The pandemic showed us what kind of historical pattern we’re going to experience when the market bubble that’s been building since 2008 bursts, and an unprecedented economic cataclysm comes. First, the country experiences a crisis so severe that there’s no way things are ever truly going back to “normal.” Then the highest level of capital, that being finance capital, maneuvers towards suppressing every illiberal element within our society. Finance capital’s political agents use the turmoil as justification for censoring those who speak out against the new cold war, and for using militarized police force.
Soon, inter-elite rivalry intensifies. The lower levels of capital unite with the higher levels to an extent, namely when it comes to deploying the police and hate-mongering about China. But as soon as the lower levels start interfering with a part of finance capital’s agenda, big tech tries to take away the former elite faction’s reach within the discourse. Stories of corruption by finance capital’s favored politicians are suppressed on social media, while the intelligence agencies work to carry out ops so they can justify national security state crackdowns. The Democratic Party and the compatible left portray these crackdowns as a good thing, but they only allow the state and big tech to further assail anti-imperialists.
This is the story of both our recent past, and what’s likely to be our near future. The second time it happens, though, the anti-imperialist forces that finance capital seeks to destroy will be in a better situation. Because though the efforts to crush our movement will be more intense than last time, this could be what compels more of the USA’s population to join with us. Should we sufficiently work to get out of the movement and into the masses, we’ll become the political force that much of the people come to see as an answer to the state’s anti-democratic actions. As well as to the efforts of the elites to keep driving down our living standards.
With the last big event that catalyzed this series of developments, we weren’t yet ready to assume that role, because we didn’t so far have enough unity among our ranks, not enough organizational strength. We also weren’t yet at the stage in U.S. imperialism’s decline which Ukraine has since brought us to, wherein the majority of the USA’s people have come to recognize the war machine as among our society’s biggest problems.
Back then, this country didn’t have a true anti-imperialist coalition, that being a coalition of antiwar elements which go beyond left-liberals. Partly because of this weakness within revolutionary politics, the Democratic Party was able to co-opt and divert the spontaneous mass energy from the George Floyd uprising with almost full effectiveness. It used the upsurge in political involvement to steer many leftists towards voting blue, letting the feds meddle in the election without any sufficient challenges towards this scheme. Without an adequately strong or visible anti-imperialist movement, finance capital could successfully bring attention away from the Biden family’s corrupt connections within Ukraine. Which would prove to be an instrumental part of how they sold the Ukraine proxy war, as not enough of the public had the knowledge to initially resist the Ukraine psyop.
With some time, though, the new cold warriors lost their narrative dominance. They didn’t anticipate how good Russia would be at countering NATO, nor how much the backlash towards the proxy war would strengthen the anti-imperialist movement. They didn’t think Russia’s special operation would accelerate the decline of U.S. hegemony, or 2023 would turn into the antiwar movement’s best year in decades. Because of these ways finance capital’s enemies have become empowered since the pandemic, finance capital is preparing to crack down in an unprecedented way.
When the economic breakdown comes, the dominant wing of our ruling class will employ the same counterinsurgency model it used in 2020: to marginalize and assail anti-imperialists under the pretext of combating the reactionaries within small capital. Yet this next time, the effort to silence dissent will be more aggressive and encompassing, to the extent that finance capital may stop holding back in its attacks on the other faction of the elites. A large part of why free speech still exists to the extent that it does is because of the leverage which the lower levels of capital, with their illiberal tendencies, have over how much expression gets policed. The highest levels of capital wish they could restrict speech far more, but if they take it too far they’ll provoke a backlash from the Bonapartist wing.
When finance capital’s suppression of the Hunter Biden story contributed to Trump’s loss in 2020, and the Bonapartists mobilized their base to try to reverse the election results, the intelligence centers found a way to (momentarily) minimize the instability that had come from this. They sent their assets into the MAGA movement to exacerbate the unrest, encouraging the Capitol Hill crowd to break into the building. Then they could apply maximum charges to most of the crowd’s members, while not even charging the federal agent who had been so important in initiating the illegal entry. This was the same kind of false flag tactic which capital’s dominant wing used to keep control following the 2016 election. That was when the intelligence agencies invented the “Russiagate” scandal so that they could sell more cold war escalations, expand censorship, and expand their own institutional control. And it’s what finance capital will do during the next stages of the empire’s collapse.
Like was the case during the pandemic’s first year, in this next phase Marxists should align themselves with neither the highest elites nor the insurgent elites. As commentator Gary Olson concluded, both of these factions are merely fighting to maintain their profits, and are willing to sacrifice as many working-class lives as they need to:
“Re-opening America,” cloaked in a smokescreen about patriotism, “freedom” and concern for small businesses, is their means of ramping up enraged protesters. In the words of political analyst and activist Caleb Maupin, “The people responsible for the right wing mobilizations are a coalition of millionaires and billionaires who feel like they are locked out by the ultra-rich. This is the coalition that took Trump to the White House in 2016. Amidst the pandemic, these lower levels of American capital are watching the blood rush from their financial wounds.” The second and even richer faction of the ruling class includes the Big Four major oil companies (eager to see the small frackers and drillers driven out of business by low gas prices), CEOs of the aforementioned tech giants (Amazon is at an all-time high), (CNN ratings up 193 percent, FOX 89 percent, and MSNBC 56 percent), and of course “old money” elites are all immune from being forced out of business. Except for vanquishing competitors they are as indifferent to pandemic suffering and death as their less wealthy rivals. They will emerge more powerful and dominant in the post pandemic era
With the coming economic collapse, the elites are going to carry out such human sacrifice mainly through the benign kind of social murder that always comes from increased poverty. As The Big Short drew attention to, with every 1% increase in unemployment, almost 40,000 people lose their lives. And unemployment doesn’t need to go up for more people to commit suicide out of desperation, or for more people to get heart disease from the increased stress. Under Biden’s supposed economic boom, the increased inflation is enough to be destroying lives. And that the inflation is slowing down isn’t decreasing the people’s suffering.
Finance capital’s goal is to continue with the wars and “degrowth” austerity measures that worsen these social crises, while preventing the ensuing backlash from destroying the liberal order. For the time being, the biggest threat towards this order comes from the Bonapartist faction of the elites, which is more and more willing to destabilize the government to preserve its own material interests. Unless this inter-elite rivalry escalates to the point of civil war, finance capital is going to be able to maintain its dominance, as it’s been doing by having its intelligence agencies carry out a power grab throughout our institutions. The feds can manage this type of opposition easily enough; it’s an opposition with so much false consciousness, its members easily get diverted away from the anti-imperialist cause.
The op where the FBI sent a plant to the Capitol Hill crowd, then used the ensuing chaos as an excuse to censor Palestinians, was able to be so effective because the crowd the feds were manipulating wasn’t doing anything truly revolutionary. In reflection of how the crowd was made up not of working-class people, but largely bosses and cops, the event was merely an ideological extension of those lockdown protests which capital’s lower levels had been engineering.
The grievances of both protests were based within an element of fact. The lockdowns were a cover for the pandemic’s corporate bailout, and they were only implemented after the government had already failed to contain the outbreak. Also, the 2020 election was indeed influenced by efforts from the intelligence agencies to manipulate the flow of information. Without a class analysis or a prioritization of anti-imperialism, though, the responses to these things failed to strengthen revolutionary politics. It was merely one ruling class faction competing with the other for narrative and material dominance. Naturally, the insurgent faction’s media inserted numerous falsehoods into its reporting on the lockdowns and the election interference, like that Covid isn’t dangerous or that voter fraud was the main issue. Which finance capital’s media could use to discredit all counter-hegemonic ideas.
The war over Ukraine, and now the one over “Israel,” have changed this situation. More conservatives have come to have opposing wars as among their top priorities. And more communists have become alienated from the liberal tailist ideological orientation, which used to be able to draw in more recruits from newcomers to socialism. A growing amount of those who have class consciousness are realizing that we can defeat the capitalist state not by copying the posturing of the Democrats, but by building a true coalition against the war machine. That’s how we can connect with the broad masses on the inflation crisis, and on the additional evils the elites will subject us to when their economic system reaches its next stage of collapse.
As we continue with this mass-based project, the narrative agents of finance capital will try to portray us as tailing the reactionaries within capital’s lower levels. We’ll have to resist this pressure to become subservient towards the liberals. Over these last couple years, we’ve made so much progress towards building a real proletarian movement. And if we further this trend within American socialism towards centering the people, we’ll be in place to provide the people with leadership amid their coming time of great need.
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