This doesn’t mean taking an ultra-left posture, and treating the supporters of “democratic socialism” as enemies. There’s a layer of opportunists who need to be combated, but they aren’t most of the socdem base. It means gaining the skills to go into the masses, which here looks like showing why the Democratic Party is inseparable from the imperial state. The DNC will remain genocidal, no matter the efforts to change this. If we can explain this, while building an independent infrastructure for the working class, we’ll defeat the project to recapture today’s popular upsurge.
We have to become so learned in the nuances of mass work because reformism holds a unique kind of potential mass pull. Pull that can only come from the masses having a real material reason to want bourgeois electoralism. As Ken Lawrence said in his critique of the Italian ultra-leftists, who thought they could bring the people out of reformism by merely activating armed struggle: “While it is true that reformism is the bourgeoisie’s carrot and repression is its stick, that is not the whole story, nor even the most important part. Reformism is the aspect of capital that the working class has internalized. It is an alien class ideology, yes, but it is precisely because it has been internalized, and represents a pole within the proletariat’s consciousness, that it constitutes such an effective tool of bourgeois hegemony.”
To see an example of success in overcoming reformism, we can look to the most obvious case, this being the Bolsheviks. And to grasp why they were successful in this, we have to recognize how they refused to “bow to spontaneity,” and passively reinforce the reformist ideas that workers will initially come to. In What is to be Done, Lenin said that the Marxists who rejected reforms as the end goal were “dissatisfied with this worship of spontaneity, i.e., of that which exists ‘at the present moment’. We demand that the tactics that have prevailed in recent years be changed; we declare that ‘before we can unite, and in order that we may unite, we must first of all draw firm and definite lines of demarcation’…In a word, the Germans stand for that which exists and reject changes; we demand a change of that which exists, and reject subservience thereto and reconciliation to it. This ‘slight’ difference our ‘free’ copyists of German resolutions failed to notice.”
These historical insights are so indispensable for unpacking today’s “democratic socialist” movement because if we don’t learn from history, we’ll end up tailing behind the Democratic Party, as the biggest “Marxist” orgs are doing. “Democratic socialism” relies on historical illiteracy; the whole purpose of choosing this name for it was to assuage concerns about past and present socialist states being “dictatorships,” while reinforcing such anti-communist nonsense beliefs. For many who got behind Sanders in 2016, as soon as they pulled back the veil of anti-communist propaganda, they successfully developed to the next stage of consciousness.
Their journey of critical thinking could not end there, though. For decades, socialism in the USA had been just talk, unable to escape the niche that it had been forced into during the 20th century. And to truly break out of this niche, American communists would need to relearn their own working-class history. To rediscover trade unionism, party-building, unemployment councils, and the other working-class practices that had made their forebears strong.
Even the most advanced among American communists are in the very early stages of learning what these things look like, because we’ve needed to start up from absolutely nothing. We are determined to stick with the mission for the rest of our lives, though. And when we show this dedication of ours to the masses, they’ll see a clear alternative to the socdems who’ve seemed so compelling. Or rather when they see the material results of our dedication—the worker struggles we’ve led to victory, the services we’ve provided, the popular infrastructure we’ve built—they’ll have a good reason to take our side.
The next confrontation within the left will be between the aesthetics of the reactionary NATO Dems, and the tangible workers power-building of the proletarian movement. And this aesthetic vs. material theme has special relevance to the direction that our culture is going in. Because now that the youngest generation has only ever known the social media age, we are going to see an increase in the proportion of people who are compelled by aesthetics in themselves. This shrinking of intelligence is the logical outcome for the cyberpunk age.
When Hasan Piker uses the image of himself reading Lenin, he’s marketing towards the individuals who’ve already been conditioned to think through a mainly superficial lens, taking advantage of how successfully our ruling class has replaced actual left-wing politics with pure counterculture vibes.
There is a larger battle going on right now, though, that has players who are capable of overcoming oligarchic propaganda power. In these last four years, we’ve been mainly seeing the enemy fight this battle against the armies of resistance throughout West Asia—Gaza’s guerrilla movement, Yemen’s patriots, Iran and Lebanon’s heroic fighters. Soon the Chinese people will likely join the fight, according to the plans of these left “populist” neocons who desire war over Taiwan.
All of this is going to further the systemic breakdown that our government has catalyzed, and all of it matters for where the class war goes next. There will be many who respond by entering into the political struggle, and won’t be intimidated into inaction by the state’s police tactics. If we provide this layer of dedicated freedom fighters with the structure they need, the entire game will change.
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