As history keeps vindicating communism, spreading confusion is the only hope for the imperialists

At the same time when Asia’s workers states have developed so far that no one can deny their success, the people in the empire’s core have gained broad desire for revolution. These two things haven’t happened coincidentally. They both came out of the path that the world was set upon when the United States became the center of financial control, and then the American empire’s decline immediately began. Korea’s people beat back the empire, then Vietnam’s people did too, then the empire found itself losing too much for the domestic status quo to continue. Faced with international defeats, our ruling class began a war on the U.S. workers, which accelerated when the USSR fell and Washington reached the peak of its power.

This power proved to be fragile, largely because Chinese socialism had by that point prepared itself for a productive explosion. When the American masses became ready for revolution, and unified in the desire to rid themselves of their illegitimate banker regime, the examples from Asian socialism would be there to show them what the path forward looks like. And the number of people who’ve come to favor communism because of these socialist projects is growing. 

A problem we still face is that certain imperialist narratives about these socialist states, like “Uyghur concentration camps” or “Kim Jong Un the tyrant,” have yet to be sufficiently driven from the public’s consciousness. To resolve this problem, we must wage a new campaign of ideological struggle.

This campaign must be about more than debunking anti-communist propaganda. Merely countering the enemy’s lies, without offering a deliverable alternative to the duopoly, is what U.S. Marxists did back when socialism in America was still just talk. Since the escalations of Washington’s new cold war in 2022, and the radicalization that this brought to America’s people, communists have been able to gain relevance in a way they didn’t before. And those who know what it truly means to go into the masses have made progress since then. 

This ability to add substance onto the form, and advance beyond the realm of discourse, looks like centering service towards our communities while taking a leadership role within workers struggles. These are the two main policies that benefit the cause at this stage. 

In later stages this will change; but for as long as class struggle exists in any form, we will have to stay attentive of which reactionary ideas we’re primarily dealing with, and how these ideas can be defeated. At this moment, the biggest ideological threat is a passive, selfishly nihilistic American attitude towards the crimes our government commits against the world’s people. Among Gen Z, there’s a widespread susceptibility to this attitude, because the economic decline of this last generation has caused Gen Z to think in highly materialistic terms; the primary question for them is whether something will benefit them directly. Without proof that an idea or movement will help them personally, they’re not interested.

This comes from a rejection of the high-minded liberal idealism that our ruling class sold to many Gen Xers and millennials; which could become a good thing, as long as we don’t let imperial nihilism be what replaces this idealism. The way to do this is through showing that communism can rescue the masses from capitalist degrowth, and provide alternative material support systems as America’s collapse accelerates.

Our task of combating apathetic individualism will be protracted. America may not undergo its own “cultural revolution” until after the fallout from imperial decline forces us into an arduous collective struggle. And the task still won’t be complete after then. Even after China had undergone a struggle of this kind, Mao warned that a culture can’t be immediately freed from retrograde influences, and that this fight is in fact something very long-term:

In China, although in the main socialist transformation has been completed with respect to the system of ownership, and although the large-scale and turbulent class struggles of the masses characteristic of the previous revolutionary periods have in the main come to an end, there are still remnants of the overthrown landlord and comprador classes, there is still a bourgeoisie, and the remolding of the petty bourgeoisie has only just started. The class struggle is by no means over. The class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, the class struggle between the different political forces, and the class struggle in the ideological held between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie will continue to be long and tortuous and at times will even become very acute. The proletariat seeks to transform the world according to its own world outlook, and so does the bourgeoisie. In this respect, the question of which will win out, socialism or capitalism, is still not really settled.

Mao’s response to this problem was to launch the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which we’ll need to properly understand in order to wage our equivalent battles against American individualism. On the GPCR, many of the Marxists who support China have come to a synthesis between criticizing its errors and recognizing its necessity. We see how ultra-leftism gained prominence within the CPC’s anti-liberal campaign, and we also see how liberalism had to be systematically fought in order for China to not go the way of the USSR. This teaches us that when we carry out a cultural revolution in America, it will only be able to succeed on the basis of embracing America’s national heritage and identity, unlike the ultra-lefts do.

America has been a collectivist nation for longer than it’s been an individualist one. Individualism—or rather the illusion of “individualism” within a fundamentally collectivist species—only became dominant in our society when the ruling class psyoped Americans into it after World War II. 

For most of the nation’s life prior to then, the American workers movement had been strong, and this revolutionary strength came out of the inherently collective fight that the country’s proletariat was forced into. When the U.S. transitioned out of its settler-colonial era, and monopoly finance capital arose, this proletariat gained new ability to unify across race; and it was on this basis of cross-racial workers struggle that the American nation could become something far more cohesive. This nation has yet to be constituted fully, but we know how to get it to that stage: by throwing off the rule of capital, and taking example from the socialist civilizations that we’re being dazzled by.

Both the past and the present vindicate communism. When you look at how workers struggle was integral to forming the modern American nation, and how workers victory was what brought these other countries to where they are now, it becomes clear our only path forward is to overthrow the banking regime. It couldn’t be more obvious that our interests are in the defeat of the monopoly financial dictatorship that fortified its control after World War II, and that’s now working towards the destruction of American civilization itself. The propagandists for nihilistic complacency have no way of disproving this reality. For their politics to remain tenable, they have to keep the people confused, and protect the anti-communist narratives that make it look like there’s no alternative. 

This is all they can do amid the inspirational achievements we’re seeing in today’s socialist development. As the masses see these achievements, we must turn this into an entry point for greater revolutionary consciousness. Which must be done not just by explaining how our enemies are factually wrong, but by using history and practical action to show why the revolutionary path is the way forward.

————————————————————————

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.

The growing danger of ultra-leftism, and the crossroads that our movements find themselves at

The crisis of today’s western revolutionary politics is that it’s been at a crossroads for years now, but hasn’t yet decided where it wants to go. This is the gap in preparedness that exists between the Global South’s liberation struggles, and the leftists inside the imperial sphere who seek to emulate these struggles. In these colonial countries, and in the United States most of all, the left was unready (as well as unwilling) to organize the masses amid the watershed moment of October 7. And as this deficiency has become more apparent, more leftists have been embracing adventuristic action, believing their only recourse is to abandon all restraint or strategy. 

We can rescue the working-class movement from this thinking, if we gain a clear sense of what path forward exists for a movement that’s in our situation. The world we’re now living in is one of delayed revolutionary progress, where imperialism has been facing revolts within a growing number of places but this hasn’t yet tipped the power balance. We’ve gotten closer with the worker uprisings in Bolivia and Kenya, but Washington is on the advance in many other countries. And a critical part of why the U.S. has kept expanding its aggressions is because Gaza’s holocaust still hasn’t been stopped. 

If the imperialists could starve Gaza, they know they can starve Cuba, and so on. America’s institutional left has no effective response to this, because its institutions were set up by finance capital. And because the Democrats reacted to October 7 by deciding to purge the compatible left, the Democrat front orgs that have given leftists assistance are incrementally cutting off support.

For the individuals who’ve relied on the Democrat NGOs, and sincerely believe in the revolutionary cause, there are two paths: go into the masses, or resort to ultra-left adventurism. To steer the communist movement away from the latter direction, we’ll have to explain with clarity what ultra-leftism means, which Lenin already did for us. Lenin thoroughly deconstructed the reckless thinking of the radicals who don’t want to build a real mass movement, and these analyses are critical for countering the “pan-leftist” sentiments that say ultra-leftism isn’t a problem.

Among the examples of ultra-leftism that Lenin described, the underlying theme is hubris. He wrote of “the fabulous, howling stupidity that the autocracy can be ‘saved’ from the crowd by soldiers, and from the revolutionary organisations by the police, but that there is no salvation from individuals who hunt down ministers!!” Referring to the “economists,” who believed that narrow workplace organizing is enough on its own, Lenin observed how left-wingers who advocate for terrorism share economism’s rejection of popular organization:

This fabulous argument, which we are convinced is destined to become notorious, is by no means simply a curiosity. No, it is instructive because, through a sweeping reduction to an absurdity, it reveals the principal mistake of the terrorists, which they share with the “economists” (perhaps one might already say, with the former representatives of deceased “economism”?). This mistake, as we have already pointed out on numerous occasions, consists in the failure to understand the basic defect of our movement. Because of the extremely rapid growth of the movement, the leaders lagged behind the masses, the revolutionary organisations did not come up to the level of the revolutionary activity of the proletariat, were incapable of marching on in front and leading the masses.

Ultra-leftism, particularly the kind of ultra-leftism that I’m tackling here, comes from a desire to attain political strength when one fundamentally doesn’t know how to gain this strength. Its adherents grasp for easy ways to strike blows at the ruling class, expecting that if somebody takes the most drastic action at the right moment, the revolution will automatically come. Lenin pointed to how the adventurists speak about political struggle as if it can only happen through dramatic bursts:

How well we know this Language of people who are free of the constraint of firm socialist convictions, of the burdensome experience of each and every kind of popular movement! They confuse immediately tangible and sensational results with practicalness. To them the demand to adhere steadfastly to the class standpoint and to maintain the mass nature of the movement is “vague” “theorising.” In their eyes definitiveness is slavish compliance with every turn of sentiment and ... and, by reason of this compliance, inevitable helplessness at each turn. Demonstrations begin— and blood thirsty words, talk about the beginning of the end, flow from the lips of such people. 

When this strategy inevitably fails to build popular power, the ultras give up, and move on to pushing adventurism during the next spontaneous upsurge:

The demonstrations halt— their hands drop helplessly, and before they have had time to wear out a pair of boots they are already shouting: “The people, alas, are still a long way off....” Some new outrage is perpetrated by the tsar’s henchmen—and they demand to be shown a “definite” measure that would serve as an exhaustive reply to that particular outrage, a measure that would bring about an immediate “transference of strength,” and they proudly promise this transference! These people do not understand that this very promise to “transfer” strength constitutes political adventurism, and that their adventurism stems from their lack of principle.

This is the cycle that the participants in movements will keep falling into unless they receive the proper guidance, and learn how to go into the masses on a truly substantial level. They’ll react to the failures of anti-popular policies by becoming either reformists or adventurists, as articulated by Gus Hall in Crisis of Petty-Bourgeois Radicalism:

When such policies fail–when they do not result in revolutionary victories, those who honestly believe in them face a dilemma. They can go one of three ways. Some give up the struggle. They use many excuses, but in essence they accept the status quo. They move into positions of opportunism. Others, in frustration, move into isolation by accepting the path of anarchism. This path destroys cadre as a meaningful revolutionary force. But most, however, draw the correct conclusions. They move into struggles and movements based on mass concepts. They draw the necessary conclusions that one’s revolutionariness can be measured only in the framework of moving masses into struggle.

How do we recruit and lead those within this majority who will seek to keep moving the struggle forward? Part of our task is to combat the ultra-lefts themselves, who absolutely pose a large and growing threat within movement spaces. The biggest problem, though, is the right opportunists, who today look like the social democrats which have rebranded themselves as “democratic socialists.”

Hall said that “It is impossible to struggle against the incorrect concepts of petty-bourgeois radicalism without a consistent and sharp struggle against the forever present influences of Right opportunism. The pressures towards Right opportunism are the most consistent in any capitalist country. They remain the chief danger to the revolutionary movement in the broad mass organizations of the people and the working class.” Within left politics, the socdems are the ones with the biggest platform and the most institutional power, because they’re among the imperialists; they’re part of the left only in terms of their branding. And right now, they’re using a highly effective rhetorical method for winning over those with class consciousness: they’re pivoting away from the idpol that defines modern ultra-leftism, and centering an economistic kind of populism. 

Such politics indeed represents the greatest threat, because this rhetoric is capable of making social democracy look like the mass movement that we so desperately need. It could win over not just leftists but also disillusioned MAGA voters, recapturing tens of millions of Americans who’ve been heading in a revolutionary direction. And among politically active left-wingers who are looking for an alternative to the ultra-left groups, this politics will look attractive. Conversely, many other leftists will react to the fortification of imperialism by embracing adventurism. The only thing that can stop this diversion from succeeding is if we build working-class power that’s actually independent, and that’s actually based in the broad working population. Anything less, and the cycle of defeat will continue.

————————————————————————

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.

Jewish supremacy, its role in the Epstein regime, & the operation to stop anti-Zionist MAGA

Jewish supremacy is a real problem, but it comes from a deeper system of control, a system whose defeat will require more than electoralism. It will require breaking from the duopoly, and building an independent mass organizational coalition that can withstand maximal state violence. The fight before us is a fight against global finance, which uses ideologies like Jewish supremacy but is a force that’s bigger than any religion. It’s not an invincible force, though, and the financiers are right now trying to stop the Global South’s revolts against them from spilling into the empire’s core. 

What we can next expect from them is an escalation of their campaign to spread violence, chaos, and fear, with the goal of stopping America’s people from uniting against the system. They aim to preemptively halt the rise of an anti-Epstein coalition, which is our best hope for thwarting the designs of global finance.

Jewish supremacy’s role in the banking regime

Voting is the first means for political action that most within today’s anti-Zionist movement have come to. They’re the methods that have been embraced by the supporters of Thomas Massie, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Dan Bilzerian, the latter of which has been taking anti-Zionist MAGA in a more radical direction. 

Bilzerian has put the phrase “Jewish supremacy” into the discourse, which helps deepen one part of people’s understanding about our power structure. Yet this has come along with statements from him that spread confusion about history, and about how to respond to the provocations by our ruling class. As the power structure strikes back against the anti-Zionist insurgency within MAGA, and tries to criminalize pro-Palestine activities, we must gain clarity about who our allies are in this fight.

These allies include the global communist movement, which has been at the front of the armed struggle against Jewish supremacy. The Marxist-Leninist PFLP is part of Gaza’s resistance coalition, and the socialist DPRK has been giving arms to Palestine’s liberation fighters for decades. But you wouldn’t think so from how Dan Bilzerian describes communists; he says that the Bolsheviks were motivated by Jewish supremacy, and that this drove them to starve Ukrainians and murder Christians.

These claims are total fabrications, and we can connect the creation of such anti-communist lies not just to Nazi Germany but to the pre-World War II Zionists. Ukraine’s nationalist movement, which used the Third Reich’s “genocidal famine” narrative to justify its own genocidal cause, was created through a partnership with the Jews who sought to colonize Palestine. And when Banderite Ukraine helped the Nazis murder Jews, this served as critical propaganda for the Zionist cause. This has always been Jewish supremacy’s role: to serve as an additional wing of capital to Christian imperialism, first with the Jewish bourgeoisie’s slave trading and then with the project to steal Palestine. 

Talmudic cultism as a means for waging war on popular power 

As the U.S. empire ramps up its wars, our ruling class is finding a new use for Jewish supremacy: to set us up for Zionist paramilitary terrorism against anti-imperialists, perpetrated by the Jewish Defense League and other violent Jewish supremacist forces. 

The leaders of this terror campaign are trying to realize an end times prophecy, a prophecy that’s different from the evangelical prediction about “Israel” catalyzing Christ’s return. It’s found in the Talmudic lore about the coming of a Jewish messiah, who can only arrive when the Temple has been built; and to build the Temple, those within the religious wing of Jewish supremacy are seeking to make “Israel” into a great power. Which comes along with exterminating the Palestinian people, crushing dissent against Zionism within the United States, and taking millions of more lives across West Asia. 

This is the logic driving the settler movement’s theological leaders, who have a far deeper relationship with the Trump White House than it would appear on the surface. The connection between the two is the Shabtai society, Yale’s Jewish alternative to Skull and Bones. 

Shabtai is the only American Jewish org that’s associated with the settler terrorist ally Ben Gvir; Shabtai has set up entire tours for him so that he can normalize his Kahanist ideology, which sees it as justified to commit mass vigilante murder against Palestinians and other Zionist targets. Shabtai is also a link between Epstein’s network and VD Vance; in 2008, the club’s leader Benny Shabtai toured IDF training sites with Epstein, and Vance was a member of Shabtai during his time at Yale. (Which by the club’s rules means he’s still a member.)

Something notable within this story is that Epstein was not a Kahanist; he was a two-stater liberal Zionist. At the time that he went on the tour with Shabtai in 2008, Epstein was supporting Ehud Barak, the pro-two state “Israeli” defense minister who had been close friends with Epstein for years by then. And when Epstein flew to “Israel” with Benny Shabtai in April of that year, Epstein had just been sentenced for sex trafficking. Epstein—and by extension the criminal blackmail intel network he served—were being pushed in the direction of helping the Kahanists. Then in the next election, Netanyahu replaced the liberals, letting the Ben Gvir camp gain unprecedented influence through Netanyahu’s coalition. 

It’s this faction inside the power structure, the one which cares about Zionism’s crusade so much that it’s brought America into a self-destructive war, that will be behind the next violent Zionist attacks against U.S. citizens. The CIA doesn’t necessarily share Netanyahu’s ideology, and liberal Zionism is likely the prevailing position among the intelligence community; so these terrorist acts will come from rogue actors. Actors who are powerful, but who can’t escape the entropy of U.S. imperialism’s internal fractures.

The civil war that Zionism will help bring

The Talmudic cult inside our ruling class no doubt hopes to install Vance in 2028, strong-arming the election amid shrinking mass support for the Zionist right. From a strategic perspective, it makes the most sense for the ruling class to let the Trump wing lose so that liberal Zionists can become the new face of the empire. But the Talmudists aren’t operating off of such broad pragmatic thinking; on an ideological level they’re trying to fulfill a prophecy, and materially they’re trying to give their settler base as much new land as possible. 

Such is the nature of the split inside “Israeli” society, and of the conflict between our rulers. The different factions among our enemies are invested in different areas of exploitation, and this has led them to approach civil war both in “Israel” and the United States. They’re still both trying to crush Palestine’s resistance and prevent a revolt from the American people, but they’re increasingly unable to maintain unity in these efforts. It is useful for finance capital to cultivate a cabal of fanatics who incite terrorism in the name of their god, but this ideology will inevitably split the strength of the U.S. empire, causing irreconcilable divisions within the empire’s leadership. 

The center can’t hold, neither in “Israel” nor in America; and we can take advantage of this. Key is to not let anti-Zionists be divided, and to not play this game on the terms our enemies have set; running anti-Zionist candidates is a good thing, but it can’t be our main method. And given how prone Zionists are to assassinating leaders, it’s not wise to let our efforts depend on individual personalities regardless. When the American people overthrow the Epstein regime, they’ll do this by relying on the strength of the masses, who can only be unified if there’s unity among regime opponents.

————————————————————————

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.

The existential panic of the “creative class,” & how this is leading them to neocon fanaticism

Above: demonstration by Silicon Valley residents in support of the U.S. war proxy against Russia.

The terror that professional-managerial class creatives are feeling right now is the terror of being replaced. This is something they’ve made clear through their media platforms, where they’ve been stirring up anti-tech sentiments with a special hostility towards AI art. These critiques aren’t about the ecological destruction that corporations are bringing about through their data centers, nor about how AI is being used to surveil the masses and commit war crimes. The anti-AI grievances of the PMC relate specifically to the notion that AI-assisted creativity is inherently unethical, and must be stamped out so we can preserve the old order. 

This is a fight for survival by a class that’s being endangered by progress, not just because AI threatens to take their jobs but because it’s brought capitalism closer to extinction. And the way this class will respond to the threat is by embracing liberal fascist neocon politics, more so than they already have.

The system can take certain measures to stop AI from destroying it. This March, when the Supreme Court ruled against AI artwork being copyrighted, it eased some of these existential fears for the moment. The inescapable reality, though, is that these latest technological leaps have brought communism nearer than ever. They’ve enabled China to accelerate its development and further outpace U.S. imperialism; they’ve heightened capital’s contradictions in a way that the ruling class can never reverse; they’ve introduced new productive tools, which always make a ruling class less secure in its power. 

The gap between our present reality of artificial scarcity, and the potential reality of universal prosperity under communism, has been expanded by these new tools. Both the monopoly financiers, and the cosmopolitan labor aristocrats whose fortunes are tied in with the financiers, have less of an objective reason to exist than ever. As the banking regime ramps up its wars, we will see this aristocratic labor strata rally behind Washington’s offensive, reacting towards history’s forward march by seeking to destroy as much as possible. 

It will be a maniacal version of the reaction from Europe’s aristocrats towards the rise of the bourgeoisie, described in the Manifesto of the Communist Party:

The aristocracy took their revenge by singing lampoons on their new masters and whispering in his ears sinister prophesies of coming catastrophe. In this way arose feudal Socialism: half lamentation, half lampoon; half an echo of the past, half menace of the future; at times, by its bitter, witty and incisive criticism, striking the bourgeoisie to the very heart’s core; but always ludicrous in its effect, through total incapacity to comprehend the march of modern history. The aristocracy, in order to rally the people to them, waved the proletarian alms-bag in front for a banner. But the people, so often as it joined them, saw on their hindquarters the old feudal coats of arms, and deserted with loud and irreverent laughter.

This is how an elevated class lashes out when its role has been rendered redundant: by appealing to fears of progress, attempting to turn back history through tricks that ironically often involve a “socialist” aesthetic. In the case of the creative class, the reaction has potential to do catastrophic worldwide damage, because these creatives are a critical part of the social base the empire needs for its next assaults.

The way the war machine will rally these cosmopolitans is by bringing them to the ideology of “permanent revolution,” which supports unlimited intervention to enforce the will of the metropolitan intellectual class. 

This is how Stalin explained the urban-centric worldview of Trotsky, whose ideas are essential to understanding the politics of today’s metropole PMC:

Trotskyism is the theory of the “permanent (uninterrupted) revolution.” But what is Trotskyism’s conception of the “permanent revolution”? It is the revolution without consideration of the small peasantry as a revolutionary force. Comrade Trotsky’s permanent revolution is, as Lenin says, the “neglect” of the peasant movement, a “game for the seizure of power.” Where does the danger of this lie? In that such a revolution, if one took the trouble to realise it, would end with a complete breakdown, as it would deprive the Russian proletariat of its ally, the small peasantry. This explains the fight which Leninism has been carrying on against Trotskyism since the year 1905. How does Comrade Trotsky estimate Leninism from the point of view of this fight? He regards it as a theory which contains in itself “antirevolutionary” features. (Trotsky “1905,” Russian edition p. 285). On what is this angry remark against Leninism based? On the fact that Leninism always has defended and still does defend the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry.

This is the view of the liberals, and the Marxists with liberal prejudices, who believe the MAGA base is incurably reactionary. The growing anti-NATO and anti-Zionist sentiment among MAGA isn’t viewed by the PMC left as evidence of revolutionary potential, because the PMC left sees supporting imperialism as the revolutionary position. From its perspective, anti-imperialism is “antirevolutionary.” It’s out of this mentality that comes the chauvinist perceptions of the global working class, in addition to the American working class; according to the left pro-imperialist worldview, every country that defies the United States is “fascist,” and by extension its working masses are fascist. (Since the working masses are the ones who as a rule support breaking from global finance.) Pro-imperialists use the “I hate the government not the people” qualifier, but this is a cover for their ideology’s true view of the world’s proletariat.

This politics has a particular class base, found within the workers who’ve been urbanized to the effect that they see themselves as separate from the rural workers. The enemies of the proletarian cause have been able to appeal towards this strata, cultivating a liberal reactionary movement that’s now on the rise. To lead the American masses to victory, we must separate this movement from the authentic working-class struggle, not letting the neocon PMC ideology co-opt Marxism. History proves we can successfully break the grip of imperial chauvinist ideologies after they’ve taken hold within the workers movement; key to this is identifying where the contradictions in them exist, and using these contradictions to draw the working class towards the revolutionary position.

Our task in its essence is fairly simple. As Lenin explained: “The only Marxist line in the world labour movement is to explain to the masses the inevitability and necessity of breaking with opportunism, to educate them for revolution by waging a relentless struggle against opportunism, to utilise the experience of the war to expose, not conceal, the utter vileness of national-liberal labour politics.” Amid the first world war, the anti-imperialist side in the socialist movement won the Russian masses, and it did so by proving the revolutionary party to be the most effective at getting the masses what they needed. 

The problem reactionaries always face is that they set themselves up against the working class. The creative class neocon movement will face this as well, even as it tries to appropriate working-class rhetoric and aesthetics. Within the Democratic Party, there is an effort right now to appeal towards disillusioned MAGA voters and independents by giving up identity politics, and start centering economic populism. But the different wings of liberal reactionary politics could never unite behind making friends with the modern peasantry and proletariat. The Democrats who aim to gain rural voters aren’t even sincere in wanting to rescue rural America, because liberal globalism views the countryside’s people as expendable.

This hostility towards those outside the metropole bubble comes through in the attitudes of the creative class neocons, and of the intelligentsia members who see the rural masses as backwards enemies. The danger from these elements is that they’re the ones who tend to claim the “Marxist” label, thereby giving Marxism a very bad name among the modern proletariat and peasantry. The authentic Marxists must show the masses how fundamentally opposed we are to what these charlatans represent, allying with America’s working people to resist the banker/PMC alliance.

————————————————————————

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.

Liberal fascism, its effort to co-opt Marxism, and the next conflict inside the communist movement

At this stage, revolutionaries and reformists are fighting over who gets to define what working-class populist patriotism means. Until the recent past, this conflict over the ownership of socialist patriotism wasn’t even present, because only Marxist-Leninists of the patriotic kind were associating with that style of politics. All other political currents that call themselves socialist, including the ones to the right of the patriotic MLs, were scorning patriotism in favor of identity politics. This would only last for as long as wokeness remained useful to the liberal wing of our ruling class, though. After October 7, the Democrats came to agree with the Trump wing that all individuals with left-wing views need to be purged from our institutions. 

The goal of this purge is to set us up for the criminalization of all dissent against the imperial state’s designs; which means that when social democrats rhetorically draw upon the nation’s history, this represents a dark use of such patriotic sentiments, designed to assist the bourgeoisie’s fighting wing.

The reformists misapply socialist patriotism

Dimitrov warned that unless Marxists take ownership over their nation’s history and patriotic pride, the fascists will. We started ahead of the liberal fascists in this contest, so now they’re emulating the “patriotic socialist” or “MAGA communist” style; AOC’s recent statement that the American revolutionaries fought against the “billionaires of their time” showed this pivot, and we’ll no doubt continue to see such rhetoric from the social democrats. This brand of politics isn’t something that’s favored by the bulk of the PMC intelligentsia, who were the ones which created the idpol “critical theories” that encourage national nihilism. But within the left-wing intellectual sphere, there are certain intellectuals who promote patriotic Marxism, and who attempt to reconcile this with their reformist prejudices.

So far, the most visible example of this subset exists within the individuals behind Geese: A Review of American Communism. The magazine’s contributors are Democrats for all intents and purposes, so of course their idea of communism is to support the party’s “progressive” wing. But the extent to which they draw from the Marxist texts to support their position makes them distinct from the DSA leadership, which isn’t serious about studying Marxism and therefore has been left blindsided about major trends of the present moment.

The DSA’s role is to be passively led around by the Democrats; Geese entered into this era already intent on promoting the reformist version of MAGA communism that the Democrats have adopted. The way that the Geese members came into their present role was by breaking from the pro-Democrat CPUSA, and their reason for splitting was that they believed CPUSA is too far to the left. This solidified their orientation as being reformist, but also based within a rejection of CPUSA’s identity politics and anti-patriotic posturing.

I’m sure Geese would deny being reformist, and they’ve presented plans of action that can make their position appear revolutionary to the untrained observer. In a commentary that feels consistent with their camp’s practice of echoing MAGA communism, they advocate for a “people’s January 6th,” where communists rally the masses to stop the Trump wing from carrying out a coup in the next election. This will supposedly let us establish a workers government by enabling the “progressive” Democrat to seize control of the state. When you look at the Marxist definition of reformism, though, it becomes apparent how this plan only diverts from revolution. So says the resource MarxistLeninists.org:

Stalin summarizes the difference between Marxism Leninism and reformism as follows;

 

"" To a reformist, reforms are everything, while revolutionary work is something incidental, something just to talk about, mere eyewash. That is why, with reformist tactics under the conditions of bourgeois rule, reforms are inevitably transformed into an instrument for strengthening that rule, an instrument for disintegrating the revolution. ……. To a revolutionary, on the contrary, the main thing is revolutionary work and not reforms; to him reforms are a byproduct of the revolution. That is why, with revolutionary tactics under the conditions of bourgeois rule, reforms are naturally transformed into an instrument for disintegrating that rule, into an instrument for strengthening the revolution, into a strong point for the further development of the revolutionary movement. ""

 

Mixing the “reform” and the struggle for “reforms” with “reformism” and “reformist” means moving away from the ABCs of Marxism and breaking its wings. Especially in times when there is no revolutionary situation, in Lenin's words, " A period of reform. The absence of a revolutionary situation. This is the essence of the work."

This reality, in which reforms are not synonymous with “reformism” and can be used to bring revolution closer, is something that’s been misinterpreted by those pushing reformism from a “Marxist” standpoint. According to their reasoning, it’s not reformism to side with one wing of our class enemies, because supposedly the reforms this wing implements will advance the revolutionary process. It comes from denial of the principle that as long as you subordinate yourself to capital, any reforms you fight for will strengthen bourgeois rule. Which comes from the denial that siding with one wing of capital means subordinating yourself to it. 

The “progressives” serve the role of demagogues for finance capital

Geese, and those who share its view, are so confident that they’re operating from an independent position while they assist the Democratic Party. This self-perception comes through in the Geese article that calls for a January 2029 mobilization behind the Democrat candidate:

If the state is much more captured by the Right than it was on January 6th, the Left can no longer play defense and expect the structure to hold. For a decade, the broader Democratic coalition has mobilized under the banner of protecting the institutions. By 2029, there will be nothing left to protect. The institutions are the very weapons the enemy will use to execute the steal.

The liberal establishment will predictably hold vigils outside the Supreme Court, begging a captured judiciary for a legal remedy. They will fail. The Left must reorient its psychological posture entirely. We must become an offensive insurgency. We are besieging a captured state to physically evict the regime. 

To execute this siege, the movement requires an unassailable popular mandate. A neoliberal campaign is structurally incapable of providing this. The centrists, if they are the ones left to respond to the coup, will lack the vision to inspire the masses to throw themselves into the struggle. They possess zero willingness to marshal popular forces to displace the regime. Not only this, they have demonstrated an incapability of even marshaling sufficient voters to defeat Republicans in the first place. It may seem as if a centrist or even right-wing Democrat will be uncontroversial enough to avoid triggering the coup. This is delusion. Whether it is Gavin Newsom or AOC, they will not allow the election results to go a different way.  Let’s not forget that to these forces someone as conservative as Joe Biden was perceived as an existential threat.

If the Trump wing rigs the next election, will communists be obligated to help the Soros wing, like communists needed to support Roosevelt against Wall Street’s plot to coup him? This is how the Democrat-aligned current within American Marxism views their relationship to the Democratic Party—not just the socdem wing, but the party as a whole. They’re operating from the notion that U.S. capital’s Thiel faction is the only source of fascism, and therefore we must assist the Open Society faction in its efforts to regain power. 

This notion is so wrong because in the 21st century, American social democracy does not have the kind of antagonistic relationship to finance capital that it had in Roosevelt’s time. And this is because during the class war escalations of the last generation, the U.S. communist movement has had no independent or substantial presence. It’s been a niche appendage to the Democratic Party, which is why the Democrats were in position to contain American socialism when it reappeared.

The social democratic movement of today did not gain prominence within the Democratic Party due to bottom-up pressures from the working class movement, which were what caused FDR to become as left-wing as he did. In the post-2008 era there hasn’t been a powerful working class movement, not in the organized sense; instead there’s been a growing spontaneous anger from the working masses, anger that our ruling class has needed to respond to but hasn’t yet given the workers real leverage. The outcome is that the socdem movement we’re dealing with today cannot be allied with against finance capital, because it’s one of finance capital’s most insidious and inseparable tools.

Amid the Obama era’s rising popular discontent, capital’s liberal wing decided to adopt Sanders and the other socdem politicians as controlled opposition. Sanders made a non-aggression pact with the DNC, ensuring he wouldn’t start a third party and his movement could be captured. The technocratic liberal billionaires took this compatible “progressive” current, and infused it with ideas that assist monopoly finance: liberal Zionism, anti-Russia hawkery, “environmentalism” that’s about furthering land privatization in the Global South. The biggest real aims of the “progressives” are ones that come from these billionaires, not from the demands of the workers.

No, we are not obligated to side with the Soros wing, any more than we should side with the liberal Zionists over Netanyahu. We need to take advantage of the growing conflicts between our enemies, and provide the masses with an alternative to the duopoly. As both sides in this duopoly destroy America to try to win their inter-capitalist fight, it will become more apparent to the people that neither side deserves their allegiance. The main problem the communist movement now faces is that when somebody delves into theory, if the theory gets misapplied this can actually make them more out of touch with the people’s interests. The Soros wing is going to cultivate a current inside Marxism that backs liberal finance capital, and that gets its ideological basis for this off of a crude economistic populism. 

The pro-Democrat Marxist patriots are a problem in a way that the woke leftists weren’t, because their ideas are capable of gaining broad support among the class conscious workers. The answer to this problem is to separate Marxism from Soros “progressive” politics, which will require a bit of strategic correction from the patriotic MLs; many of us are still acting like the woke leftists are the main problem within the communist movement, when our most relevant foes of today have pivoted away from idpol. In response to this development, a split is happening within the PMC; a division where one part of the intelligentsia clings to the idpol theories, while the other part has thrown itself behind a reformist version of socialist patriotism. It’s the latter element that could soon deceive many workers, and we must reorient ourselves around combating this element’s ideas specifically.

————————————————————————

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.