting with its past revolutionary struggles.

Something critical to understand about America’s campaign of state violence is that even though it is an American Jakarta method, it’s not simply an “imperial boomerang,” where an empire’s violence abroad becomes directed at its own people. The real basis for the ICE murders is America’s own history of genocide against indigenous people, Africans, and immigrants, as well as our government’s extremely violent assaults against workers who’ve fought for their rights. We have to apply the tools which the targets of this past violence used to resist, delving deep into the histories of these efforts. This is how we gain an essential kind of strength within our work to combat the state’s terror; this, along with our studies into the methods of the present-day Global South resistance efforts. 

To the greatest extent that it’s safe for us to do given the threat of repression, Marxists must bring these insights to the broader masses, who are increasingly united in opposition to ICE and are looking for direction on how to resist. If we can connect all of these things—the present to the past, America’s struggle to the Global South’s struggle—we’ll be equipped to keep pushing our own lines forward.

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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 implosion of liberal identity politics, and our task of building a new cross-racial workers force

If American communists want to survive this state crackdown, we will need to work fast at rebuilding Marxism’s ties to the anti-racist struggles. We must make it a central priority to reach the Black, Latino, and Native masses, in a way that we haven’t done thus far during the 21st century. 

For those within the American communist movement who’ve sought to break out of the petty-bourgeois radical model, and go into the real masses, a major focus in this stage has been on repudiating liberal identity politics. It has been completely necessary for us to combat the metaphysical, anti-materialist academic theories which the modern left has adopted; we’ve needed to fight against the attempts at divorcing the struggles by certain groups from the class struggle, and reducing “class” to just another identity among many. The next step beyond tearing down idpol is to build the structure we need; to create a multi-racial workers coalition that can defend against our ever-more violent repressive state.

This problem we’ve needed to confront within idpol, where the self-described Marxist movement willingly cripples itself through metaphysical theories, is a problem which became so prominent because state repression had already succeeded. There have been times throughout American history when a strong working-class force has emerged, and during those times our class enemies have needed to employ crackdowns as their main counterrevolutionary tactic. Otherwise, the repression in the United States hasn’t been anywhere near as large as it typically is in the imperial peripheries, and this is only because the U.S. empire has already managed to “mow the grass” very effectively within its own borders. In the absence of a strong working class, the biggest tool for attacking workers power becomes the proliferation of pseudo-Marxist ideas, designed to lead class-conscious workers to a political dead-end.

With the rise of militarized police, the project to make ICE into a paramilitary force, and the new wave of political persecutions, the fight is becoming more real. The discursive means for sabotaging revolution aren’t as effective as they were for a while in recent American history, and these escalations in state violence are a direct response to a new revolutionary threat. The ruling class views today’s conditions as so threatening not because the masses have become organized—the bulk of them are still far from gaining organization—but because there has emerged a new risk of restored popular power. Amid our never-ending depression, as well as the new imperialist wars that our ruling class has embarked on, the American people may find a kind of class solidarity which they haven’t yet achieved.

What the system fears is that working-class Americans of all races will join forces to an unprecedented degree, and wage a type of proletarian revolt which has reconciled its racial contradictions in ways that past worker endeavors have failed to. The American labor movement’s refusals to join with indigenous people’s fight against extermination, and the refusal by many 20th century socialist orgs to center the struggle against Jim Crow, were critical reasons why these efforts fell short. William Z. Foster explains these failures in History of the Communist Party, which provides context for how liberal idpol came into being. 

The compatible left was able to propagate idpol in the midst of a concerted, strategic project to undermine white working class solidarity with the non-white workers. Before our ruling class corrupted Marxism with notions that reject workers struggle in favor of isolated identity projects, it recruited white chauvinist opportunists to put forth a “Marxism” which dismissed anti-racism as a distraction from class. This was among the great errors that led the Socialist Party to become irrelevant. When the Black Power movement managed to gain serious strength, the opportunists within the left changed their tactic. They now claimed to be in solidarity with the victims of racial and national oppression, so that they could redefine the anti-racist struggle to be something separate from the class struggle. We know that the “anything but class left” (as Parenti described them) are the modern version of the white chauvinist “socialists” because these two elements come from the same class. 

Both worldviews are fundamentally bourgeois, informed by an experience that’s detached from the interests of the workers. The capitalist, liberal version of “anti-racism” was able to dominate because the authentic, working-class elements within America’s social movements had already been pushed to the margins. There has not been an American left since the Panthers and the other revolutionaries of their time got crushed. And in the absence of a real left, the compatible left is all that remains.

For the American communist movement to defeat capital’s terror campaign, we will have to build upon the work our forebears did in bringing these different liberation movements into a cohesive proletarian force. Otherwise, we’ll fall into stagnation, and be made into targets for the state without having the basis for fighting back. We can avoid such a catastrophe, if we direct our revolutionary work in a way that’s informed by what history has taught us about multi-racial solidarity. The achievements of the Panthers, the American Indian Movement, the Brown Berets, and the other liberation groups of the 60s era can provide us with critical guidance, however much their gains have been destroyed. 

Within Blood In My Eye, George Jackson provides such an insight, identifying the construction of dual power as instrumental towards bringing in the Black working class:

How can the black industrial worker be induced to carry out a valid worker’s revolutionary policy? What and who will guide him? The commune. The central city-wide revolutionary culture. But who will build the commune that will guide the people into a significant challenge to property rights? Carving out a commune in the central city will involve claiming certain rights as our own—out front. Rights that have not been respected to now. Property rights. It will involve building a political, social and economic infrastructure, capable of filling the vacuum that has been left by the establishment ruling class and pushing the occupying forces of the enemy culture from our midst. The implementation of this new social, political and economic program will feed and comfort all the people on at least a subsistence level, and force the “owners” of the enemy bourgeois culture either to tie their whole fortunes to the communes and the people, or to leave the land, the tools and the market behind.

The American communist movement has already been expanding its efforts to build those alternative economic structures, as I’ve talked about many times in regard to the American Communist Party’s innovative and diligent community service projects. We should draw attention to these gains; but every time Marxists have taken a new step forward, our first thought must be which step will come next. And a critical next step is to redouble all of our existing efforts at multi-racial worker organizing. This is what we were striving for all along when we entered into the struggle against idpol, and when we embarked upon a communist project that involved serious dual power. History has shown us what our task is; we must answer the call.

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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 post-Covid generation has been cast out of society, but Mao shows us how to respond to this

The post-Covid generation’s two available paths are arrested development, or entry into a life of overwork just to hold on to a bare minimum. When those in Gen Z become inert, and fall behind in the basic areas of life, they’re doing so because the alternative is to fully invest oneself in a broken system. Home ownership and access to well-paying jobs have been cut off from this generation regardless of how individually driven they are; and when a “normal” life is out of reach anyhow, many will decide it makes sense to give up, whether consciously or subconsciously.

This is the condition that’s afflicting the bulk of people born after 2000, and in the realm of radical politics, it’s having ramifications for how the typical “activist” orgs are able to operate. Petty-bourgeois radicalism, where leftists limit their outreach to a small bubble, has always leaned onto the student element for new recruits. Petty-bourgeois radical orgs like PSL depend on a model of routinely picking up kids, intensely working them for a time, and then taking in a new batch of kids after the old batch has become burnt out. This is how these orgs have been operating for decades. Post-Covid, though, when the proportion of unemployed college graduates has reached historic highs and most in Gen Z aren’t on track to start families, the experience of these younger people has grown too detached from what such opportunistic projects are selling.

Petty-bourgeois radicalism is a boomer ideology, based in the idealist notion that if you just protest hard enough, the revolution will come. This is a view that can’t be reconciled with the bleak reality we’ve been thrust into, where no matter how hard you try, you will end up far too short. This helps explain why PSL’s “pan-leftist” model has lost its former relevance, and been replaced by another breed of ultra-leftism; one that’s aggressively adventuristic, and focused on illegal action for its own sake.

This ideology of course isn’t capable of winning the bulk of the masses either, and it’s only capable of rallying those among Gen Z who are “woke” to the effect that they actively isolate themselves from the people. The majority of Gen Z have no reason to join with it. For communists to build a new workers movement, we will need to put forth a very different kind of militant practice than what’s offered by the “antifa” circles. We’ll have to embody the lifestyle of mental and physical excellence that was described by Mao, and that can save Gen Z from its stagnation. Wrote Mao:

If the body is made savage, then the civilized mind will follow. Knowledge consists in knowing the things in the world, and in discerning their laws. In this matter we must rely on our body, because direct observation depends on the ears and eyes, and reflection depends on the brain. The ears and eyes, as well as the brain, may be considered parts of the body. When the body is perfect, then knowledge is also perfect. Hence one can say that knowledge is acquired indirectly through physical education. Physical strength is required to undertake the study of the numerous modern sciences, whether in school or through independent study. He who is equal to this is the man with a strong body; he who is not equal to it is the man with a weak body. The division between the strong and the weak determines the area of responsibilities each can assume.

Physical education not only enhances knowledge. it also harmonizes the sentiments. The power of the sentiments is extremely great. The ancients endeavoured to discipline them with reason. Hence they asked. 'Is the master [i.e.. reason] always alert?' They also said: 'One should discipline the heart with reason.' But reason proceeds from the heart. and the heart resides in the body. We often observe that the weak are enslaved by their sentiments and are incapable of mastering them. Those whose senses are imperfect or whose limbs are defective are often enslaved by excessive passion, and reason is incapable of saving them. Hence it may be called an invariable law that when the body is perfect and healthy, the sentiments are also correct.

The system doesn’t want our bodies or minds to be healthy. It wants us to respond to our bleak circumstances by languishing, and using electronic or chemical stimulation as a replacement for the lives we were supposed to have. Many have fallen into these habits, and many will continue to stick with these habits even if they want to escape them. Individual self-betterment advice is not enough; we won’t be able to fully defeat these self-destructive phenomena until the superstructure behind them has been abolished. What we can do is build a structure that stands in opposition to the illnesses that capital imposes on us, and provides a means for our society’s “left-behinds” to do labor on the revolution’s behalf.

The key is to make this labor genuinely mean something, and make it have the greatest constructive effect that such work can bring. The pan-leftist orgs give the maximum amount of work to passionate college kids, and when this work inevitably fails to bring real progress in the class war, these kids respond by becoming alienated from that labor. This work fails to be fulfilling because those in charge do not have any serious endgame; their practice is “movementist” rather than revolutionary, as its only endgame is to maintain the existing cycle of performative activities. The same dynamic of pointless work and burnout applies to the “antifa” groups, though they have the advantage of offering their members maximum libidinal release through unrestrained adventurism. No matter how much catharsis the “antifa” warriors get during their time in these circles, they too will keep cycling in and out. By its nature, the compatible left cannot offer its recruits work that fulfills them in a sustainable way, and that lets them achieve things which build upon each other over time.

Only the authentic communist movement, the movement that’s serious about analyzing the class struggle’s history and testing political practices, is capable of giving the “left behinds” what they need. If you’re among the “left behinds”—as in you’ve had enough doors closed on you to understand the system views you as excess—then you’re not really who the ultra-left groups are trying to appeal to. They’re looking for people who haven’t yet been sufficiently “black-pilled,” and therefore are willing to believe that it’s worthwhile to pursue the failed practices of the New Left. It’s when you’ve been able to experience these failures that it becomes apparent why we must take a different path.

This alternative path will have to be one where we synthesize Mao Zedong Thought’s ideas about revolutionary discipline, with an organization-building model that fits our conditions. The work we do will need to change as the circumstances evolve, but it’s already certain that this org model will include a combination of above-ground and below-ground projects; as in mass work which gives us a popular base, along with “secret work” which gives security to those whose lives and freedom are threatened by the state. 

The accelerating crackdown by militarized police, and by the ICE forces that function as a paramilitary force, is making people aware of just how urgent our situation has become. We must prevent the ultra-lefts from hijacking the resistance against this state violence, and build those dual-power structures that can let popular power keep growing. And to carry forth this task, we will have to take example from Mao’s party during its own era of tribulation, training our ranks in how to maximize their power as human beings.

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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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We’re seeing the death of a productive mode, and it’s creating an underclass who will build the next civilization

Everything that we’re seeing happen today is whiplash from when capitalism had to give up its old mode of production, and surrender to the flow of history. The capitalist ruling class did this when capital reached its monopoly stage, where financial speculation came to be the central driving factor; and then the system reached a phase where it could no longer exist in its old, competition-driven form. It was likely during the First World War when capital’s breakdown became this advanced, and when the system therefore needed to switch towards a model that’s fundamentally state-managed; this is what rule by central banking means in our era, and it’s where capital was always headed. 

Because in this stage, capital is no longer based within industry at its core, the effect is that more and more parts of the old system become superfluous—ultimately including the traditional bourgeoisie itself. It’s this context that explains why within the countries where capitalism is most developed, we’re seeing the rise of a new kind of underclass. An underclass whose ranks are still made up of the old lower classes, but whose experience as members of these subordinated elements has taken on a new characteristic. What’s unprecedented about much of today’s workers and unemployed workers is that they’ve been excluded from community and familial relationships, to a degree that’s never before been seen in history. And for them to have been pushed into this role, our financial order needed to render the old productive roles increasingly obsolete, with this process accelerating as time has gone on. 

In 1845, Engels described the first steps in the outmoding of the old producers and traders. This was an upheaval that would create a new “middle class”; which mitigated capital’s worst social effects for a time, but in the end that class would also be pushed out of the economy. Wrote Engels about the ascendancy of this class:

Manufacture centralises property in the hands of the few. It requires large capital with which to erect the colossal establishments that ruin the petty trading bourgeoisie and with which to press into its service the forces of Nature, so driving the hand-labour of the independent workman out of the market. The division of labour, the application of water and especially steam, and the application of machinery, are the three great levers with which manufacture, since the middle of the last century, has been busy putting the world out of joint. Manufacture, on a small scale, created the middle-class; on a large scale, it created the working-class, and raised the elect of the middle-class to the throne, but only to overthrow them the more surely when the time comes. Meanwhile, it is an undenied and easily explained fact that the numerous petty middle-class of the "good old times" has been annihilated by manufacture, and resolved into rich capitalists on the one hand and poor workers on the other. 

The centralising tendency of manufacture does not, however, stop here. Population becomes centralised just as capital does; and, very naturally, since the human being, the worker, is regarded in manufacture simply as a piece of capital for the use of which the manufacturer pays interest under the name of wages.

Capitalism did create a layer of prosperous workers, as well as a new kind of social cohesion for the lower-class workers. One where these workers were obviously still exploited, but the system necessitated that they live in a highly centralized way, and would therefore experience community which was more tight-knit and expansive. In the new era of finance capital, where tech has become the greatest center of financial monopoly and everything has become globalized, this advantage for the underclass has disappeared. Capitalism initially could provide a replacement for the traditional model of community that it destroyed, but ultimately this replacement would vanish as well.

What’s left in its absence is an increasingly precarious social hierarchy where most in the post-Covid generation are absolutely not on the path to having children, while even those with relatively better luck under this system largely find themselves navigating an unstable lifestyle. Aside from the massive proportion of Generation Z who are completely estranged from biological reproduction, there is a layer within Gen Z who are simply in the category of delaying children; which means that though they’ve been able to avoid the outright isolation which is being experienced by many in the underclass, it still doesn’t economically make sense for them to rush towards starting families. So we’re seeing a “delay” that realistically will be permanent in many cases, because the family has fundamentally been shattered by the deterioration of capital. 

The predominant lifestyles for the post-Covid generation are either arrested development, where you fall behind in all areas, or a “normal” way of living where you’re constantly working just to keep the bare minimum. Because in a stage when finance has become what truly defines capitalism, and finance has decided to degrow its industrial infrastructure, you’re in danger of becoming superfluous even if you’re bourgeois—or a “bourgeoisified” labor aristocrat, as most within the successful minority are.

When south Korea reached the logical conclusion of this collapse process, and its society’s birth rate became so low that the country itself was on track to go extinct, its government responded by implementing measures to make parenthood easier. Yet south Korea is still going extinct, because this is a crisis that can’t be solved by simply giving more aid to those who are experiencing it. The overwork, extremely competitive employment market, and de-industrialization that are behind this crisis will continue to exist until the workers have seized the means of production. There is no reforming our way out of the form capitalism is in now; this form is the one that capitalism has taken after exhausting its previous options for how to function. When capital switched to its centrally managed stage, soon enough it would come to “abolish the family” in the same sinister kind of way that anti-communists accuse Marxists of wanting to do.

Those who’ve been left behind under this system, so much that their lives haven’t been able to develop in the “normal” ways, have a unique advantage in understanding the system—and thereby in waging the fight to overthrow it. This is because so long as they’re seeing reality clearly, they aren’t caught up within the psychological type of “bourgeoisification” that’s being propagated by our cultural institutions right now, where the masses are encouraged to merely gain individual success and completely divorce themselves from the collective. 

The right-wing populism of Reaganite politics relies on bourgeois “family values,” while this newer trend discards even that pretense. There are efforts by figures like Andrew Tate to funnel the “left-behinds” into this maximally superficial lifestyle, but their advice for joining the elites won’t even change the proportion of elites vs. underclass; nothing can overcome the material contradictions we’re facing, other than an evolution to the next productive mode. And the ones who find themselves unable to move up within the system, no matter how much they apply their strengths, have an exceptional opportunity at this moment.

If the system has decided that you are “excess,” the only way to go is forward. You have nothing to lose within the system, and are—in certain key ways—untethered from the game that’s been set up to entrap the masses. The contradiction between what “normal” life is supposed to be, and what you’ve been allowed to be, is creating a friction that millions upon millions of others like you are also needing to grapple with. The emergence of a problem necessitates conflict, mental conflict; this is how someone becomes radicalized. The system is trying to keep this conflict neutralized by providing society’s most despondent members with endless entertainment and chemical sedation; but the conflict will continue to play out, and it will produce some of the most dedicated participants in the class war. 

When this war is won by the proletariat, those who devoted their time to investigating, planning, and designing during the present chaotic era will be able to make integral contributions towards humanity's next steps. And from those among the despondent who’ve managed to guide themselves towards such higher goals, we will see some of the greatest among these achievements. In terms of practical advice for the “left-behinds” who are trying to win their inner conflicts, I can point to Mao’s analysis on mental and physical excellence:

Physical education not only harmonizes the emotions, it also strengthens the will. The great utility of physical education lies precisely in this. The principal aim of physical education is military heroism. Such objects of military heroism as courage, dauntlessness, audacity, and perseverance are all matters of will. Let me explain this with an example. To wash our feet in ice water makes us acquire courage and dauntlessness, as well as audacity. In general, any form of exercise, if pursued continuously, will help to train us in perseverance. Long-distance running is particularly good training in perseverance. 'My strength uprooted mountains. My energy dominated the world' [from a poem attributed to Hsiang Yu] — this is courage. 'If I don't behead the Lou Lan, I swear I will not return'— this is dauntlessness. To replace the family with the nation — this is audacity. ' [Yu] was away from his home for eight years, and though he thrice passed the door of it, he did not enter' [ reference to Mencius ] — this is perseverance. All these can be accomplished merely on the basis of daily physical education. The will is the antecedent of a man's career.

Because finance capital has taken away the family from the bulk of the post-Covid generation, it may be that our only option is to replace the family with the nation; at least until the nation can reach enough strength for the family to be restored. This is the position that history has forced us into, and we must respond by becoming active agents within history; by shaping history as conscious participants in it, which starts with resolving the interior wars that our conditions have made us need to fight. These inner conflicts are a direct extension of the civilizational collapse that our rulers are engineering; it’s when those trapped in these conflicts recognize this that they can find the path forward.

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Gen Z supports Palestine’s resistance, and this will translate into a new mode of revolutionary politics

The reaction towards Palestine’s holocaust is creating a new political paradigm, one that will bring the anti-Zionist cause to victory if we guide it in the right direction. It’s this part of the situation that we absolutely cannot miss; though there are many spontaneous developments right now that give hope for the anti-Zionist, revolutionary cause, these events won’t translate into victory unless we intervene.

To get a sense for what sorts of interventions we’ll need to carry out, we can look to a story about spontaneous mass trends being guided in a concrete direction, as described by Lenin:

What was the historic service Lassalle rendered to the German working-class movement? It was that he diverted that movement from the path of progressionist trade-unionism and co-operativism towards which it had been spontaneously moving (with the benign assistance of Schulze-Delitzsch and his like). To fulfil such a task it was necessary to do something quite different from talking of underrating the spontaneous element, of tactics-as-process, of the interaction between elements and environment, etc. A fierce struggle against spontaneity was necessary, and only after such a struggle, extending over many years, was it possible, for instance, to convert the working population of Berlin from a bulwark of the progressionist party into one of the finest strongholds of Social-Democracy.

In the context where Lenin was writing, “social democracy” meant the most advanced type of working-class politics, a trend that was genuinely revolutionary. Since then, the upholders of this movement’s traditions have needed to abandon the “social democrat” label, as it was made to be synonymous with the movement’s reformist elements. Today, one of the main forces of co-optation that’s faced by the pro-Palestine and working-class movement is the modern social democrats; or the “democratic socialists,” as they’ve rebranded themselves. If we simply celebrate Gen Z’s awakening on Palestine, without waging our own struggle against spontaneity, the new popular energy will be successfully diverted towards opportunism; both the reformist opportunism of the “progressive” Democrats, and the ultra-left opportunism that substitutes adventurist violence for actual mass organizing.

It’s necessary to define and delineate these trends; because for the radical generation’s members to defend themselves against the political sabotage that’s coming their way, they will need to know which ideas have been historically proven to derail revolutionary moments. Now is a moment of unprecedented gains for America’s solidarity movements; never before have so many Americans come to side with the Palestinian resistance over the Zionist occupier. This development was the next step beyond Gen Z’s embrace of socialism, which had happened prior to when October 7 massively opened up our discourse. There are actors who seek to divert these sentiments into Democratic Party entryism, or who propagate mindless adventurism that undermines any attempts to organize these radicalized masses. But we can thwart any effort at leading the people astray if we connect the pro-Palestine movement here with the fight that the Palestinians themselves are waging. This will give our movement a kind of guidance which can only come from out of the center of a liberation struggle.

When it comes to Palestine, all the activities of the reformists, the adventurists, and the other antagonists towards revolutionary politics are dependent on a separation from what’s happening in Palestine itself. For example: when Zohran Mamdani tries to engage in a balancing act on Palestine by repeating the Zionist entity’s lies about October 7, this is a problem that we can only properly respond to if we adopt the perspective of Palestine’s resistance. If we understand the actions of the resistance in the context of an anti-colonial war, and give up the impulse to disavow these actions for the sake of appeasing Zionists.

Within the pro-Palestine movement, this problem of capitulation towards Zionism is the primary issue we have to rectify. And we can put forth the criticisms necessary for rectifying it, without alienating the parts of the masses who’ve been drawn towards a figure like Mamdani. There is a difference between the ideological actors who obstinately defend Mamdani’s taking anti-resistance positions, and the broad sections within Gen Z who’ve embraced Mamdani even though they themselves support the resistance. We need to be able to differentiate between opportunists and people with sincere intentions, then navigate within the masses so that we can bring in the majority among them who are compatible with our politics. 

We know that most within the post-Covid generation already have the right position on the resistance; if any of them have gravitated towards a reformist leader, it’s because this leader is the only one that’s been presented to them who somewhat aligns with what they want. To isolate ourselves from these parts of the masses would be movement suicide; we must build a coalition with all who are advanced on anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism.

This is a key part of how we translate Gen Z’s radicalization into a political force that can sustain itself: do what Lenin did, and offer an alliance to those within the reformist camp who may switch to an outright revolutionary politics. It’s what the American Communist Party’s chairman Haz Al-Din did when he extended such an offer to the anti-imperialists inside the Democrat entryist orgs:

I'm speaking on behalf of ACP when I say that we don't have a problem working with and uniting practically with PSL, FRSO, hell, even anti-imperialists who are in the DSA…Wouldn't it be more constructive to work together at least on our major principled points of agreement rather than cancel and ostracize one and another over our disagreements? I saw someone say one of the reasons they like DSA is that it overcomes sectarianism by allowing different factions. I think it would be nice of ACP, PSL, FRSO and some others came together on the basis of a shared framework of principled coordination. We don't need to merge our organization's or parties but why shouldn't we keep open a space for working together? There's very few people in the USA who defend AES and maintain principled opposition to the Democratic Party. Why the bitter enmity? If we don't cooperate and join forces at some level, all we're doing is empowering the Right.

When Lenin made his offer of unity to the reformists, he did so with the awareness that this offer was likely to be rejected, or that the reformists would betray the revolutionaries when the time came. This didn’t matter though, because the purpose of the offer was to show the masses that the revolutionaries were the ones who could be trusted. At this stage American communists, and the others who share their level of consciousness Palestine, are not in a position to execute this strategy in the same way Lenin did; it wouldn’t really mean anything for us to offer Mamdani a partnership, because we aren’t yet on an equal footing with someone like him. The ones who we can meaningfully reach out to in this way, though, are the other organizers and regular org members who’ve joined groups that don’t necessarily represent their own politics. 

Reaching out to them will expand our presence in the best way that we can for now; while exposing the sectarian motives of the opportunists who seek to keep these ranks separated from us. The next step—and the one we need to be carrying out in tandem with that one—is to build dual power, creating organizations that can sustain a presence within their communities. This is how we give representation to the masses who are most advanced on Palestine, and thereby deal a blow against the empire.

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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.