When the Zionist right took on the role of the liberal technocrats, it inherited the unprecedented mass backlash that the liberals set this country up for. Now that the revanchist Reaganites are the ones at the head of the U.S. empire, they’ll have to try to manage the anger that’s building up among the American people. This anger extends well beyond the disillusioned parts of the MAGA base, though MAGA’s fracturing will be an important factor in the Zionist right’s ultimate defeat. The main source of the popular outrage that I’m talking about is within the post-Covid generation; specifically those among this generation who’ve been excluded from the most basic parts of an adult life, and who therefore have nothing to lose.
They’re looking for a place to direct their rage, and the target they see in front of them is the Zionist right—an element which has become delineated from other kinds of conservatism, in that the Zionist right’s “conservatives” don’t even pretend to care about the value of liberty or life. These actors have been proudly backing the extermination of the Palestinian people, and they’re willing to create a Palantir surveillance dystopia for the sake of crushing anyone who opposes their anti-human agenda. For the ones who the system has shoved aside, it’s immediately clear that this agenda must be defeated, and that its proponents have no credibility.
Gen Z has no investment in the social and economic order that the Zionist right glorifies. The proportion of individuals who came of-age following Covid, and who aren’t on track to live on their own, start a family, or even get employment, is much higher than our discourse pretends it is. The Reaganite ideology, which was always based in absurd idealism about how the capitalist class will save America, is so far removed from this reality that it can’t hope to capture Gen Z on a mass scale. Even among Gen Z conservatives, the trend is towards a politics that breaks from the boomerist superstructure, which functionally cannot exist anymore for the bulk of people under 30. The reality of what capitalism actually is—that being a banking dictatorship where everything that doesn’t serve finance gets sacrificed—has been exposed. And faced with this reality, those who capital has left behind have no choice but to forge their own path.
This is where the role of Marxists comes in. The post-Covid generation has objectively reached a proto-revolutionary consciousness, since this is the only kind of consciousness its members could have after experiencing today’s conditions. The problem is that unless Marxists intervene, and provide the left-behinds with leadership towards the working-class struggle, they’ll be captured by the psyops of finance capital. They’ll be diverted towards the “Jewish question,” or the gender wars, or the mentalities designed to encourage apathy. So Marxists must adapt our practice along with the spontaneous changes in the masses, as Lenin said we have to do:
The greater the spontaneous upsurge of the masses and the more widespread the movement, the more rapid, incomparably so, the demand for greater consciousness in the theoretical, political and organisational work of Social-Democracy. The spontaneous upsurge of the masses in Russia proceeded (and continues) with such rapidity that the young Social Democrats proved unprepared to meet these gigantic tasks. This unpreparedness is our common misfortune, the misfortune of all Russian Social-Democrats. The upsurge of the masses proceeded and spread with uninterrupted continuity; it not only continued in the places where it began, but spread to new localities and to new strata of the population (under the influence of the working class movement, there was a renewed ferment among the student youth, among the intellectuals generally, and even among the peasantry). Revolutionaries, however, lagged behind this upsurge, both in their “theories” and in their activity; they failed to establish a constant and continuous organisation capable of leading the whole movement.
If we become inert, if we keep going over the slogans and practices that have characterized the existing Marxist movement, we’ll be made irrelevant in the midst of the Gen Z social storm. Our cause will only survive if our organizing projects truly account for what kinds of circumstances the post-Covid generation is facing. For those born after the turn of the millennium, the opportunity to create a new generation has as a rule been taken away, and the consequence of this is that these “left-behinds” are having trouble seeing a future. This is the danger in having a population with nothing to lose: if their discontent isn’t properly guided, it will lead the left-behinds to become even more atomized.
Thus far, the system’s main approach for managing society’s most alienated members has been sedation tools, such as prescription drugs and pornography. And these tools have been effective in a way that they couldn’t be in an exploited country, because though America is declining, it is the center of imperialism. As Gen Z’s arrested development drags ever on, though, and the younger post-Covid generations come to experience the same tragedy, pressure will keep building up. The storm is coming; the question is how well the Zionist right will be equipped to redirect the storm.
Because the Zionist right’s mission is to revive boomerist myths, it is clear that these “conservative” elites are fundamentally unprepared for this mission on a psychological level; of course there’s no way they could understand the mentality of individuals who’ve been discarded by the system. They’re just as detached as the liberal technocrats are; thus why the military has been preparing to step in, running simulations in which they may need to fight off Gen Z revolts and wage counterinsurgencies within the USA’s own cities.
To take advantage of the strategic and tactical weaknesses within these plans, we will need to take care of the weaknesses in our own movement’s approach towards the masses. We’ll have to offer the left-behinds a viable path forward, providing them with the means to become active agents in history. The Zionist right will certainly fail, and the deep state actors who stand behind them will fail too if we navigate our task correctly.
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