Within the left, the next main line of demarcation is going to be between the pro-imperialist reformists, and the actual working-class movement. We know this because the “democratic socialists” have been adopting a strategy that’s capable of actually drawing in a mass base for their politics: discard the woke rhetoric that used to be predominant within the left, and appeal towards a broader audience via economic populism. The new posture of the “progressive” Democrats is one where they copy the MAGA communist strategy, i.e. reach a mass base that includes the conservative workers.
It’s a bourgeois diversion from Marxism, one that may be very deliberate depending on just how directly our movement has inspired this recent pivot by the socdems. They’re omitting all of MAGA communism’s anti-imperialist aspects, while solely promoting policies that will uplift the workers in the empire’s core; which always amounts to an effort at strengthening capital, and at condemning the world’s people to more imperial violence.
To unpack social democratic ideology, and figure out how Marxists can defeat it, we must investigate why social democracy always benefits the bourgeoisie. And when speaking to the masses about why social democracy should be rejected, we must illustrate why victory for the bourgeoisie always means defeat for the proletariat. Because according to the worldview that social democrats draw from, supposedly the workers and the capitalists are able to achieve a mutual triumph. Supposedly we can come to a “class peace,” where the proletariat has been lifted up to an extent where it no longer matters that the proletariat is exploited.
Such is the ideal that H.G. Wells had in mind while he was interviewing Stalin, and posing to him the social-democratic liberal view of class. Wells was coming from the same perspective as the “American exceptionalists” within the socialist movement, who believed U.S. capitalism is so uniquely advanced that the workers had come to no longer be in material conflict with the capitalist class. Such was the perspective of the camp that viewed Roosevelt’s pro-worker reforms as being part of an actual path towards socialism, rather than as an effort to stave off socialist revolution. In response to the statement from Wells that such reforms could let Roosevelt abolish the financial oligarchy and bring about socialism, Stalin said:
What will this "socialism" be? At best, bridling to some extent, the most unbridled of individual representatives of capitalist profit, some increase in the application of the principle of regulation in national economy. That is all very well. But as soon as Roosevelt, or any other captain in the contemporary bourgeois world, proceeds to undertake something serious against the foundation of capitalism, he will inevitably suffer utter defeat. The banks, the industries, the large enterprises, the large farms are not in Roosevelt's hands. All these are private property. The railroads, the mercantile fleet, all these belong to private owners. And, finally, the army of skilled workers, the engineers, the technicians, these too are not at Roosevelt's command, they are at the command of the private owners; they all work for the private owners. We must not forget the functions of the State in the bourgeois world.
The State is an institution that organises the defence of the country, organises the maintenance of "order"; it is an apparatus for collecting taxes. The capitalist State does not deal much with economy in the strict sense of the word; the latter is not in the hands of the State. On the contrary, the State is in the hands of capitalist economy. That is why I fear that in spite of all his energies and abilities, Roosevelt will not achieve the goal you mention, if indeed that is his goal. Perhaps, in the course of several generations it will be possible to approach this goal somewhat; but I personally think that even this is not very probable.
This debate happened in 1934, when essentially the whole capitalist world was reckoning with the crisis of overproduction which had produced the era’s economic collapse. The United States, which had become one of if not the biggest world monopolist centers, was facing the choice to preserve capitalism through reforms or undergo a workers revolution. And by that point, the American masses had come to have enough revolutionary consciousness for proletarian victory to be quite plausible. But the opportunist forces, the actors who sought to tail behind the Roosevelt wing of the ruling class, would win out within the communist and labor movements. This enabled Wall Street to fortify its control after Roosevelt’s death—which there’s evidence to suggest was an assassination—and crush the country’s working-class organizations.
It was in this next decade or so after World War II that America would undergo the cultural shift which ultimately made the MAGA movement viable. What happened was that in the midst of the McCarthyist paranoia, the conservative forces which aligned with capital’s lower levels redefined “communism” as being synonymous with the designs of monopoly finance capital. According to this narrative, propagated by groups like the John Birch Society, any sentiment within our institutions which aligns with social progressivism is evidence of Marxist infiltration. And what solidified this narrative was the co-optation of Marxism by the academic “critical theorists,” who’ve divorced Marxism from the class struggle so that they can treat identity politics as “Marxist.” ACP chairman Haz Al-Din explains this in his article which clarifies MAGA communism’s role:
Leftists sneer at MAGA Communists owing to the supposedly unbridgeable rift between Communism and the MAGA movement. But they are themselves the prime cause, and the greatest beneficiaries of such a rift in the first place! It is the betrayal of the revisionists, and the traitors to the working class movement - career climbing through institutional academia, NGOs and ultimately the highest levels of government - that has earned Communism the dirty name that it has now acquired in America. The ‘communists,’ sitting at their posts as the most vicious representatives of the professional managerial class, are themselves chiefly to blame for the unpopularity of Communism. It is thus inevitable that the greatest enemies of the MAGA Communist movement will be leftists, who stand the most to lose from the unity of Marxism with the worker’s movement. It will outmode them into irrelevance, and turn the ideology that has for so long been the sanction of their parasitism and evil into the weapon of social forces disposed with the intention of liquidating them as a class.
If communists had stopped these charlatans from taking over Marxism, many if not most of today’s right-wingers would now be aligned with our cause. We know this because during the pre-war era, much of what would become the modern Republican base had been part of the masses who were suffering under the Wall Street-created crisis; the American working class has collectively lived through these historical struggles, and the presence of reactionary ideas among the working class hasn’t negated this shared nature of their experience.
At that time, racism and nativism were on the rise compared to a generation earlier, as the ruling class had successfully revived the Ku Klux Klan and popularized its propaganda. William Z. Foster pointed out how this rising fascist menace showed “the working class must retain the initiative, and establish and maintain its leadership over all of the oppressed masses. It must impress its program and its goal upon the minds of the lower middle class and farmers, as the only substantial hope for the solution of their problems, and thus establish such sympathetic contact and alliances with these classes that their support or neutrality in the revolutionary struggle is secured.” Due to a combination of the reformist leaders winning out within the workers movement, and this movement being overwhelmed by the repressive strength of capital, the communists were set back in this goal. Which allowed the capitalists to reach much of these petty-bourgeois and working-class whites, bringing them into what’s now the modern American conservative movement.
A famous peculiarity about this movement is that originally, it was the Democrats who represented its primary home. As it’s commonly phrased, the Democrats and the Republicans “switched platforms” when the Democratic Party absorbed the Civil Rights movement, and the Republicans captured the “Dixiecrat” whites. This was the moment when the brand which would become MAGA solidified, making the rise of Trump into an inevitability. But all throughout this process, even as the workers movement was dismantled and capital went on an unprecedented offensive, America was being haunted by the specter of communism (specifically MAGA communism).
Among the conservative masses, there remained that desire to fight against the liberal social engineering projects, which were more insidious than even they could have anticipated. The schemes of monopoly finance capital are bipartisan, with America’s people having never truly had any powerful allies within their government’s leadership; and now that America’s collapse has become so advanced, many former Dems and Trump supporters are realizing this.
The psyop to cast communism as the driving force of monopoly finance capital, like the psyop to co-opt the left, was about seizing upon real contradictions within the peoples they were targeted at. The John Bircher narratives and their fascist predecessors were about exploiting the pre-existing racial inequalities in American society. And the campaign to insert idpol liberalism into Marxism took advantage of ultra-leftist tendencies that were already there within the left. These efforts to cut the working class off from communism have been effective, due to the real conflicts inside American society that can nurture anti-Marxist trends. Yet all the while, these trends have been struggling against their shared nemesis, which is the immutable potential for revolutionary consciousness. It’s immutable because it arises from the struggles which these material contradictions create, inexorably pushing society towards confronting what’s been ignored.
Every enemy that Marxists face must reckon with the fact that they are fighting against the scientific recognition of material reality. Marxism cannot be refuted, so consistently what the anti-Marxists do is try to divert the masses from getting exposed towards Marxism’s analyses. This is what we’re seeing from the socdems, who will soon become our main enemies. They’re having to take care not to present a message that’s too class-conscious, that may bring the people further towards anti-imperialism and actual working-class organization. What they’re putting forth is crude economism, where someone exclusively focuses on workplace or social welfare benefits while disregarding the actual class war.
By employing a bastardized version of the MAGA communist strategy, the socdems have shown they understand MAGA’s separation from Marxism is not unbridgeable, and in fact could easily be resolved if the underlying contradictions are reckoned with. The socdems have been sent in to keep the American working class from having this reckoning, and figuring out its true history and interests. We are here to expose everything that they seek to keep hidden, and give the workers a path to final victory.
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