Social fascism’s role: cover for CIA/Mossad interference, push World War III from a “progressive” angle

To understand why the “progressives” helped manufacture consent for the Iran war, we have to look at social fascist theory. Social fascism is the explanation that the Comintern formulated for why the reformists had led the campaign to murder Rosa Luxemburg, and thereby sabotage Germany’s workers revolution. History has proven this theory correct innumerable times, with the “democratic socialist” assistance in the Iran war effort being the latest example. That the social democrats share guilt for the assault on Iran isn’t a controversial idea within communist circles; but we must confront how much of the left is still willing to give these actors the benefit of the doubt on Iran, or who outright share their position.

The best way to argue against this position is by pointing out that the Mossad was inseparable from the supposedly revolutionary Iran protests. Whatever accusations somebody makes against Iran about its response to the demonstrations, their information has been filtered through the channels the Mossad controls. The onus is on the accusers to show why Israel’s account of the story should be believed, and therefore why we should de facto join with the pro-Zionist side. 

Even as the American people react to the war with outrage, and this war escalates to genocidal levels, the social fascists are working to keep the demonizing narratives about Iran alive within our discourse. Their role doesn’t allow them to commit to supporting the resistance against Zionism’s expanding onslaught. This is because as Stalin explained in 1924, this role the social democrats have is to be auxiliaries for the bourgeoisie’s fighting wing, attacking from a “progressive” angle:

…while the decisive battles were in progress, the bourgeoisie needed a fighting organisation, needed fascism; but now that the proletariat is defeated, the bourgeoisie no longer needs fascism and can afford to use “democracy” instead, as a better method of consolidating its victory. Hence, the conclusion is drawn that, the rule of the bourgeoisie has become consolidated, that the “era of pacifism” will be a prolonged one, and that the revolution in Europe has been pigeonholed.

This assumption is absolutely wrong. Firstly, it is not true that fascism is only the fighting organisation of the bourgeoisie. Fascism is not only a military-technical category. Fascism is the bourgeoisie’s fighting organisation that relies on the active support of Social-Democracy. Social-Democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism. There is no ground for assuming that the fighting organisation of the bourgeoisie can achieve decisive successes in battles, or in governing the country, without the active support of Social-Democracy. There is just as little ground for thinking that Social-Democracy can achieve decisive successes in battles, or in governing the country, without the active support of the fighting organisation of the bourgeoisie.

There are indications that the next maneuver of our ruling class will be to put the social fascists into power. And this makes sense, given how much capital has now consolidated its control. Trump 2.0 has been defined by a complete lack of desire by those in power to hide their crimes, and this confidence comes from how our class enemies don’t expect the masses to become organized. The next logical step is for the U.S. empire to put on a “progressive” mask again, potentially in the form of AOC.

The problem is that once the mask has come off, there’s no way to truly go back. If AOC is installed next, the “democratic socialist” brand will collapse as fast as Trump 2.0’s “dissident” image has collapsed. This is the new reality our class enemies must deal with: political scams, as a rule, are harder to sustain than they were in America for the longest time. The American working class has now been in a depression for almost twenty years, starting with the 2008 collapse that they never recovered from. The masses are ready to turn on anybody who gives them false promises to end the wars, and to return prosperity.

As the social fascists experience an ever-greater backlash from their base, we must be ready to bring this base to communism. Which means synthesizing the original Comintern position, where the socdem political scammers are correctly viewed as social fascists, with the softer position that the Comintern would eventually take. In 1935, after fascism had again become the bourgeoisie’s primary tool, Dimitrov concluded that communists need to account for how we reach the social democratic workers:

in countries having Social-Democratic governments, the Communists, by utilizing appropriate individual demands taken from the platforms of the Social-Democratic ministers as a starting point for achieving joint action with the Social-Democratic Parties and organizations, can afterwards more easily develop a campaign for the establishment of a united front on the basis of other mass demands in the struggle against the capitalist offensive, against fascism and the threat of war. It must further be borne in mind that, in general, joint action with the Social-Democratic Parties and organizations requires from Communists serious and substantiated criticism of Social Democracy as the ideology and practice of class collaboration with the bourgeoisie, and untiring, comradely explanation to the Social-Democratic workers of the program and slogans of Communism. In countries having Social-Democratic governments this task is of particular importance in the struggle for a united front.

If we were to call the workers who love Zohran or AOC social fascists, this would of course be ultra-leftist and self-destructive. Where it is appropriate to use the social fascist label, though, is when we are dealing with the very most bad-faith and corrupt actors within the liberal wing of ruling-class politics. Our task is to reveal to these workers why the leaders they’ve been attracted to are really their enemies. Lenin concluded that people will always be “victims of deceit and self-deception in politics, until they learn behind every kind of moral, religious, political, social phrase, declaration and promise to seek out the interests of this or that class or classes. The partisans of reform and betterment will always be fooled by the defenders of the old régime, until they understand that every old institution, no matter how savage and rotten it may seem, is sustained by the forces of this or that dominant class or classes. And there is only one way to break the resistance of these classes, namely, to find in the very society surrounding us, to find and educate and organize for the struggle, those forces which can – and owing to their social situation must – form a power capable of sweeping away the old and creating the new.” 

Going around insulting regular workers who support social democracy is not the right tactic, and in my experience avoiding such ultra-left behavior is a matter of mastering one’s own temperament. We know where the impulse to put out this anger comes from: a rage against those who are assisting in the project to murder millions for profit. If we can master ourselves, and direct this anger at the collaborators while properly explaining our anger to the workers, we'll be in position to draw the masses away from the lies of the social fascists.

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Iran is fighting a war to save the world, & it will be fully won when Americans defeat their Epstein dictatorship

Iran’s heroic example in defying the Satanic Epstein regime’s aggression is something that can inspire Americans to fight back themselves. To recognize just how illegitimate their government is, reject both imperialist parties, and strike back amid this war that Washington is waging against the entire world’s working class. This moment has great potential to make West Asia’s resistance movement spill into the heart of the beast, and catalyze the American popular uprising that brings the greatest blow U.S. imperialism has ever suffered. 

Such is the foundation of the hope that those of us within the anti-imperialist movement are feeling right now, even as we see our enemies go on such a gargantuan rampage. To give the people a path towards victory against their government, and sustain the struggle’s progress during the next dark developments, we must translate their anger into a concrete plan. A plan that’s informed by the history of how the working masses have made imperialism’s designs backfire.

We must draw attention to the analysis which Lenin made about why only the revolutionary path can let us end imperialist war. How he pointed out that “The distinction between the reformists and the revolutionaries, among the Social-Democrats, and socialists generally, was objectively bound to undergo a change under the conditions of the imperialist war. Those who confine themselves to ‘demanding’ that the bourgeois governments should conclude peace or ‘ascertain the will of the peoples for peace’, etc., are actually slipping into reforms. For, objectively,  the problem of the war can be solved only in a revolutionary way.”

This is a message that Marxists must always be sure to get across. In the presentation of this article, I’ve used the popular language about how we’re fighting against a Satanic regime, and against an Epstein class. The imperialist apparatus can be described in these ways, and that the masses already recognize such terms means there is a place for them in our rhetoric. But we must also convey the nature of the economic structure that’s put Satanism and pedophilic sadists in charge of our world; we must make clear how it’s the global financial system that’s behind America’s accelerating economic decline, and the expanding wars that Washington is waging. This is how we explain why Lenin was correct about all reformist paths being false solutions, put forth to stop the workers from throwing off the rule of banking.

“There is no possibility of this war ending in a democratic, non-coercive peace or of the people being relieved of the burden of billions paid in interest to the capitalists, who have made fortunes out of the war, except through a revolution of the proletariat,” continued Lenin. “The most varied reforms can and must be demanded of the bourgeois governments, but one cannot, without sinking to Manilovism and reformism, demand that people and classes entangled by the thousands of threads of imperialist capital should tear those threads. And unless they are torn, all talk of a war against war is idle and deceitful prattle.”

When we bring these analyses into the conversation, and clarify what a revolutionary solution actually looks like, we can overcome the attempts to divert America’s people from doing what truly endangers the imperial system. The sentiments of heroism and defiance are there, but we have yet to build the mass organizational structure which the people will need for putting these sentiments into practice. The role of materials like this one is to delineate between the reformist responses towards the Epstein war, which can only lead us in a circle; and the revolutionary path that can bring the masses to victory.

This must be how we build upon the revolt against Epstein and neocon wars which is happening inside of MAGA: by exposing these realities about how finance capitalist power works, and what needs to be done in order to dismantle the power structure. Thomas Massie, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tucker Carlson, and Candace Owens are playing an important role by speaking out against the war. On their own, though, these efforts repeat that pattern of merely demanding peace, without a program to overthrow the economic system which prevents peace. This problem applies even more so to the politics of the “progressive” Democrats. They aren’t even acting in good faith, as their purpose is to sheepdog people back into the two-party system. 

With the antiwar MAGA trend, there’s actually a possibility that the trend will lead somewhere revolutionary, which is why Marxists of my type have called our tendency “MAGA communism.” The DSA’s politics are such total controlled opposition that our strategy with DSA must be to actively draw its followers away from their present camp. With the many Trump voters and independents who’ve been listening to what people like Candace have to say, our posture must be different, because these Americans have already come to basically think within a communist framework. Unlike the DSA they’ve come to reject the duopoly; and by necessity, they’re engaged in an intense investigation of the current conditions, seeking to stay up to date about what our ruling class is doing.

We do not need the majority of the people to become communists, as this has never happened in any country which has undergone a workers revolution. With dissident MAGA, though, we do need to reckon with two major problems. Those being the prevalence of anti-communism, and the tendency to rely on consumption of “alternative” media as a substitute for actual organizing. There is still great confusion about what communism is, since dissident MAGA has emerged from the right-wing politics that views Marxism as a tool for finance capital. We are capable of overcoming such confusion, though, and building a real organized popular effort, if we accompany our educational work with serious coalition-building. 

Creating a united front does not mean trying to get everyone to adopt your own ideology, it means taking the lead in unifying everyone who shares your goal. If we build an anti-Epstein coalition in this way, and resist the war on Iran in this way, then we’ll prove ourselves to the people as being worthy of respect. There are many efforts right now to smear communism, including from individuals who aren’t even ill-intentioned. But we can thwart these efforts by making the anti-communist dogmas run up against the practical realities of political struggle, and showing why Marxism offers the path forward.

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To turn this war into a class war, we must combat the “socialists” who oppose anti-imperialist countries

At this stage, one of the biggest things we can do to turn this imperialist war into a class war is combat the Trotskyist sentiments which dismiss anti-imperialist struggles. This opposition often varies in its forms and severity, because Trotskyist orgs aren’t a monolith. But the reality we need to deal with is that throughout much of the communist movement, there exists a fundamental hostility towards the countries or movements that are at the forefront of resisting Washington. And Trotskyism is the ideological throughline that we can identify among these trends.

One example of this problem from recent times is when these communist formations have opposed Russia’s war against Ukrainian fascism; which is a stance that opposes not only the anti-fascist effort itself, but also the workers struggles that produced this effort. Another example is Venezuela, which the KKE and its ideologically aligned parties have failed; they’ve promoted the lies from Venezuela’s Trotskyist wrecker faction about Maduro having betrayed the workers, which split the workers movement amid Washington’s escalating campaign of aggression against Venezuela.

Of course, these same formations have denounced these aggressions, but only after they contributed towards weakening the resistance against what Washington has been doing. And the same applies to how they’ve handled Iran, though in a manner that’s more subtle (and therefore in a way more dangerous). 

In terms of the pro-imperialist narratives that we’ve seen from popular Marxist publications, among the biggest problems can be found within In Defense of Communism, which has platformed the Tudeh Party of Iran’s statement from this February that said Khamenei “drove the country [Iran] to the brink of war and destruction.” Zionist lies within a pseudo-“Marxist” framing really don’t get any worse than that; but I will not accuse any of the actual parties I’m speaking about of endorsing this particular lie, since Idcommunism isn’t officially a publication for any party. The fact that Idcommunism is run by individuals who support Greece’s communist party, though, is something we should note in relation to Tudeh. Because Tudeh has successfully gotten the KKE, and many other CPs, to sign on to a statement that’s influenced by Tudeh’s agenda of slandering the Islamic Republic.

The statement I’m talking about doesn’t go so far as to blame Iran for the war, which I doubt that any CP on earth besides Tudeh would do. But it does show that Tudeh has managed to legitimize itself within the movement as a perceived source of reporting on the events within Iran, which is of course very troubling. The statement was made in January, and was endorsed by dozens of communist orgs around the globe; not just the KKE and its European partners, but also Global South formations like the Palestinian Communist Party. It said that “We have received detailed reports, published by the fraternal Tudeh Party of Iran, regarding the circumstances surrounding the protest demonstrations that began on December 28 in Tehran. According to all reports, the brutal mass crackdown waged by the authorities of the Islamic Republic was unleashed in response to the legitimate protests of people against the catastrophic collapse of the country’s national currency and the acutely deteriorating living conditions being endured by the population at large.”

Its language about the crackdown is non-specific, but it shows that Tudeh has been able to normalize two key narratives within the global communist movement: 1) that Iran’s security forces have been committing abuses in as serious of a way as Zionism’s propaganda has portrayed, and 2) that the protests should simply be viewed as organic, even though the Mossad has said it’s sent agents to shape the character and behavior of the demonstrations. These are the ideas that bad actors within the communist movement have been proliferating about Iran, and they certainly have played a role in letting the U.S. take its attacks on Iran this far.

As our third world war goes on, and more countries come into the center of the conflict, the communist movement’s principles keep being tested. And to make it pass this test of history, we must wage a struggle inside socialism. Combating Trotskyism is among the most productive things we can do at the moment for the same reason that it was so important for Lenin to combat the “socialists” who supported the first world war. 

Exposing the impediments towards anti-imperialist struggle within the left is how we create the friction that the workers movement needs during times like this one. Forcing the debate over anti-imperialism into working-class spaces is one critical step towards realizing the outcome Mao envisioned for when a third world war came about; the outcome where the global working class makes this war backfire on the capitalists, and carries out an unprecedented wave of revolutions.

When I name Trotskyists as the source of the imperial collaborationism within the communist movement, I’m not only talking about the formations that outright use the “Trotskyist” label. I’m even more so referring to the elements within socialism which have internalized the ideology of Trotskyism; which share its fixation on perceived ideological purity, over the practical needs of liberation struggles. Any self-described socialist formation that refuses to get behind the Islamic Republic is practicing Trotskyism, and is thereby embodying the modern version of the chauvinism that Lenin identified within the left opportunists of his time:

Mere appeals to the workers of all countries, empty assurances of devotion to internationalism, direct or indirect attempts to fix a “sequence” of action by the revolutionary proletariat in the various belligerent countries, laborious efforts to conclude “agreements” between the socialists of the belligerent countries on the question of the revolutionary struggle, all the fuss over the summoning of socialist congresses for the purpose of a peace campaign, etc., etc.—no matter how sincere the authors of such ideas, attempts, and plans may be – amount, as far as their objective significance is concerned, to mere phrase-mongering, and at best are innocent and pious wishes, fit only to conceal the deception of the people by the chauvinists. The French social-chauvinists, who are the most adroit and accomplished in methods of parliamentary hocus-pocus, have long since broken the record for ranting and resonant pacifist and internationalist phrases coupled with the incredibly brazen betrayal of socialism and the International, the acceptance of posts in governments which conduct the imperialist war, the voting of credits or loans (as Chkheidze, Skobelev, Tsereteli and Steklov have been doing recently in Russia), opposition to the revolutionary struggle in their own country, etc., etc.

Good people often forget the brutal and savage setting of the imperialist world war. This setting does not tolerate phrases, and mocks at innocent and pious wishes. There is one, and only one, kind of real internationalism, and that is—working whole-heartedly for the development of the revolutionary movement and the revolutionary struggle in one’s country, and supporting (by propaganda, sympathy, and material aid) this struggle, this, and only this, line, in every country without exception.

If we wage a serious struggle against Trotskyism, like Lenin waged a struggle against these earlier social-chauvinists, we’ll put the workers movement in position to take advantage of the many opportunities which are appearing before it. We’ll be able to connect our labor struggles with the fight that’s being waged by the Iranians, and by all the other peoples who are engaged in or preparing for armed defense against the imperial aggressors.

There lies the true value in this whole debate: it lets us take example from the struggles of the Global South. This task of ending the separation between workers struggles and anti-colonial struggles actually has a very direct connection to the origins of Trotskyism, because Trotskyism’s rise depended on Marxists failing to properly understand the character of the Global South’s revolts. When the expectation by Marx and Engels about workers revolutions first happening in the most developed countries failed to come true, and the early 20th century’s European worker uprisings were successfully crushed, many in the socialist movement reacted by going in a right-wing deviationist direction. They came to the position that building socialism in one country would make socialism fail, because according to their interpretation of the old “workers can only win in the most developed countries” idea, socialism could only be built when Russia’s revolution expanded beyond the underdeveloped country in which it had taken place.

This translated to an inherent bias in favor of the working-class politics within the imperialist countries, and a dismissal of the liberation fights within the colonized or formerly colonized nations. In ideological terms, the problem here is an unwillingness to recognize primary vs. secondary contradictions. On a material level, there’s a deeper reason for why these Trotskyist and chauvinist attitudes exist. This ideological conflict is truly a conflict between the petty-bourgeois forces within the socialist movement, and the forces that have a truly firm basis in the working class—that is the global working class, and the concrete struggles it’s waging against U.S. hegemony. If we properly understand the petty-bourgeois side, we can prevent the workers from falling into the traps that the opportunists create for them.

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The theft of the world we knew, the timeline of our social decline, & Gen Z’s search for salvation

Something liberals have done in response to Gen Z’s tragedies is pathologize the reactions from the victims, especially the male victims. This is how our discourse has framed the rise of social isolation among men who are thirty-and-under: by blaming the individuals, which is what someone is doing when they say that these men simply need to go to therapy. This is the nature of “psychology” in its capitalist form: to medicalize the problems that we experience because of the conditions in which we live. It’s a tactic that’s weaponized against both working-class men and women; but the example of suffering men being told to go to therapy exemplifies the particular nature of how capital is destroying social relations in the 21st century. It illustrates what kinds of victim-blaming, atomistic gender war ideas our institutions are pushing in order to try to stop Gen Z from rising up.

To understand what’s really behind the rise of lonely men, the birthrate decline, and the other seemingly inexplicable social crises that have emerged throughout the last generation, we have to look at when this sort of thing has happened in the past. When societies have experienced upsets which catch everyone by surprise, because everyone assumed that humanity would keep operating as it already had been. This was the nature of the transition into statehood, as described by Engels in Origins of the Family. Referring to the sudden evolution that Athenian society underwent, Engels discussed what social relations turned into after money and usury entered the picture:

If the sale of the land did not cover the debt, or if the debt had been contracted without any security, the debtor, in order to meet his creditor's claims, had to sell his children into slavery abroad. Children sold by their father – such was the first fruit of father-right and monogamy! And if the blood-sucker was still not satisfied, he could sell the debtor himself as a slave. Thus the pleasant dawn of civilization began for the Athenian people. 

Formerly, when the conditions of the people still corresponded to the gentile constitution, such an upheaval was impossible; now it had happened – nobody knew how. Let us go back for a moment to our Iroquois, amongst whom the situation now confronting the Athenians, without their own doing, so to speak, and certainly against their will, was inconceivable. Their mode of producing the necessities of life, unvarying from year to year, could never generate such conflicts as were apparently forced on the Athenians from without; it could never create an opposition of rich and poor, of exploiters and exploited. The Iroquois were still very far from controlling nature, but within the limits imposed on them by natural forces they did control their own production…That was the immense advantage of barbarian production, which was lost with the coming of civilization; to reconquer it, but on the basis of the gigantic control of nature now achieved by man and of the free association now made possible, will be the task of the next generations.

Solving this riddle of how to utilize production for the collective benefit has been humanity’s great task ever since the coming of civilization. And Gen Z, with its predicament of being born into the dawn of an unprecedented social upheaval, has been given the exceptionally unfair task of needing to resolve this problem in order to have a future. By “have a future,” I mean this in the sense of establishing a relationship with the world as it will exist after all of Gen Z are dead. Gen Z have overwhelmingly been blocked from starting families, and nothing short of a wartime-level mobilization can get them on the path to doing this. Everything will need to change, and in an impossibly short time.

Given these facts, what is the way forward? It isn’t to demand the impossible from Gen Z; it’s to map out where our allies are in this fight, and what the path to victory against our class enemies looks like. The unprecedented nature of the disruption that’s afflicted us is proportional to how big of a breakthrough will come when we overcome this crisis. Never before has humanity been closer to finding the answer to the dilemma Engels summarized; to figuring out how we can take advantage of modern technology’s gargantuan productive forces, while not letting these forces facilitate exploitation by a parasitic class.

The answer to this riddle, as Engels concluded, is communism. It’s the abolition of class society, a project that can only be built on the foundations of the proletariat taking the means of production. Bringing this idea to today’s “left-behind” Gen Z individuals is a major part of why I’ve come to focus on the loneliness epidemic so much. We need to reach those who capital has forced out of “normal” life, and has rendered “excess” in the view of our social system. 

To effectively convey to the left-behinds why communism is the answer, we need to fully recognize the crisis they’re facing. Pseudo-Marxist formations, like the Trotskyist Revolutionary Communist Party, have been making it part of their marketing to argue against the ideas of the “manosphere”; but due to the inherently superficial nature of the RCP’s politics, it can’t offer any alternative to the right-wing male lifestyle brands other than basic phrases about class struggle.

The Marxism that wins over the left-behinds will be one which treats this crisis as the existential battle that it is. The RCP’s approach to confronting the manosphere involves recognizing that men are alienated under capitalism, but why exactly are they alienated? What is the problem that’s driving them to take this particular path at this particular time? This problem is more than that they’re merely alienated from their labor; the problem that they’re both alienated from their labor, and have now been robbed of the opportunities to find kinship in the midst of their experience as workers. They can no longer find women who could support them through this, and therefore no longer have hope to start families. (Which is a problem that also applies to today’s working-class women, though in a different way as I’ll explore later on.) To understand the nature of the crisis that the manosphere is exploiting, we have to look at how the alienation reached this stage, and why we were all left blindsided while the collapse was taking place.

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Prior to the breakdown in relationships from recent decades, capitalism was able to provide a structure of kinship. The contradiction bourgeois feminism took advantage of was that this structure kept the same practices of exploitation and subjugation which had been present ever since the dawn of class society, where the creation of an underclass brought prostitution into being. It’s this historical reality about how prostitution emerged from the same processes as slavery that Marxists need to emphasize. Because this is how we can combat the liberal narrative that upholds the sex industry as something empowering for women.

Wrote Lenin about prostitution’s class character:

Present-day capitalist society conceals within itself numerous cases of poverty and oppression which do not immediately strike the eye. At the best of times, the scattered families of poor townspeople, artisans, workers, employees and petty officials live in incredible difficulties, barely managing to make both ends meet. Millions upon millions of women in such families live (or, rather, exist) as “domestic slaves”, striving to feed and clothe their family on pennies, at the cost of desperate daily effort and “saving” on everything—except their own labour.

It is these women that the capitalists most willingly employ as home-workers, who are prepared for a monstrously low wage to “earn a little extra” for themselves and their family, for the sake of a crust of bread. It is from among these women, too, that the capitalists of all countries recruit for themselves (like the ancient slave-owners and the medieval feudal lords) any number of concubines at a most “reasonable” price. And no amount of “moral indignation” (hypocritical in 99 cases out of 100) about prostitution can do anything against this trade in female flesh; so long as wage-slavery exists, inevitably prostitution too will exist. All the oppressed and exploited classes throughout the history of human societies have always been forced (and it is in this that their exploitation consists) to give up to their oppressors, first, their unpaid labour and, second, their women as concubines for the “masters”.

The smear label that radical liberals have come to use for the sex industry’s opponents is “sex worker-exclusionary radical feminists.” For somebody to use this label unironically, their ideology needs to exist within the bourgeoisiefied section of the world that liberalism has constructed, where the realities of sex trafficking look like a tangential detail. This pro-“sex work” position has become as prevalent as it is now because the American working class movement was dismantled long ago, which made the workers lack a framework for combating bourgeois ideology. And it’s this part of our history—the systematic destruction of organized labor and workers parties—that we need to understand if we want to properly reckon with today’s social crises.

Our rulers couldn’t have carried out their progressive war against the working class if they hadn’t successfully attacked the old proletarian institutions in these ways. If they hadn’t illegalized key union practices after World War II, waged an anti-communist campaign that culminated in the mass killings of the Panthers, and exploited the contradictions inside the left by cultivating a “Marxism” which isn’t really about class struggle. “Marxism” as it’s predominantly existed in America since the 70s has been just identity politics, detached from a real class analysis. (Thus the rise of the leftists or “Marxists” who call people SWERFs for taking Lenin’s position on prostitution.) And it’s because the workers have been left defenseless that the capitalists could ship out our jobs, let inflation massively outpace wages, financialize the economy, and implement the other measures that have left Gen Z in such a dire position.

The conditions for the 2008 economic collapse had been engineered prior to when our generation came into being. Therefore it makes sense why we were caught so completely off guard when we started to experience the evils that have been imposed onto us. An unemployment rate for graduates that’s at its highest since 2013, even though we’re supposed to be in a “good” economy; a Gen Z home ownership rate that’s a fraction of what the boomers had when they were our age; these are some of the factors that have pushed Gen Z to react by having children at an unprecedentedly low rate. The birthrate drop is not just about a decline in living standards, though; and this is important to note if we want to advocate for class struggle in a more substantive way than RCP does.

Another part of the explanation for the birthrate crisis is that most Gen Z men aren’t in relationships with women, which obviously is going to impact how many families are being started. The other aspect has to do with a particular psychological attack that our ruling institutions have directed towards working-class Americans in the midst of our social decline, especially since 2020. This is the tactic where people are actively encouraged to give up the working-class concepts of kinship and family, in favor of a hyper-individualist mindset that’s apathetic towards the idea of having children.

This mindset hasn’t merely come from propaganda; the propaganda has only exacerbated a preexisting aversion towards having children, which growing numbers of people around the world have been feeling in reaction to modern capitalism’s conditions. And the liberal technocrats who’ve been promoting this self-centered mindset are themselves not even necessarily anti-natalist; I truly believe that our ruling class, and their managerial lackeys, didn’t understand the nature of the social collapse that their ideas and policies would bring about. From a societal management perspective, it’s never a good idea to create a massive class of excess males; yet these technocrats so often prefer to dismiss this problem. And it’s because a lot of them believe their own propaganda about what “progress” means.

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According to the main trend within bourgeois feminism—the one that’s come into conflict with the radical feminists who oppose prostitution—the highest form of female empowerment is to give women opportunities for monetary gain. And in a society where young people from working-class backgrounds have now been almost completely cut off from the opportunities of past generations, the bourgeois feminist solution is to promote the sex industry as the new great source of upward mobility for women. This is what we’ve seen with the rise of OnlyFans since 2020, when the mismanagement of the pandemic accelerated all parts of our societal decline.

At the same time that 2020 and its aftermath have created an unprecedented number of “excess men,” a massive number of women have become part of the lumpenproletariat. The tactic of the gender war psyop is to make these abandoned men into objects of obsessive cultural hatred, and paint them as having chosen their bleak circumstances; then use the manosphere to have these men give that hate back. The connection this has to OnlyFans is that in order for OnlyFans to become culturally accepted, our ruling class had to normalize a view of female “empowerment” which is utterly detached from the working-class experience, and in fact hostile towards workers. Which is where this vitriol against today’s struggling men comes from.

The manosphere is filling the absence of a working-class familial role that men are increasingly being shut out of, in part because capital has been pushing ever-more working class men and women out of their roles as workers. The outcome is that growing numbers of working-class men are underemployed or unemployed, without any viable opportunities to find women; while the system is offering these men’s female counterparts a “way out” in the form of sex work.

In the old time, the bulk of working-class men and women were enabled to struggle through their exploited conditions together. For Gen Z, this has been made into a rare thing. For the bulk of Gen Z working-class men, the default state is to be celibate and without companionship. This is also true for many working-class women in Gen Z; but without a massive effort to reconstruct our old spaces for community, these two types of workers will remain separated from each other. Our ruling class views these excess men as purely disposable resources, to be exploited through ever-lengthening work hours or discarded entirely. With the women from working-class backgrounds, though, we’ve seen capital take a different approach. We’ve seen the capitalists try to draw as many of these women as possible into the sex industry, and do so through a psyop about how this represents the height of liberation from patriarchy.

OnlyFans, this regulated and open part of the sex industry, serves to whitewash the horrific experience of the bulk of the globe’s “sex workers” while letting working-class women gain a type of bourgeoisified social status. It’s an addition to the corporate feminist push from this last half-century, where companies have sought to recruit more women and incentivize more women to get college degrees; except this campaign is about cultivating a larger lumpenproletariat. The members of the labor aristocracy and the professional-managerial class, both male and female, cannot see their social class grow; the existence of their lucrative careers depends on skimming off of imperial super-profits. So capital has instead grown the number of bourgeoisified women by offering them a lumpenized path, one that’s elevated within “progressive” culture and thereby offers an upward escape from the despised working class.

Why has social engineering gone in this direction? Why this effort to elevate a layer of women at the expense of working-class men? From the perspective of the class war, this lets capital hide the shared struggle of working class men and women. It lets the discourse frame gender relations through an insane kaleidoscope, where it looks like most men are failures for not matching the incomes of the bourgeoisiefied women (who of course make up a small minority of their gender). There is another aspect to it, though, that we can actually take advantage of as we fight our own side in this war: the managerial technocrats truly believe that creating a gigantic legion of angry men with nothing to lose would be a good thing for the stability of their empire.

Their confidence that this won’t pose any sort of problem comes from the expectation that these alienated men, and the others with a stake in overthrowing our economic order, won’t come together. The PMC liberal mindset can’t fathom the concept of collective working-class organization, because the rootless cosmopolitan role of this class makes its ranks detached from the realities of the class war. PMC liberals very often adopt the “socialist” label for themselves, because they see socialism as synonymous with their bourgeois “progressivism”; therefore, they’re blinded to what the true interests of the workers are, and where a real proletarian movement gets its appeal. 

The PMC and their lumpen allies believe they can stop such a movement by attacking it with epithets; for example, these pseudo-Marxists try to smear actual working-class organizers by calling them “SWERFs” or “misogynists.” Such nonsense cannot halt a serious effort to organize working men and women, which is why the PMC and the lumpen left are not our biggest enemies in this fight. A larger obstacle will be the individuals who our ruling class is recruiting in preparation for an unprecedented terror campaign against the working class, with many of these mercenaries themselves being excess males; this is the demographic that many of the men who are joining ICE come from. Making alienated men into armed killers for the Zionist right is the end goal of the manosphere psyop; if the banking regime can’t make enough of us submissive, it will activate the layer of left-behinds who’ve joined death squads. Defeating this Satanic alliance is our only path to salvation.

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The dangers the social democrats pose: normalizing Israel, & weaponizing Palestine against China

This month, the website of Illinois “progressive” Democratic candidate Kat Abughazaleh revealed many things about where socdems stand on foreign policy. I speak about Abughazaleh’s platform as being representative of a wider trend (even though Abughazaleh has lost the election) because there is evidence that the most prominent “progressives” share that platform’s pro-imperialist positions. AOC has critiqued Trump for not getting rid of Venezuela’s revolutionary government, as part of a broader complaint about Trump impeding Washington’s ability to fight “authoritarianism.” Zohran has denounced Venezuela and Cuba, as well as condemned Iran’s government in a self-undermining criticism of Trump’s war. It’s obvious that socdems are advancing the imperialist project; the problem we face is how to stop them from successfully co-opting our popular struggles, and neutralizing these struggles at a critical moment. 

One way that these opportunists are evading backlash against their pro-imperialist agenda is by quietly backing away from certain chauvinist rhetoric, at least when they find that this rhetoric is hurting them too much. According to a tweet by Ryan Grim from Breaking Points, Abughazaleh’s site originally included the statements: “There is no acceptable scenario that leaves Hamas in charge of the Gaza Strip…The State Department must work with the National Democratic Institute, the National Endowment for Democracy, and other foreign capacity-building entities to aid in the reconstruction of Palestine’s civic institutions, in partnership with the United Nations.” The site was changed after Grim’s post, with the platform now claiming that it’s opposed to any interference in Palestine’s political solution.

The attempt at damage control is clear to those who’ve been paying attention; but the issue is that unless we seriously intervene against this brand of “left-wing” imperialism, it will be able to deceive many people. We must provide the people with a guide to identifying this opportunism. Lenin provided such a framework; he pointed out how “progressive” chauvinists claim to be principled for a time, then default to supporting imperialist war and colonialism at the decisive moments:

Long before the war and for the first time in world history, the socialists of all the countries now engaged in hostilities gathered together and declared that they would make use of the war “to hasten the downfall of capitalism” (the Stuttgart resolution, 1907). In other words, they recognised that objective conditions had matured for that “hastening of the downfall”, i. e., for a socialist revolution. That is to say, they threatened the governments with a revolution. In Basle (1912) they said the same thing in still clearer terms, referring to the Commune and to October-December 1906, i. e., civil war. When war broke out, the socialists who had threatened the governments with revolution and had called upon the proletariat to bring about that revolution began to refer to what had happened half a century before, and today are justifying socialist support for the governments and the bourgeoisie! The Marxist Gorter is absolutely right in comparing, in his Dutch brochure, Imperialism, the World War and Social-Democracy (p. 84), “radicals” of the Kautsky type with the liberals of 1848, who were courageous in word and traitors in deed…

Let us hope that Potresov, Kautsky and their adherents will propose that the Stuttgart and the Basle resolutions be replaced by something like the following: “Should war break out despite our efforts, we must decide, from the standpoint of the world proletariat, what is most to its advantage: that India be plundered by Britain or by Germany; that the Negroes of Africa be taught the use of “firewater” and pillaged by the French or by the Germans; that Turkey be oppressed by the Austro-Germans or by the AngloFranco-Russian alliance; that the Germans should throttle Belgium or the Russians, Galicia; that China be partitioned by the Japanese or by the Americans”, etc.

Sure enough, the Abughazaleh platform called for the U.S. to continue supporting Taiwan against “Chinese aggression,” which is the narrative Washington uses to justify its attempt at dividing Taiwan from the rest of China. Of course the socdems were going to adopt this position after the imperialists carried out their “pivot to Asia,” the strategy for containing China so that U.S. hegemony can be extended. 

There is an aspect of this left-wing anti-communist campaign that’s even more insidious. This is the aspect where these socdem politicians are propagating the “Uyghur genocide” lie, and using Palestine solidarity to demonize China. A way we can counter this manipulation, in addition to debunking the CIA’s Uyghur narratives themselves, is by pointing out how these same “progressives” support Israel. 

When they claim to be against Israel, this only means they’re against the Netanyahu faction within Zionism. The position of Zohran, and the others who share his stance on Palestine, is that Israel has the right to exist in Palestine as long as it’s sufficiently progressive (which is implied in his statement that Israel doesn’t have the right to exist as a Jewish supremacist state). This isn’t a position that even partially moves things in the right direction; it’s a way of gatekeeping and undermining the pro-Palestine movement. This becomes apparent when one understands the nature of the Zionist settler-colonial structure, in which the “progressive” colonizers play a role of sanitizing Zionism while Israel expands its genocidal violence.

Our problem is that at this stage, the antiwar and pro-Palestine movements haven’t yet found a way of defending against these kinds of “soft” Zionist infiltration attempts. They’re also vulnerable to actors like the pro-regime change Iranian diaspora, who can easily trick liberal-minded individuals into repeating their atrocity propaganda against the Islamic Republic. This applies to the discourse around every other country Washington is targeting, from Venezuela to China to Cuba; all of these places have seen the most reactionary parts of their populations move to the United States, and agitate for imperialist wars. 

It’s an identity-based kind of political deception, which perfectly fits with the woke imperialist brand that the socdems seek to make predominant. To combat this deception, we have to do what the Palestinian resistance has done: investigate the class interests of the different political elements which one is dealing with. Something Palestine’s communists did after the 1967 Zionist expansion was take a look at which class elements within Palestinian society most align with their cause. They had to face that the bourgeois minority is not as compatible with the liberation struggle as the working masses, so they built the next stage of their movement on a more proletarian-centered foundation. 

We can’t wage a resistance while ignoring the distinctions in class interests among the different groups that call themselves left-wing; this is what the liberals do when they listen to Iranian diaspora agitators, without considering which side they represent within the class war. When we take class into account, the path forward becomes all the more clear.

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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.