When Fidel Castro concluded at the end of his life that armed struggle was no longer the right path, this would prove instrumental for understanding today’s strategic situation in the class war. Right now, the revolutionary forces are in retreat, with multiple workers governments across the American hemisphere being under heavy strain from the offensive Washington is waging. That we’re in such a dire situation, even after the transition to a multipolar world has essentially already happened, further proves Castro’s point.
He was speaking to Colombia’s FARC guerrillas when he said that the armed strategy was no longer viable; his evidence for this is clear in just how advanced the enemy’s surveillance and cyber warfare have become, with the old methods of asymmetric warfare now being outmoded as a rule. But in the exceptions to this rule, we can find instructive examples—not so that we can directly replicate their models of fighting, but so that we can build upon their achievements through the new tools the revolutionary side has gained.
In the American hemisphere, the one armed struggle that’s now on the advance is in Haiti. This is the conflict where the gangs, the modes of organization formed by the lumpenproletariat, have been successfully unified by the leader Jimmy Barbecue. Gangs are not revolutionary on their own, and they wouldn’t be able to take on this role without such a leader either in Haiti or elsewhere; but the fact that they’ve gotten this far has implications both for Haiti’s class war and for the global working-class cause. What I predict will happen, both through deliberate revolutionary efforts and through spontaneous developments, is that Haiti’s popular victory brings memetic inspiration to the world’s peoples. That this revolt is lumpen in nature gives it a particular kind of cultural appeal; people are drawn to narratives about outlaws, and to see outlaws beat back the United States government will be explosive on a worldwide scale.
We’ve already seen the multipolar era’s progressive accomplishments spread radical consciousness across the globe, most notably in the case of China. The post-Covid generation is seeing the marvels of Chinese advancement and becoming more open to communism because of this, in a way that was rare just ten or fifteen years ago. Now we’re seeing the popular revolts of our era produce such resonance, mainly with Palestine and now France. Yemen’s fight against the empire is also becoming more widely recognized as a sign of hope. Each time that a new front gets opened up in the global class war, more of the people become open to the militancy that communism’s historical traditions have to offer.
One of our tasks, though, is to clarify what exactly this militancy should look like. It can’t look like applying old practices without investigating whether they’ll work for us, as Mao warned against doing:
We are opposed to die-hards in the revolutionary ranks whose thinking fails to advance with changing objective circumstances and has manifested itself historically as Right opportunism. These people fail to see that the struggle of opposites has already pushed the objective process forward while their knowledge has stopped at the old stage. This is characteristic of the thinking of all die-hards. Their thinking is divorced from social practice, and they cannot march ahead to guide the chariot of society; they simply trail behind, grumbling that it goes too fast and trying to drag it back or turn it in the opposite direction.
We are also opposed to "Left" phrase-mongering. The thinking of "Leftists" outstrips a given stage of development of the objective process; some regard their fantasies as truth, while others strain to realize in the present an ideal which can only be realized in the future. They alienate themselves from the current practice of the majority of the people and from the realities of the day, and show themselves adventurist in their actions. Idealism and mechanical materialism, opportunism and adventurism, are all characterized by the breach between the subjective and the objective, by the separation of knowledge from practice.
When our movement does reconcile knowledge with practice, and acts according to what the circumstances reveal as necessary, we become capable of forming a real strategy. The strategy for our fight in the USA isn’t yet able to be fully revealed, but we have the guiding logic that will let us find it. Recent history has shown that memes will have a critical role in rallying the people; they let a movement keep up its momentum in the face of the class enemy’s repression, which is part of why the American communist movement has been treating even its humor in a serious way. The actions that will actually let us seize power—namely mass organizing, and the leading of strikes like in Bolivia—gain a kind of strength from this global resonance that didn’t exist in the past. Which is vitally important when we’ve seemingly been rendered more vulnerable by the coming of these new technologies.
The struggle we’ve been tasked with—at least in the countries that aren’t fighting off occupation like Palestine—will have to be above-ground and fully legal. This is something I recently realized after investigating the conditions more. Illegal adventurism will still happen, but in those cases, our role will be to give these spontaneous acts memetic power that can agitate people towards organizing. This doesn’t apply to all adventurism, but there are major cases where it does. Think of the popular reactions to Luigi Mangione, or to the French riots.
When we carry out this kind of agitation, we are helping reveal realities that were already there, and thereby bring things closer to the structural breaking point that Hegel talked about. He analyzed how the accumulation of contradictions creates instability, including within states that had once been strengthened by the same traits which are imperiling them:
In thinking about the gradualness of the coming-to-be of something, it is ordinarily assumed that what comes to be is already sensibly or actually in existence; it is not yet perceptible only because of its smallness. Similarly with the gradual disappearance of something, the non-being or other which takes its place is likewise assumed to be really there, only not observable, and there, too, not in the sense of being implicitly or ideally contained in the first something, but really there, only not observable…
In the moral sphere, in so far as it is considered under the categories of being, there occurs the same transition from quantity into quality and different qualities appear to be based in a difference of magnitude. It is through a more or less that the measure of frivolity or thoughtlessness is exceeded and something quite different comes about, namely crime, and thus right becomes wrong and virtue vice. Thus states, too, acquire through their quantitative difference, other things being assumed equal, a distinct qualitative character. With the expansion of the state and an increased number of citizens, the laws and the constitution acquire a different significance. The state has its own measure of magnitude and when this is exceeded this mere change of size renders it liable to instability and disruption under that same constitution which was its good fortune and its strength before its expansion.
It’s an elegantly simple process: changes keep piling up (in our case through spontaneous uprisings combined with concerted organizational work), until the existing structure can no longer hold. Though the work that organizers have committed to is endlessly complex, and we should bring advanced analyses to the masses, the agitational side of things embodies such simplicity. There’s a difference between agitation and propaganda, with the role of the former being to transmute the essence of the revolutionary goals; in this way, memetics have always been part of a Bolshevik’s duties. As France’s uprising spreads to more countries, and the rate of quantitative shifts goes up exponentially, we must be ready to bring this to the point of qualitative change—to the overthrow of the bourgeois state that’s today’s main obstacle towards progress.
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