To bring the post-Covid generation to Marxism, we must fully break from the “academic leftist” model

The starkest contradiction between academic leftism, and the reality of today’s conditions for the youth, is how academia itself increasingly cannot offer upward mobility. The members of higher education tend to think in a socially progressive way, and they often identify as leftists or give credit to surface-level Marxian ideas. Yet due to the nature of bourgeois academia, the very structure of these educational institutions is growing ever-more hostile towards the students. 

For the Gen Z who’ve come of age post-Covid, post-graduate unemployment is unprecedented in its scale, and in the degree of hopelessness for this trend to end. These students are also experiencing the fallout from a systematic campaign to dismantle higher education as we know it, with the worst consequence from this being growing student homelessness. For the younger Gen Alpha, these problems will no doubt be at least as severe. To bring the post-Covid generation into the class war, Marxists must properly unpack academic leftism, and understand where it lies within today’s material conflicts.

The contradiction we must confront

Academic leftism is a mindset, a mindset where “socialist” intellectuals preach to the masses rather than actually leading the proletarian struggle. This way of relating to the people as a “Marxist” is a holdover from the period of bourgeois revolutions, where after the people overthrew the feudal order, there appeared “right” and “left” wings within the new capitalist parliament; with the right being on the king’s side, and the left existing in negation towards the king. Because the concept of a political left came out of bourgeois politics, there has always been a contradiction between identifying with the left, and identifying as a communist; “leftism” is something that the capitalist ruling class has been able to incorporate into its core ideological makeup, making leftism compatible with the notion of a “progressive” imperialism. 

Part of this is apparent in how all of Washington’s color revolutions have involved backing leftists who hate the governments the empire wants gone. The problem goes much deeper than this, though, because the left isn’t merely something that imperialism has co-opted; when we recognize proper definition of what “the left” is, that being a wing within bourgeois “democracy,” it becomes clear that communists must escape from leftism in order to become truly independent from bourgeois politics. 

This is where it’s so important to grasp the nature of the ideological conflict within leftism, and within the academic institutions that utilize leftist ideology. Because even though communists seek to rebuild an authentic left, to reconstruct the working-class institutions that were destroyed in the 20th century, all the while we must remain prepared to combat the problems which will inevitably arise out of leftism. These problems being the unprincipled, imperialism-compatible behaviors that are embraced by the leftists who support Washington’s color revolutions. 

Inevitably these behaviors will manifest in the form of attacks against those who seek to rebuild America’s workers movement, because leftism without dialectical thinking is pure negation. It’s the ideology that you can use to cancel any working-class organizer for not being woke enough. This is why Haz Al-Din concludes that leftism’s logical conclusion is to serve the very most destructive and malicious designs of imperialism. 

He phrases this by calling leftism the heir to fascism, which sounds counterintuitive when you’re looking at these ideologies on the surface level; yet no matter how bombastic it seems, the reality is that we have seen leftists across the globe rallying alongside fascists in Washington’s color revolutions, with Ukraine being one of the foremost examples of this. 

The defense from these left fascist collaborators is that they came towards their views based on their own lived experiences, and have their own reasons for hating the U.S.-targeted governments which they live under. And this is what reveals the contradiction between leftism and Marxism; because indeed, these collaborators represent a political camp that emerged out of real material factors, independently from U.S. imperialism. Where their politics came from, though, was not class consciousness; it came from petty-bourgeois and lumpen resentment, which invariably becomes targeted at the proletarian forces. This is why Haz describes leftism as fulfilling the same anti-proletarian role which fascism does:

The true heir of fascism, is none other than Leftism itself. Fascism, like leftism, establishes the dead form of modernity as a pinwheel - a swastika - actively and voluntarily preserving it at the expense of its own real technomic premises, and therefore emanating an affect of revolutionary change. If there is any model worthy of representing the ‘political spectrum’ (which does not actually represent political difference, but rather the political homogeneity of the modern state), it is precisely that of the swastika, as it cannot tilt right without also moving left. The dead form of modernity cannot be preserved, without also emanating the veneer of change. This shocking fact is already self-evident throughout Europe and Ukraine. To call leftists fascists would be superfluous, for leftism is already far more fascist than fascism could ever possibly have been. All the genocidal intent, violence, terrorism and bestiality of fascism is amplified, with far more viciousness, brutality and efficiency in leftism, a fact which is sure to become evident to all in the years to come.

These are the activities that our ruling class hopes to draw the lumpenized students or former students into: ultraviolent adventurism, efforts to terrorize the actual working-class forces, libidinal release to cope with one’s alienation. This is why “antifa,” as it actually exists today, mirrors the Brownshirt model of recruiting from the unemployed youth. And these anti-worker “counter-gangs” grow out from academic leftism; the identity politics ideology behind them is taught to these unemployed youths by the academic/NGO networks. This infrastructure has laid the groundwork for a new wave of counterinsurgency, wherein the adventurist wing of ultra-leftism escalates its assaults against working-class organizations.

Rescuing the left-behind youths

Such is the role that ultra-leftism will play in this next stage of the class war: weaponizing the most disaffected among the post-Covid generation against the proletariat. To draw these youths away from ultra-leftism, or from its far right counterpart, we must fully break from the academic leftist model. We must reject the mode of practice that the bourgeois revolutionaries have passed down onto us, wherein the members of the revolutionary intelligentsia merely talk at the masses in hope of rousing them towards revolution. 

There is a difference between trying to lecture the masses into becoming revolutionaries, and building a collective organization for these masses which can give them practical experience within the class struggle. Only with the latter model can the population’s level of class consciousness truly be raised. Because there’s been no left in America for a long time, during this first organizational stage we have needed to look for class consciousness within the ideological realm; to identify which parts of the masses are most disillusioned with the liberal order, and go into them. The proper definition of class consciousness, though, is when the working masses come to participate in working-class organization itself. This is the context we must consider while we follow Lenin’s call to raise the consciousness of the workers:

There can be no talk of an independent ideology formulated by the working masses themselves in the process of their movement…This does not mean, of course, that the workers have no part in creating such an ideology. They take part, however, not as workers, but as socialist theoreticians, as Proudhons and Weitlings; in other words, they take part only when they are able, and to the extent that they are able, more or less, to acquire the knowledge of their age and develop that knowledge. 

But in order that working men may succeed in this more often, every effort must be made to raise the level of the consciousness of the workers in general; it is necessary that the workers do not confine themselves to the artificially restricted limits of “literature for workers” but that they learn to an increasing degree to master general literature. It would be even truer to say “are not confined”, instead of “do not confine themselves”, because the workers themselves wish to read and do read all that is written for the intelligentsia, and only a few (bad) intellectuals believe that it is enough “for workers” to be told a few things about factory conditions and to have repeated to them over and over again what has long been known.

When we truly grasp what Lenin meant by this, we can address the contradiction between leftism and Marxism, which is reaching a heightened point of conflict at this phase in the decline of our social order. Because of how extensively our ruling class has engineered society’s decline, the college pipeline as a rule no longer offers a path towards employment, or towards starting a family. And this breakdown of the boomer societal model is forcing those within left politics to confront an existential question for their cause. They’re having to answer: should we keep modeling our practice after academic leftism, or should we pursue the alternative route? That alternative being to wage the class war in a way which is truly responsive towards the conditions we’re facing today.

These are conditions where the foundation for “normal” life has been dynamited. If trends continue as they are, for the most part the post-Covid generation will not create a new generation after them; their familial connection to the future has been severed. Never before has humanity seen such a level of alienation, and therefore no attempt at mass politics that’s unwilling to confront this alienation can survive; not as a truly independent force, at least.

Leftism provides a cope for the post-Covid left-behinds, in the form of boundless negation; it tells them that humans are a virus, and therefore it’s a good thing for us to stop having children. It also preaches national nihilism, Clavicular-style, to the effect that leftists can avoid caring about the American family’s destruction. Of course these arguments can’t placate everyone, though, and their real purpose is to cultivate a niche political ideology. Among the left-behind youths who are seeking concrete political answers to the problem of familial decline, right now the main ideological influences are coming from the right. This is largely because it’s the right-wing “Jewish question” commentators who are talking about this problem in the first place. They’re the ones who are making the connection between the decline of American patriotism among the 30-and-under crowd, and the disappearance of opportunities for starting families; which aren’t things that leftism even recognizes as being bad.

Because leftism was designed to negate mass politics, in the Trump 2.0 era it’s lost its former relevance, and we shouldn’t be treating it as the central threat. I focus on leftism here for the purpose of contrasting anti-mass politics with the politics which Marxists need to embody; we know what the opposite of an effective communist movement looks like, and this lets us avoid the idealist errors that keep our movement stagnant. If the essence of academic leftism’s problem is that it’s about preaching to the masses, then we know that raising the consciousness of the masses can’t happen without actual popular organization. It can’t happen without unemployment councils, or party-building, or the other essential elements that are demanded by a Bolshevik practice. And when we use these tools to let the post-Covid generation fight its existential battle, then we can earn this generation’s respect.

The post-Covid generation’s fight is existential in nature because if they lose this fight, then they will become outmoded amid capital’s next technological phase. Gen Z, and those younger than us, see where things are headed unless we assert our interests. Recognizing this is part of how Marxists can convince the left-behind youths that we deserve to lead them. Academic leftism and its radlib outgrowths don’t even pretend to offer the post-Covid generation a solution. The far right offers them a false solution. We offer the authentic solution, but we must understand what our own goal is before we can speak or act credibly. 

Within Marxism, there is a battle for ideological control, where the leftist negationist side is in conflict with the dialectical side. This battle has been happening for centuries, and it will continue for centuries more; but the fact that it’s lasting this long shows the necessity for Marxism to evolve. To be effective as a Marxist, you have to reinvent yourself according to each new historical reality. As Gen Z and Gen Alpha fight to remain vital amid unprecedented existential peril, this is the mode of operating that we must impart onto them.

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The U.S. will only keep ramping up its wars, forcing the “progressive” imperialists to reveal themselves

In this next phase, the biggest problem for the antiwar movement will be the “progressive” Democrats who act as false allies to our cause. The “democratic socialists" will do damage in the same way that Trump 2.0 has done damage: by giving false hope to people with anti-imperialist consciousness, lulling them into complacency while the empire ramps up its wars. Our rulers know to switch up their primary means of propaganda every couple of years; by regularly changing which wing of bourgeois politics gets to have the main cultural platform, they can manage the population in routine cycles.

This has always been the nature of bourgeois “democracy,” and it’s what makes this model so effective at maintaining stability for capitalist rule. What happens, though, when both wings keep starting more and more unpopular wars? When Washington has to keep ramping up its aggressions in order to contain China, and extend U.S. hegemony?

After World War I, the bourgeoisie could afford to put their wars on pause, and thereby placate the population fairly effectively. Throughout this time, both the U.S. and European ruling classes adopted the “pacifist” posture, as they had realized that the system was in danger of collapse and there had to be a momentary compromise. This compromise was part of what allowed the capitalists to then bring about more extreme warfare than ever, and crush the working class by putting communists into the first Nazi extermination camps. This was how Wall Street and London prevented revolution in Germany—which they’d feared would be the next country where the workers prevailed—and created a war machine which could launch genocidal war against the USSR. 

As finance capital uses the Zionist Nazi state for a similar purpose, the tasks of the working-class movement are in many ways parallel to what was required from us during Hitler’s war. Yet this new confrontation is unprecedented in nature, because now the imperialist and fascist forces are unified in their efforts at extermination. The Nazi Germany of today is fighting for the United States and its imperial partners, meaning the only recourse of the working class is to unite with the forces fighting against this Hitlerite bloc; to support the Axis of Resistance, and all of the countries that are fighting for their survival amid Washington’s offensive.

This is where the “progressive” imperialist wing seeks to cause division among the globe’s different working-class forces, and undermine solidarity while feigning support for the victims. The “progressives” claim to be pro-Palestine and antiwar, yet they’re hostile towards every country or resistance organization that’s fighting on the side of the Palestinian masses. A leader cannot be “pro-Palestine,” or against the war on Iran, while they’re assisting in the proxy war on Russia; Russia is actively aiding the Iranians, which by extension makes Russia an ally to Iran’s anti-Zionist Axis of Resistance. A leader also can’t be pro-Palestine when they condemn Hamas, which is the leading force in pushing back the occupier.

The only way that the socdems can make these positions seem compatible with socialism is by taking the class struggle out of the picture, and leading the workers towards an ideology of collaboration with capital. This was the strategy that Lenin identified among the “socialists” who got behind the first world war:

Opportunism and social-chauvinism have the same ideological-political content: collaboration of classes instead of class struggle, renunciation of revolutionary methods of struggle, helping one's "own" government in its embarrassed situation instead of taking advantage of these embarrassments for revolution. If we take all the European countries as a whole, if we pay attention not to individuals (even the most authoritative), we will find that it is the opportunist trend that has become the chief bulwark of social-chauvinism, whereas from the camp of the revolutionaries, more or less consistent protests against it are heard nearly everywhere. And if we take, for example, the grouping of trends at the Stuttgart International Socialist Congress in 1907, we will find that international Marxism was opposed to imperialism, while international opportunism was in favour of it already at that time. 

In the past epoch, before the war, although opportunism was often regarded as a "deviationist," "extremist" part of the Social-Democratic Party, it was nevertheless regarded as a legitimate part. The war has shown that this cannot be so in future. Opportunism has "matured," is now playing to the full its role as emissary of the bourgeois in the working-class movement. Unity with the opportunists has become sheer hypocrisy, an example of which we see in the German Social-Democratic Party. On all important occasions (for example, the voting on August 4), the opportunists come forward with an ultimatum, which they carry out with the aid of their numerous connections with the bourgeoisie, of their majority on the executives of the trade unions, etc. Unity with the opportunists actually means today, subordinating the working class to "its" national bourgeoisie, alliance with it for the purpose of oppressing other nations and of fighting for great-power privileges, it means splitting the revolutionary proletariat in all countries.

This was how the mask came off of these “socialists” who believed in class collaboration: when the “scramble for Africa” had reached its conclusion, and the colonial powers entered into war with each other for the imperial holdings, those who sought to work with the bourgeoisie got behind this war. These opportunists had by definition always supported imperialism; the difference was that they could no longer keep this aspect of their politics in the background, because imperialism’s violence had spilled over into Europe itself. With the USA’s entry into the war, America’s socialist movement was forced to confront imperialism in this way as well; and though the social-chauvinists in the Second International offered them a rationale for supporting the war, many chose to bear the wrath of their government by speaking out against it. Most notably Eugene Debs, who was made a political prisoner for making a speech against Wilson’s interventions.

This is the path that we need to choose as today’s “socialist” or “progressive” opportunists seek to get the workers behind Washington’s next global assaults. And they absolutely will do this to an increasing degree; the only reason why they’re posturing as antiwar now is because Democrats don’t necessarily view Iran as the top priority. They want Washington to primarily focus on the war against Russia, and this will turn into them more openly promoting proxy war over Taiwan as time goes on. 

Like during the first world war, the imperial order is undergoing a process of crisis and scrambling, forcing everyone to take sides on the question of imperialist war. The difference is that today, technology has progressed in ways which make a world war protracted, and only able to be resolved through a greater upheaval to the social system. Because of nuclear weapons, Washington cannot enter into direct conflict with its biggest challengers. There’s also the fact that the USA, and much of the rest of the world, have de-industrialized; which extends how long these conflicts are going to last. The hope of the “progressive” Atlanticists and opportunistic “socialists” is that because of how lengthy and complex the third world war will be, they can keep enough of a distance from the implications of supporting this war. 

We must expose the true nature of their positions, which means forcing foreign policy into the center of the discourse whenever the opportunists act to divert from it. Part of this is agitating against the wars themselves; the other part is organizing the masses towards advancement of the workers struggle, which will force the ruling class to divert their resources towards fighting the USA’s own people. The more our enemies have to scramble, the more relevant and tangible the revolutionary task will become for the masses, and the more apparent it will be that class collaboration isn’t an option. We have to make these wars backfire by upsetting the system’s processes of social control, and turning Washington’s offensive into something that breaks this internal order.

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Socdems want “socialism” that excludes the rural workers. Communism is what can truly rescue America.

The plans of the “democratic socialists” can at best bring increased living standards for the workers who are able to enter the most privileged labor strata. This strata will expand should these social-democratic policies be implemented, but the supporters of this reformist “socialism” won’t be able to claim their movement has rescued the working class. Because as long as your goal is merely to reform capitalism, rather than overthrow the capitalist state and build an actual workers state, then a large number of the working class will inevitably be left behind. Historically, a large part of this permanent underclass has been the rural poor, who remained in their position throughout the New Deal era which the socdems seek a return towards. So will be the case after the socdems return to power, except in this stage the contradictions will be far more severe.

They’ll be more severe because technology has continued to progress exponentially, meaning the capitalists must exclude more workers from employment in order to keep profits up. Machines have replaced an unprecedented proportion of human workers, and the effects from this can only be remedied by taking society beyond the capitalist mode of production. Otherwise the economy will continue to be ruled by the anarchy that’s inherent to capitalism, as Stalin explained in his rebuttal towards the logic of the Roosevelt reformists:

These Americans think they are reorganising society; objectively, however, they are preserving the present basis of society. That is why, objectively, there will be no reorganisation of society. Nor will there be planned economy. What is planned economy? What are some of its attributes? Planned economy tries to abolish unemployment. Let us suppose it is possible, while preserving the capitalist system, to reduce unemployment to a certain minimum.

But surely, no capitalist would ever agree to the complete abolition of unemployment, to the abolition of the reserve army of unemployed, the purpose of which is to bring pressure on the labour market, to ensure a supply of cheap labour. Here you have one of the rents in the "planned economy" of bourgeois society. Furthermore, planned economy presupposes increased output in those branches of industry which produce goods that the masses of the people need particularly. But you know that the expansion of production under capitalism takes place for entirely different motives, that capital flows into those branches of economy in which the rate of profit is highest. You will never compel a capitalist to incur loss to himself and agree to a lower rate of profit for the sake of satisfying the needs of the people. Without getting rid of the capitalists, without abolishing the principle of private property in the means of production, it is impossible to create planned economy.

Let’s say that ten years from now, the socdems have successfully enacted their social welfare expansions and wage increases. They’ll be able to point to improvements, but only within certain parts of the country, mainly where the urban workers are. And even inside the cities there will remain a large population that’s been permanently pushed out of a productive role; the AI job crisis has only gotten started, and this crisis emerged out of a much greater collapse anyhow. We’ll see the socdems, and the liberal technocrats who are backing them, try to create a new wave of “BS jobs”—roles that wouldn’t exist in an economy that’s actually oriented around the collective benefit, but that keep a certain layer of people busy.

Outside of the labor aristocrat bubble, America’s collapse will still be unfolding. And the U.S. empire will still be ramping up its wars, with China and Africa being the likeliest places where Washington will pivot to after it’s forced to retreat from West Asia. The metropolitan workers who have benefited from the social reforms will be by far the most susceptible to the propaganda which justifies these wars, even as we see policies like the genocidal Cuba sanctions applied to numerous other countries; there’s no limit to what committed pro-imperialists will be willing to support. Amid this rise in imperial chauvinism, the socialist organizations will be faced with a question: should they stay confined to the metropolitan centers, as they overwhelmingly have been for a long time, or should they expand outward?

This was the question that the Communist Party of China had to confront after its own favoritism towards the urban became unsustainable. Mao described this process of taking accountability for the party’s errors:

During the first period, we didn't have clear ideas about the countryside. Under the Right opportunist line of Chen Tu-hsiu, the peasants, our chief ally, were abandoned. Many of our comrades looked on the countryside as a plane rather than a solid, that is to say, they did not know how to look at the countryside from the class viewpoint. It was only after they had some grasp of Marxism that they began to adopt the class viewpoint in looking at the countryside. The countryside turned out to be not a plane, but stratified into the rich, the poor and the very poor, into farm labourers, poor peasants, middle peasants, rich peasants and landlords. During this period I made a study of the countryside and opened peasant movement institutes which ran for several terms. Though I knew some Marxism, my understanding of the countryside was not deep.

During the second period, we had to thank our good teacher, Chiang Kai-shek. He drove us to the countryside. This was a long period, a period of ten years of civil war, in which we fought against him, and thus we were obliged to make a study of the countryside. In the first few years, our understanding of the countryside was still not so deep, but later it became better and deeper. During this period the three "Left" opportunist lines which were represented successively by Chu Chiu-pai, Li Li-san and Wang Ming caused great losses to our Party, and Wang Ming's "Left" opportunist line in particular brought about the collapse of most of our Party's rural base areas.

The way that the American communist movement could fall into such left opportunism is by tailing after the socdems, and de-prioritizing the rural—even after the consequences of this practice have been made glaringly apparent. Since the 1970s, the prevailing mindset within U.S. “Marxism” has been to orbit the existing metropolitan activist spaces, without reaching into the broader masses. Because the organizations that engage in this tailism have remained inert, and have failed to capture the popular revolutionary momentum from recent years, the only option communists have had is to break out of this pattern. To start engaging in mass work with more seriousness than they have in the past, as the American Communist Party has done through its outstanding community aid efforts.

I have found that even among many Marxists who don’t want to join the ACP, there’s still a growing desire to break out of the stagnant old activist model, and pursue new innovations in what mass work means. The trajectory is towards a reinvention of the American communist movement, in ways that might very closely parallel what happened with China’s communists; the state’s counterinsurgency inherently has the upper hand in a city environment, so the police forces could end up driving the communists into the countryside like Chiang Kai-shek did. The practical realities of America’s class war are forcing more and more communists to stop pretending they’re bourgeois politicians, and start acting like actual agents of proletarian struggle. 

The left opportunist model can only work for those who are part of the establishment, and have the role of arbiters for imperialist war. If your goal is to advance revolutionary politics, exclusively staying inside the metropole will only keep you weak, letting the counterinsurgency more easily crush you. This is the doom that awaits all who are unprepared; the counterinsurgency will only keep getting more intense as time goes on, even if a “progressive” president comes after Trump. This is what we can expect in a phase where the empire will keep expanding its wars indefinitely. 

The way that the socdems seek to gain control of the empire is by appealing towards not just the left-leaning workers, but also the conservative workers. This is apparent from how socdems have recently been staying away from identity politics rhetoric, and focusing on economic populism. Though the socdems are aligning with these broader masses in rhetoric, and they may successfully gain support from rural America, in terms of their actual policies they’re going to remain antagonistic towards the rural masses. As well as towards the many people in the metropole who may “slip through the cracks,” and find themselves unable to gain employment as our technological upheaval accelerates. 

Communists need to reach into these masses who will remain alienated from the imperial order, even if the socdems “fix” certain problems through expanded social benefits. We must build organizational structures throughout the country’s rural communities. We must bring back the American tradition of unemployment councils. We must reach the Gen Z Americans who the socdems seek to bring into the labor aristocracy, but who are in a deeply precarious position for the time being, and could remain committed revolutionaries even if they find upward mobility. The socdems want to use imperial wage bribery to neutralize the members of the “precariat,” and create a new generation of agents for the empire. But if we build an organizational base that encompasses all parts of the revolutionary masses, we’ll create a counter-force that overpowers this trend.

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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 “Uyghur genocide” lie’s role in the next big war, and in the socialist movement’s internal conflict

When Washington shifts towards open war with China, this will come at a moment when “humanitarian” imperialism has made a comeback. Trump 2.0’s policy of brazen imperial aggression will soon be counteracted by the “progressive” Democrats, who merely represent a different version of this intensified warfare; the difference is that they promote this warfare with pseudo-egalitarian rhetoric. They embody the liberal NGO wing within imperialism, which seeks to inflict destruction on China by reviving an old psyop: the “Uyghur genocide” lie, where the CIA has used Zionist Christian evangelicals to conduct phony studies “proving” China’s vocational centers are about erasing Uyghur culture.

The context behind this psyop is that for decades, the network of Turkish-based Islamist radicalization was able to gain dangerous influence within China’s Xinjiang province, persuading certain Uyghur Muslims to commit religious murders on a regular basis. Then the Communist Party implemented a policy of rehabilitation for the people who had been caught up in this violent ideology, which ended the terror attacks in what was the most humane way possible. The response from the bourgeois-minded elements within the Uyghur diaspora was predictably to vilify China’s response, with figures such as Rebiya Kadeer serving as the voices for this supposed Uyghur human rights cause. 

This anti-communist movement had been active for a long time prior to when Washington escalated its cold war on China, and the far-right evangelical Adrian Zenz began providing “evidence” for the supposed genocide in 2019. And it’s within these diaspora propaganda efforts that the psyop will be able to find its long-term basis, because “human rights” imperialism gets its greatest narrative power from testimonies by individuals who claim to speak for their peoples. 

The reality of the actual Uyghur masses inside Xinjiang is that they’ve been experiencing unprecedented economic development alongside the rest of China; where they’re at is where the overwhelming majority of Chinese people are at, and this place is certainly not petty-bourgeois resentment against the Chinese government. So when the Uyghur genocide myth gets brought back into the forefront of the discourse, the propagandists will have to work in overdrive, compensating for the spectacular successes of Chinese socialism.

The Uyghur genocide lie is completely absurd, but the lie poses a unique challenge to the communist and anti-imperialist movement; because propaganda of its kind was not something that the original Marxists had to deal with. And unfortunately, there is a major element of “Marxists” who want to keep communism in a past phase, one where it didn’t yet need to reckon with the conditions of the post-World War I world.

The “Uyghur genocide” is propaganda that’s suited for the era when the colonial powers have come to be challenged on a major scale, and entire countries have begun breaking away from monopoly financial control. This rupture didn’t start to happen until the Soviet Union was formed; and when the bourgeoisie began fabricating accounts of atrocities by the USSR, they were able to get many of the world’s “socialists” to believe these narratives. This was because like the “democratic socialists” who vilify China, they had interests which conflicted with the goal of global proletarian unity, and therefore with anti-imperialism. 

This material conflict is also why we have sectarian “Marxist” factions, mainly the Trotskyists, who claim to uphold Lenin yet demonize all existing Leninist projects. They’re aligned with a certain element inside the left wing of imperialism, this being the element which solely identifies with the urban proletariat while viewing the bulk of the masses as incompatible with socialism. Because they’re confined to this bubble within the workers movement, they end up opposing any real mass politics, such as the politics which brought Chinese socialism into being. Thereby, they embrace the narratives of the “progressive” imperialists, and of the outright fascists who work alongside them.

In 1924, during the early stages of this propaganda shift, Stalin described the ideology of imperialism’s left wing:

As for what the pacifists and democrats want, as for the policy of the imperialists, they have only one aim in resorting to pacifism: to dupe the masses with high-sounding phrases about peace in order to prepare for a new war; to dazzle the masses with the brilliance of “democracy” in order to consolidate the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie; to stun the masses with clamour about the “sovereign” rights of nations and states in order the more successfully to prepare for intervention in China, for slaughter in Afghanistan and in the Sudan, for the dismemberment of Persia; to fool the masses with highfaluting talk about “friendly” relations with the Soviet Union, about various “treaties” with the Soviet government, in order to establish still closer relations with the counter-revolutionary conspirators who have been kicked out of Russia, with the aim of bandit operations in Byelorussia, the Ukraine and Georgia. The bourgeoisie needs pacifism as a camouflage. 

This camouflage constitutes the chief danger of pacifism. Whether the bourgeoisie will succeed in its aim of fooling the people depends upon the vigour with which the Communist Parties in the West and in the East expose the bourgeoisie, upon their ability to tear the mask from the imperialists in pacifist clothing

These were the foundations of the psyops the liberal interventionists employ, where they generate concern for “human rights” among the people who mainly care about defending and spreading bourgeois “democracy.” This propaganda isn’t the most effective on conservatives, who (when they are convinced to be pro-war) tend to be more receptive towards language about “American greatness.” Liberals view foreign policy as a way to advance humanity’s common interests, which they attach to universalist concepts about “justice” and “anti-authoritarianism.” It’s a perversion of socialist internationalism, which also cares about the collective global experience but does so with an actual class analysis.

What we are tasked with is purging this liberal interventionist ideology from the socialist movement, which includes many liberals who claim to have a class analysis while promoting the lies of the liberal order. Without our guidance, “socialism” will be made into another tool for the anti-China war effort, with the only “Marxist” voices in mainstream discourse being ones which mindlessly affirm the accounts of the Uyghur imperial collaborators.

The great contradiction which could undermine these “socialist” stooges for empire is that at this stage, the bourgeoisie and its false “socialist” allies can no longer pretend to be pacifist, like they could during that era after World War I. For U.S. hegemony to be maintained, Washington will have to sustain a long-term series of wars against China and its partnered countries, and the empire has only begun to ramp up these wars. The anti-China left find themselves on the side of military aggressions that they can barely distance themselves from, and that will soon become impossible for them to disavow as Washington pivots from Iran towards China itself.

There is no longer a way to have an anti-China position that appears separate from the war against China; inevitably the anti-China leftists, or the “dissident” right-wingers who vilify China, will be absorbed into the unholy alliance that the neocons are building. Then the masses will be met with a choice: stay in the pro-imperialist political camps that our ruling class has cultivated, or break out of the old paradigm and embrace revolutionary politics.

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The capitalist order’s next move: rebuild the labor aristocracy, rally support for “progressive” wars

Above: a statement where AOC uses pro-worker rhetoric to promote liberal “anti-authoritarian” foreign policy.

Our ruling class understands that the workers movement’s next direction will define whether anti-Zionism and anti-imperialism are able to prevail. So our class enemies have made a plan for how to neutralize the antiwar, pro-solidarity forces within organized labor: rebuild the “labor aristocracy,” the layer within the workers who live comfortably due to being bribed by imperialist super-profits. Whether we can overcome the opportunistic politics that are associated with the labor aristocracy, and take the workers movement in an anti-imperialist direction, is what will determine the U.S. empire’s survival. The imperial system is coming closer to collapse, which is why our rulers know they’ll soon need to fortify the system through domestic social reforms; but their plan will fail, if we combat the anti-solidarity ideas that they seek to propagate among the workers.

These ideas include labor Zionism, which says settler-colonialism is compatible with socialism; the anti-Chinese narratives, including the notion that socialist China is actually an enemy of the working class; pro-NATO ideology, with its belief that Russia is the aggressor in the Ukraine proxy war; and the color revolution ideology, which backs all protests that the imperialist media says we should support. These are the main pro-imperialist trends inside the workers movement right now, and they’re such a threat because they’re ideological positions which consistently align with the left wing of bourgeois politics. 

Organized labor, which as a rule is controlled by the Democratic Party, will be more likely to oppose the pro-imperialist positions that most align with the Trump wing. It would be easier for us to get a typical labor formation to endorse a resolution against military action in Iran, for instance; and we certainly should push for labor leaders to go against the Trump wing’s foreign policy. However, we are going to run into a much harder wall when it comes to rallying them against Democrat foreign policy, or against the color revolution operations that both wings within our ruling class advance. Which is where it becomes necessary to bring the workers inside the unions, and the non-union workers, into a truly principled effort at resisting Washington’s offensive.

As we go about this task, we must reject the practice of passively accepting the policies by the liberal labor leadership. This would be the equivalent to the complacent posture that one faction within the socialist movement adopted during Lenin’s time, wherein these socialists chose not to take issue with the pro-war stance of the “social chauvinists” among their ranks. These particular individuals didn’t even need to be social chauvinists themselves in order to help the pro-war actors, as Lenin explained in his report on the 1915 International Conference of Socialist Women in Berne:

Two world-outlooks, two appraisals of the war and the tasks of the International, two tactics of the proletarian parties clashed at the Conference. One view holds that there has been no collapse of the international; no deep and grave obstacles to a return from chauvinism to socialism; no strong “internal enemy” in the shape of opportunism; no direct and obvious betrayal of socialism by opportunism. The conclusion to be drawn might be worded as follows: let us condemn nobody; let us “amnesty” those who have violated the Stuttgart and the Basic resolutions; let us merely advise that the course followed should be more to the left and that the masses be called upon to hold demonstrations.

The other, view is diametrically opposed to the former on each of the points enumerated above. Nothing is more harmful or more disastrous to the proletarian cause than a continuation of inner-Party diplomacy towards the opportunists and social-chauvinists. The majority resolution proved acceptable to the opportunist delegates and to the adherents of the present-day official parties just because it is imbued with the spirit of diplomacy. Such diplomacy is being used to throw dust in the eyes of the working masses, which at present are led by the official social-patriots. An absolutely erroneous and harmful idea is being inculcated upon the working masses, the idea that the present-day SocialDemocratic parties, with their present Executives, are capable of changing their course from an erroneous to a correct one.

The modern U.S. equivalent to this idea is the notion that we can “push the Democrats left,” which comes from an even deeper bankruptcy than the one which drove these past left-wing actors towards appeasing the social-chauvinists. The crisis that we’re facing is more dire than the one Lenin described here, because unlike was the case for pre-revolutionary Europe and Russia, today’s America doesn’t have a real left. And because an organized mass opposition to capital doesn’t exist here, many of the forces that call themselves leftist or “socialist” can get away with supporting the Democratic Party, which is to the right of even those chauvinist social democrats.

The rationale for working inside the Democratic Party which the “Berniecrats” have used is that supposedly, the “democratic socialists” represent an independent force, separate from the “Democratic establishment” and capable of bringing the masses to victory. This illusion of independence falls apart when you look at which interests these “progressive” politicians objectively serve, and the tactics those interests use to fortify their control. Sanders, Zohran, AOC, and “the squad” all take the Zionist position on whether “Israel” should exist. They also reliably promote the narratives behind Washington’s wars. This part of their politics makes all the difference. When one has gained an anti-imperialist consciousness, it becomes apparent why these figures act to strengthen capital, and at this stage aren’t even acting to “move the overton window.”

A lesson from the Palestinian liberation struggle is that for the Zionists and the imperialists, “progressives” are critically useful. The “progressive” wing of Zionism shields the settler-colonial project from scrutiny, while working with the blatant racial supremacists in stealing land and committing mass murder. This is how the capitalist order has functioned ever since the advent of parliamentary bourgeois democracy: the left wing within the system, the social democrats and the “humanitarian” liberals, have been an integral part of advancing the bourgeoise’s schemes. As Stalin concluded, the social democrats are essential to the success of the fascists, because they can fulfill a different strategic need. They can facilitate capital’s counterrevolutionary and imperialist warfare by giving the people social benefits, or the promise of social benefits; which isn’t fundamentally different than what traditional fascism did.

The social democrats may soon actually get an opportunity to implement welfare state expansions, after over a decade of the Bernie Sanders movement being held back. Therefore, our argument against the socdems shouldn’t be that they’re not capable of enacting their promises; it should be that they’re part of the same transnational banking regime which brought our conditions to this point. They’ll continue to ramp up Washington’s wars if they get into power; which according to the social chauvinist argument isn’t a problem, but we will not let this view come to dominate what “socialism” means. 

In this next phase, our mission is to reach the parts of the masses who still won’t see their living standards go up in the event of these social-democratic reforms (for example the rural poor, who’ve always been left behind by American capitalism); while not giving up on these Americans who the socdems seek to bring to their position. The effort to rebuild the labor aristocracy is about saving an endangered system; and this system will be destroyed, if we rally the popular masses behind a program that’s truly aligned with the world’s anti-imperialist forces.

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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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