Venezuela’s retreat, Bolivia’s class war stalemate, & the next counter-blow from the globe’s workers

To overcome the latest blows from the class enemy, we will need to reckon with the contradiction between the bourgeoisified and proletarian workers. This is my takeaway after seeing how so many leaders of the globe’s popular governments and struggles have failed to defend their people from Washington’s offensive. When corruptible officials betrayed Venezuela’s Bolivarian revolution, and when Bolivia’s strike reached a stalemate with the government due to failure at attaining a unified workers party, these defeats were an extension of a much deeper problem. A problem where the movements against imperialism find themselves split between the popular masses, and the bourgeois or petty-bourgeois elements who take control of these movements by default. 

To rebuild the power the working-class movement lost during the 20th century, we will need to overcome this disconnect in priorities, and embody a true proletarian politics. When Frantz Fanon was describing the problems of the post-World War II decolonization struggles, he identified a series of contradictions that would prove to be one of the critical factors in the later revolutionary retreats. And these problems apply to the workers movements within the colonial countries as well, because everywhere has a rural-urban divide that can undermine popular struggle.

The great obstacle towards unity, and towards clarity about who the enemy is, came from how colonialism had concentrated its developmental projects within the metropolitan centers. From how not just the bourgeoisie within the cities, but also the urban workers, had come to enjoy the material benefits from the productive mode the imperialists had brought. The rural masses therefore existed in a different realm, both in relation to the intelligentsia and in relation to the metropole’s working class.

A movement that hadn’t reckoned with this contradiction could only produce nationalist parties which were bourgeois in nature, despite representing working people; because these workers had an experience that was distinct from the peasant experience, and therefore couldn’t produce a real proletarian politics on its own. A politics is proletarian when it’s capable of unifying the class allies in the struggle against the primary enemy, which in our era is imperialism; and without the rural masses, the force that takes over is the empire-aligned local capitalists. 

The culprits for a failed revolution are not just the bourgeoisie themselves, but also the class traitors to the proletarian cause, who’ve willingly sided with opportunism. And what cultivates this opportunism is a separation from the masses outside the metropole. As long as this separation persists, we’ll see the masses have leaders who perpetuate the cynical cycle that Fanon described:

Any unrest aimed at winning improved living standards for the laborers and dock workers would not only be unpopular but might very well stir up the hostility of the disinherited rural population. The unions, banned from union activities, make no headway. This malaise conveys the objective need for a social program which, at long last, concerns the entire nation. The unions suddenly discover that the interior must also be enlightened and organized. But since they never bothered to establish working links between their organization and the peasantry, who represent the only spontaneously revolutionary force in the country, the unions prove to be ineffective and realize the anachronistic nature of their program.

The union leaders, immersed in worker-control politics, inevitably reach the preparatory stage for a coup d’état. But here again the interior is excluded. It is a showdown restricted to the national bourgeoisie and the unionized workers movement. The national bourgeoisie, appropriating the old traditions of colonialism, flexes its military and police muscle, whereas the unions organize meetings and mobilize tens of thousands of their members. The peasants shrug their shoulders as they muse over this national bourgeoisie and these workers who after all have enough to eat. The peasants shrug their shoulders for they realize that both parties treat them as a makeshift force. The unions, the parties and the government, in a kind of immoral Machiavellianism, use the peasant masses as a blind, inert force of intervention. As a kind of brute force.

The answer to this problem, concludes Fanon, is for the ranks of the established workers organizations to live the same struggle as the rural masses, making their experience intertwined with that of the most underdeveloped communities. The actors who sold out Venezuela while claiming to uphold the Bolivarian revolution, or who governed Bolivia in a reformist manner despite coming in with a mandate for socialism, came from the same element that’s detached from the masses in this way. The opportunist leaders can’t be changed, but their base of support can be shrunken through exposure to new fronts within the class war. This was what Fanon observed:

The nationalist militant who fled the town, revolted by the demagogic and reformist maneuvers of the leaders, and disillusioned by “politics,” discovers in the field a new political orientation which in no way resembles the old. This new politics is in the hands of cadres and leaders working with the tide of history who use their muscles and their brains to lead the struggle for liberation. It is national, revolutionary, and collective. This new reality, which the colonized are now exposed to, exists by action alone. By exploding the former colonial reality the struggle uncovers unknown facets, brings to light new meanings and underlines contradictions which were camouflaged by this reality. The people in arms, the people whose struggle enacts this new reality, the people who live it, march on, freed from colonialism and forewarned against any attempt at mystification or glorification of the nation.

Our task right now is to find this new mode of politics, where a movement operates based on real collective struggle and comes from the bottom-up. Fanon’s assessment was that the peasantry are the class which can truly make revolution; and this lesson can be applied to contexts outside the one in which he was speaking, if we know how to properly utilize such theories. We shouldn’t copy-paste Fanon’s analysis to our own conditions, but we need to reorient the socialist movement around the underdeveloped parts of civilization, or the same problems that undermined the anti-colonial movements will kill our own endeavors.

Fanon’s warning about ignoring the peasantry is relevant to the class struggle in any country today because though the old “peasantry” has largely been replaced with new class categories, the same old divides persist everywhere. The failure to reckon with these divides, and build a mass movement beyond the metropole, is a critical part of why the western left has long been stagnating. It’s also central to what’s holding back the Global South’s popular movements. To resolve this problem, we will need to create organizational foundations that start from real mass power; this means prioritizing the creation of local collectives, which are what’s needed to give sufficient integrity to a national workers party. 

These collectives don’t need to all be within the rural or the intermediate “hinterland,” as obviously the city populations have great revolutionary potential; but by forming such geographically broad dual-power structures, we’ll be able to avoid an outcome where our strength gets overwhelmingly concentrated inside the big cities. A party can only build a solid foundation in so many places during its initial stages, and the cities are where they’ll often be inclined to consolidate their resources. This limitation can be overcome by building independent worker cooperatives, community aid structures, and popular coalitions in whichever communities we may live, whether or not the party already has a big presence. 

This is the practical part of how we stop the urban-rural divide from ruining our progress in the class war. In the next part of Fanon’s conclusion, he said that “Without this struggle, without this praxis there is nothing but a carnival parade and a lot of hot air. All that is left is a slight readaptation, a few reforms at the top, a flag, and down at the bottom a shapeless, writhing mass, still mired in the Dark Ages.” We can see the parallels between these neo-colonial parades, and the empty performativeness of DSA “socialism.” This is a politics that’s only capable of or interested in winning the metropolitan centers, leaving the whole struggle behind. We’ve identified the source of the inertia; through multiplying our ground within the class war, we’ll bring the struggle to a new phase.

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The chilling of dissent, the left’s rebellion against PC culture, & the next form of revolutionary politics

The effect of our bipartisan war against “antisemitism” has been to create a political chilling effect, yet also create the conditions for the next mode of revolutionary politics. At the same time that most Americans have been getting burnt out on politics, their consciousness has been changing in a way that’s definitively taken away PC culture’s dominance. That’s shattered the old environment where it was unacceptable to talk about the problem of Zionism in a blunt way, and where you had to always consider the feelings of the group that’s colonizing Palestine whenever you dared speak against their actions. 

Identity politics language policing has lost its power, both among the broad masses and within the left-wing spaces that supposedly support idpol the most; it’s among pro-Palestine activists that we’ve recently seen a rise in angry pushback towards Judeophilic narratives, and this development represents a real hope for reviving the pro-Palestine cause. The question for revolutionary politics is whether in the next phase, when the masses inevitably re-mobilize, the intellectual-minded movement leaders will be truly equipped to understand what’s happening.

Our challenge today is not to educate the masses. They’ve already reached an advanced stage of consciousness, enough that they’re now objectively ready for revolution. The turning point was when our government refused to solve the post-pandemic depression, and only kept getting us into new wars; at this point both ruling-class parties have seen their bases greatly shrink, with their defectors being politically homeless and looking for a path forward. This was going to be the outcome after most Americans turned against Israel and Ukraine. Our task is to educate ourselves, and become familiar with how the people come to correct ideas so we can properly connect with them. We must not let rote-copied theories get in the way of the true purpose for gaining knowledge from a proletarian standpoint. As Mao said about this purpose:

The one and only purpose of the proletariat in knowing the world is to change it. Often, correct knowledge can be arrived at only after many repetitions of the process leading from matter to consciousness and then back to matter, that is, leading from practice to knowledge and then back to practice. Such is the Marxist theory of knowledge, the dialectical materialist theory of knowledge. Among our comrades there are many who do not yet understand this theory of knowledge. When asked the sources of their ideas, opinions, policies, methods, plans and conclusions, eloquent speeches and long articles they consider the questions strange and cannot answer it. Nor do they comprehend that matter, can be transformed into consciousness and consciousness into matter, although such leaps are phenomena of everyday life. It is therefore necessary to educate our comrades in the dialectical materialist theory of knowledge, so that they can orientate their thinking correctly, become good at investigation and study and at summing up experience, overcome difficulties, commit fewer mistakes, do their work better, and struggle hard

It’s only when we grasp this process of learning that we can see the trajectory of the “noticing,” as many call the present trend in popular consciousness. The “noticing” refers to the experience where someone starts seeing the connections between all of the structural problems we face, and the designs behind these evils; with the default perception among the masses being that a Jewish scheme is at the root. It’s because this idea appears to explain Israeli leverage over media and politics that the “antisemitic” label doesn’t work anymore. There is still a factually based argument against the idea; namely that the ruling class has historically made Jews the tax collectors or other facilitators of surface-level bureaucracy, displacing mass anger onto Jews while leaving the productive mode intact. And Marxists should put forth this argument, but without disregarding the transformative process that’s happening among these masses who’ve rebelled against the strangulation of our discourse.

What’s happened is that the anti-cancel culture backlash has gone further than the Zionist right wanted it to. They sought to use the alienation over wokeness to sell Zionism, but now the MAGA base’s anger towards liberal moralistic policing has spread into anger over Zionism’s cancellation efforts. The Zionists wanted this discourse to just be about trans people, but they couldn’t stop their audience from making the connection with Zionist doxxing and hypocritical identitarian shaming. The next phase is the one where Americans are pushed towards new, radical solutions after the Iran war causes too much oil to run out, and they embrace socialism on a mass scale.

We know the reaction to American collapse is going to include a major growth in revolutionary consciousness because the ruling class isn’t truly in control anymore. No one is in control, this is the reality that Marxists seek to expose when we say that the “Jewish question” isn’t the right explanation. In the modern era, the force that actually controls society is a cybernetic system, built by the U.S. military after it became the core source of our technological infrastructure. AI has only been a fortification of this system; it already controlled the algorithms and the political-corporate decisions before the great accelerant in 2020. The great flaw in this system of control is that it still exists on top of a dying mode of production. It can’t get rid of the existential danger that technological advancement always poses towards an existing economic relations model. Therefore it can’t stop the rise of a new mass base for American communism.

One of the cybernetic infrastructure’s responses towards our crises has been to boost JQ content, hoping this will keep revolutionary consciousness contained. And we do need to be careful in how we try to combat this tactic, because just saying “the JQ is wrong” will come across as Zionist gaslighting; there’s a reason why I’ve treated my counterargument towards the JQ here as an actual effort to engage with the JQ’s thesis. What communists must do in this moment, where the masses are simultaneously gravitating to the JQ and to our own ideas, is build onto the things that Americans have already “noticed.” The noticers see a lot, but the larger context behind what they see—a cybernetic system that’s employing Israelis like feudal kings employed Jewish tax collectors—provides an expanded version of this insight. The masses are speeding up in their process of gaining knowledge, and many Marxists are behind them in critical ways. We have to catch up.

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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 from our era of accelerating inflation, 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 Zionist right’s plan to crush America’s people, & the new revolutionary coalition it will create

When the Iran war makes too much of the oil run out, and Americans reach a new stage of revolutionary consciousness, the Zionist right will outright advocate for abolishing the First Amendment. This will be the first step towards activating the plan our government has long had for imprisoning and murdering its own people on a mass scale; the plan that comes from what Washington has already done in dozens of countries. The proper name for this model of violence is the Jakarta method, from when the CIA’s military dictatorship in Indonesia took hundreds of thousands of lives to eliminate all who defended their nation’s sovereignty.

The only reason why we haven’t experienced repression of this kind is because inside the United States, the ruling system has been very effective at containing dissent; but soon as the bulk of the masses come to socialism, as they’re likely soon to do, the Jakarta method will be applied to us. The ones carrying out the terror campaign will be ICE agents, mass shooters weaponized by the feds, and the mercenaries who entities like “Israel” use for assassinations.

This is where we become able to unite Americans against the system, bypassing the left-right divide and utilizing the strengths of the nation’s masses. The line of demarcation is becoming clearer every day, and the logical conclusion is for the people to rise up as a cohesive revolutionary unit. Because the official pretext for the purge will be to get rid of the “communist threat,” but in practice the purge will target both communists and the libertarian crowd, and the majority will be against it. 

Within the worldview of Fuentes, Laura Loomer, and the other fed-boosted shills for the Epsteinite regime, everyone who fights back against this regime’s schemes in any meaningful way is a communist who must be exterminated. If you’re against the persecution of dissent, or against the war on the world’s working class, or against our pedocratic regime, then you’re a communist now. And when everyone with genuinely patriotic values is to be treated as a communist, then the only recourse for these patriots is to actually become communists—whether in name or in their actions.

A mass politics that fights back against an illegitimate government is functionally the same politics which communists represent, at least in the pre-revolutionary phase. The same can be said for the politics represented by libertarians, or by anti-Zionist MAGA, or by anyone else who’s striving towards the defeat of our banking dictatorship. When someone joins in on the struggle to free Americans from the dictatorship, they’re part of the same camp as the communists, whatever name they call themselves.

The ideological differences among these counter-hegemonic tendencies still matter, since negation alone doesn’t bring revolutionary change. That all of these tendencies seek to negate the Epsteinite regime doesn’t mean they have the same idea of what should replace it. The lesson for communists, though, is that unifying with these other anti-systemic forces will not weaken us but strengthen us. And this goes not just for the dissident ideologies on the right, but also for the “woke” leftists in Gen Z, who’ve been radicalized towards supporting Palestine’s resistance and are therefore highly compatible with our politics.

When I say that these forces are compatible with us, foremost I’m talking about the popular bases for the respective ideological trends. Reaching these masses needs to be our main priority, because unlike the leaders of these trends, the masses as a rule are not going to be at risk of embracing opportunism. Speaking in terms of the bulk of these masses, they don’t have an incentive to betray the revolutionary struggle; if the cause gets betrayed, then they’ll be the ones who lose out. The traitors who side with the regime’s Satanic ideology, or become informants for a reward, are a small minority; the people are our greatest ally in this fight, the question is how to prevent their desires for liberation from being foiled.

In Indonesia, the great weakness that led the people to being crushed was a lack of initiative by the popular leadership. The country’s communist party, despite being the biggest in the world and having the mass backing it needed, was enamored with befriending the national bourgeoisie. This led it to not to equip the people to defend themselves from the imminent political genocide, and not to adequately warn the people of what was coming. It’s only by prioritizing the masses above all else, and placing what’s in their interests above any hope for joining with the establishment, that we’ll be able to win against our own dictatorial menace.

The figures tasked with selling the terror campaign assert that if you truly care about defending your country’s constitution, or care about the history of our government’s crimes against the Global South, then you’re a “third worldist.” This is in effect the logic of Fuentes, and of the others who’ve been promoting the “military nihilist” ideology that says we must accept whatever our ruling class does. They’ve gotten behind the government’s persecution of Hasan Piker for his Cuba solidarity activities, as well as the war against Venezuela, because they fundamentally believe in international banking’s right to rule the globe. Critical to their narrative is the idea that Americans are only being helped by Washington’s assaults against the Global South, which ironically is a belief that fits with the actual ultra-left third worldist ideology. 

According to this framework, it only makes rational sense as an American to support war on the Global South, because supposedly this will make you richer; which was true for the mid-century boomers born into the labor aristocracy, but wars today actually depend on austerity for the American working class. The military nihilists are repeating pure boomer slop, and selling it as justification for supporting a pedocratic regime. Their promise is that if our government ramps up its wars, this will bring newfound extractive riches to Americans; which is an argument that makes the most sense to the types of people with a parasitic mindset. And the vast majority of Americans do not share the mentality of Zionists and predators, where somebody feels comfortable with living off of wealth and pleasure from other human beings. 

The actual conservative mindset is “if you want something, work for it”—which doesn’t contradict what communists stand for, because a foundational goal of ours is “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” Americans will unify against the predators and parasites who rule over us, and unleash the forces of production from the financial system that strangles them. Then we’ll be able to fulfill our full potential as a nation, and do all of the work that needs to be done.

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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 from our era of accelerating inflation, 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.