We are in the transitional stage between when the USA started off its own demise, and when the global working class has won its final victory. Washington was the true loser of the Cold War; its self-destructive imperial schemes guaranteed that the U.S. would keep losing influence, and that communism would keep rising.
This is the conclusion that I credit ACP chairman Haz Al-Din with guiding me towards through his recent post, which said: “Communism won the cold war. The West thought it had the last laugh – now Trump is America’s Gorbachev. The fall of the USSR did not defeat the Communist political system as China shows. But the fall of the USA will finally erase ‘liberal democracy’ from the face of the Earth.” That assessment is completely correct. The question is how much of a cost the struggle to defeat liberalism will have.
Imperialists get ready for the next stage in their offensive
As “liberal democracy” becomes untenable, it will be replaced by liberal dictatorship, at least until the people manage to overthrow this dictatorship. We’re getting closer to that stage every day, with the Trump White House’s present anti-democratic maneuvers only being a set-up for what will come next. After Trump is out, the dominant wing of our ruling class is going to hit back, and it will take advantage of all the ways our civil liberties have already been eroded.
This crackdown in the empire’s heart won’t be able to stop China from continuing to rise. Nor will it stop many more countries from kicking out the imperialists. It’s likely that the next wave of revolutions has already started; the Sahel nations have defeated neo-colonialism, Sri Lanka has come to have a Marxist-Leninist government, and Haiti is undergoing a popular revolution via BBQ’s movement. But the USA’s internal war against dissent will enable Washington to further advance its offensive in West Asia; and depending on how successful Americans are at building up our anti-imperialist movement, this assault will reach East Asia as well.
When I say “Americans,” I include the peoples across the whole hemisphere. The repression against U.S. Palestine supporters is part of a larger counter-revolutionary sabotage effort, one the empire has been carrying out across its “backyard.” Washington has been able to get Brazil to obstruct Venezuela and Cuba’s entry into BRICS, with Lula taking on a gatekeeping, obstructionist role throughout Latin America. This makes it all the more difficult for Cuba and Venezuela to persevere through their economic crises; which is not something they can’t overcome, but it’s putting the hemisphere’s revolutionary forces in a much more compromised place.
In Ecuador, the neo-colonial president Daniel Noboa has declared martial law right before an election, and he’s been able to “win” an invalid vote without serious backlash; when you look up the election, all the headlines portray it as being perfectly normal. This contrasts with when south Korea’s Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law in December. Yoon’s blatant assault on democracy caused an international outrage that Washington had to distance itself from; it galvanized the revolutionary energy of the country’s people, and set back the empire’s plans for war in East Asia. Noboa’s anti-democratic act represents a successful consolidation of power for the anti-popular forces, where those who’ve pointed out the election’s lack of integrity are now being pushed out of the discourse. It parallels how the U.S. media has been working to de-center the pro-Palestine movement, which it’s largely done with success.
The trend is towards the revolutionary forces continuing to make gains across Eurasia and Africa, while they’re forced to go on the defensive across the Americas and West Asia. All the while, the Palestinian genocide keeps accelerating, compelling the strongest anti-imperialist forces (like Yemen) into action while the weaker forces fall to the enemy’s onslaught. Syria has been taken over by genocidal Salafists, Lebanon has been severely weakened due to this, and the imperialists have been greatly emboldened in their campaign to destroy Iran.
The hegemon is absolutely on the offensive right now, and we must treat the situation as such; as anti-imperialists, we cannot embrace the Trump administration’s narrative about how it wants an authentic “peace deal” with Russia and Iran. The U.S. will only accept deals where Russia has agreed to become a client state again, and Iran has abandoned any serious efforts at resistance. Every compromise with the enemy lets it take more lives in Palestine and elsewhere, as well as repress the working class more effectively.
The effort to distract from class struggle, & the conditions we must prepare for
Appeasing the enemy will come at a fatal cost; this is the reality that authentically revolutionary parties, like Russia’s CPRF, have accounted for. As the CPRF assessed in an analysis from this week, a crucial part of our task is to combat the forces that claim to be counter-hegemonic, but that truly promote reformism:
Today, the situation in the world left movement resembles the turn of the XIX and XX centuries. At that time, supporters of “economism”, “legal Marxism”, Bernsteinism actively knocked the focus of attention of the proletarians from a victorious course to a dead-end one. They advocated a partial improvement of the situation of the working class without encroachment on the political system. They considered parliamentary activity to be the main means of struggle. This kind of installation is not just a skew. They lead directly to treason. In order to avoid such a sad fate for the communists, it is necessary to remember the proletarian character of our party, confidently express the interests of the workers, and subordinate the parliamentary struggle to them…
The legacy of ideological fraud is still alive today. The same Mr. Trump, scourged Biden’s team, willingly mixes the neoliberalism of the globalists and the socialism of the communists with all their opposites. This is also done by a large part of Russian experts who wander from one TV channel to another. And those European leftists who followed the renegades forgot the very essence of our movement. Today they are much more determined to defend the “values” of non-traditional orientation than the principles of proletarian struggle.
The party concludes that “Our international activities should serve to consolidate the left-wing movement. And the case should be conducted on two contours. The first is Communist Parties on a solid Marxist-Leninist platform. The second circuit is consistently left-wing forces ready to defend the interests of workers without replacing them with ‘gender’ and other false goals. The basic platform for our unity is the struggle for justice, against imperialism, neo-fascism and NATO aggression.” This effort to combat the imperialism-aligned left is a battle that we in the U.S. have won. Identity-focused leftism has been quite irrelevant in this country at least since November 2024, so it’s now counterproductive for communists to address the left. (The situation is different for the communists in Russia, where they’re fighting off incursions from the “progressive” imperialist NGOs.)
At this stage, our main enemy in the ideological struggle is the current which says we can defeat monopoly capital without engaging in class struggle, or without having a workers revolution. This current primarily exists in the “dissident right,” the controlled opposition conservative movement that critiques the system but is fundamentally loyal to capital.
There’s an element of this movement that seeks to run cover for Trump’s foreign policy, and that pushes the “Trump will beat the deep state” narrative. But at this point, Trump has been utterly discredited as a “peace president”; so the bigger narrative threat from the right is now the element which simply tries to steer people away from political involvement. That cultivates an audience of individuals who only engage with politics online, without getting organized. This is how the “anti-Zionist” right-wing alt media helps Zionism: by spreading complacency among those who’ve rejected the propaganda. The danger this type of narrative manipulation poses is that it will render the masses passive as the enemy keeps advancing; that it will prevent mass mobilization while the war escalations continue, our remaining liberties disappear, and the working class gets crushed by degrowth policies.
This terminally online type of “dissident right” politics is distinct from the more traditional kind, where people who got radicalized towards the far right were actively preparing for a civil war scenario. As organized white nationalist groups have declined in membership, and the movement has migrated to the internet, the ruling class hasn’t tried to re-organize this movement. If the state were to use the far right for its counterrevolutionary terrorism, this would expose the state’s Nazistic nature; the ultraviolent “antifa” radlibs are now more likely to be the ones who get this assignment. Today, the far right’s main role is to funnel people with revolutionary potential towards an ideology that’s designed to make them apathetic.
What communists must do is fill up the ground that’s been willingly ceded by our enemies on both the left and the right. These forces can’t do what’s required for building an effective mass movement, because they exist as appendages to the ruling class. The left has lost relevance after isolating itself from the masses, and tying itself to the Democratic Party. Now the far right is finding itself unable to find a presence outside of social media, because it’s mostly abandoned the survivalist and militia practices that used to give it major potential for gaining territory. At this point, it’s the communists who are making the most progress in building such an on-the-ground presence, and the ACP is the reason for this. The “dissident right” isn’t going around the country giving out food and clothes, harvesting crops, or aiding disaster victims. The ACP is doing these things. This alone gives us a major new strategic advantage.
The neo-Nazi militias are still there, but because the state views them as a liability, they’ll be a secondary threat. The right-wingers who the feds actually have a reason to utilize for violent ends are the lone wolf incel shooters, which mainly act as false flag perpetrators. Amid the system’s collapse, our ruling class seeks to engineer chaos that it can control, and that counteracts revolutionary developments like the pro-Luigi movement.
The civil war we’re facing is not a battle of left vs right, but an assault carried out by our government against the masses. It’s being waged by anti-social elements that have been created by capitalism’s illnesses, and that the intelligence centers are able to weaponize. The role of communists is to defend the people against this chaos, and give them the means to overthrow their capitalist dictatorship.
These are the conditions we must navigate during this stage, when our ruling class is determined to create a third world war but knows such a war will destabilize the system. This era, the multipolar era, is a time when expanded conflicts are inevitable; both the imperialists and their enemies have been compelled to advance, and seismic shifts in the global order are sure to happen. We’ve also crossed a series of technological thresholds, where both governments and rebels can exploit the new tools they’ve been given.
In these circumstances, where the capitalist world is getting “Israelified” by adopting Zionism’s policing tech, revolutionary forces around the world must take example from those who’ve outmaneuvered the Zionists. As I’ve written about, the achievements of the Yemeni resistance have updated Che Guevara’s military theory for the digital surveillance age; and the Palestinian resistance has expanded upon this theory. The world’s capitalist states are anticipating that their own peoples will rise up, so they’re implementing the same techno-tyranny that the Zionists have imposed on the Palestinians. But this only ensures that our era will be an age of civil wars, because it forces the global proletariat to adopt more assymetrical methods for rebelling.
We’ve seen proof that the modern systems of techno-oppression can be beaten by a revolutionary movement. The oppressors can inflict apocalyptic levels of damage, but the masses can persist amid even the most extreme efforts to terrorize them; this is what we’re seeing in Gaza. Our ruling class wants to make Gaza into the new global normal; the genocide is partly about letting the world’s other peoples know that the same could be done to them. This does not mean these peoples are helpless against the enemy, though. The forces of popular revolution are gathering to strike against the hegemon, and their counter-offensive is already underway. We in the United States will continue building up our workers movement, and when the time comes, we’ll fulfill our own role in this great uprising.
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