To get their favored politician into the highest office, the ruling elites don’t need to convince the majority of the people to like this politician. They only need to maintain the liberal cultural hegemony, which makes it possible for figures like Kamala Harris to be effective capitalist tools. Like Harris, Hillary Clinton was highly unpopular. Yet the Hillary Clinton psyop, where liberals argued that Clinton’s pro-imperialist corporate agenda was necessary for protecting our “democratic institutions,” was essentially successful (at least in the short term). It was able to define the discourse throughout the Trump years, shoving aside genuine left opposition towards Trump so that the only acceptable way to challenge him was by saying “he’s not a good enough imperialist!”
Then the 2020 election came, giving the elites an opportunity to install a new Hillary. Because this one was as disliked as the first, though, they had to first make her vice president to a mentally declining Joe Biden. We’ve now come dangerously close to Harris becoming president, which would enable the new cold warriors to complete their most reckless foreign policy goals. Remember how everyone with sense was warning about how Hillary’s no-fly zone plan for Syria would start World War III? Harris would commit the same or equivalent kind of provocation, as well as accelerate the effort to destabilize the globe by carrying out numerous new color revolution efforts.
Harris would be even more dangerous than Biden because whereas Biden is simply a half-aware receiver of the instructions from the new cold war’s architects, Harris is someone with the kind of narcissistic anger which makes for a deliberative and calculated arbiter of harm. The ruling class cultivates political leaders who have the kinds of personalities which make them inclined to listen to their foreign policy advice, no matter how much of a human cost it will have to follow this advice. They’ve created a system that’s designed to give authority towards individuals who feel like they have something to prove, or who feel like they need to get revenge. (Harris is in the latter category, which is the more dangerous one.) That’s why Harris is the greater evil in this election, compared even to Trump: she’s the leader who can allow the most aggressive elements of the imperialists to carry forth their genocidal goals without any constraints.
How can we prevent a Harris presidency? Not by voting for the lesser evil. The big lesson which many developing radicals learned in 2016 was that “harm reduction” voting is a distraction from the true answer to reactionary politics, that being effective efforts at defeating the social system. And we can’t defeat the system by perpetuating the two-party cycle which has reinforced it for numerous decades. We can defeat it by looking for its weak spots, and striking at them. In our present situation, the big weak spot is the narrative war. Monopoly finance capital has been able to get Harris so close to the presidency by maintaining dominance within the discourse; by keeping the Democrats Party able to put forth its narratives without any serious opposition. As soon as the forces which consistently oppose these narratives get strong enough, the elites will become unable to install Harris, as well as more broadly lose their advantage in the class conflict.
To defeat Harris and the ultra-monopolist overlords behind her, we must advance an authentic communism. A communism that’s not concerned about pandering to liberals—like today’s predominant iterations of U.S. “Marxism” are—and that therefore doesn’t enable the Democratic Party’s key narratives.
When the Democrats imposed lockdowns and mandates whose “benefits” were coupled with massive harm towards the workers, and which objectively acted to strengthen monopoly capital, the main types of “socialists” didn’t oppose these policies. When the Democrats had their intelligence agencies facilitate entrapment throughout the Capitol Hill riot, then carried out a liberal coup which damaged democracy more than anything MAGA did, their supposed challengers on the left endorsed the suppressive efforts of this coup. When the Democrats provoked an escalation in the Ukraine conflict, and justified their backing of the proxy war by concealing fascist Kiev’s ethnic cleansing threat towards the Russian speakers, none of the major socialist orgs recognized Russia was right to intervene.
That these left actors support Palestine only makes them more effective infiltrators of the communist movement. They keep showing that at every pivotal moment in our geopolitical and class conflict, they’ll side with liberal fascists like Harris.
What’s come from this is that Harris has become closer to the presidency than ever. Which shows how enabling liberal narratives is not a necessary compromise, but an act of opportunism that aids the ruling class. The actors who’ve affirmed this decade’s most important Democrat lies from a “socialist” perspective can’t claim that it’s all not such a big deal; that these parts of the narrative war are inconsequential. Giving these advantages within the discourse to the liberals has made World War III so much more likely, and has let the elites greatly accelerate their project at furthering austerity.
The lockdowns have permanently worsened the conditions of the workers, which is exactly what the banks and monopolies need in order to keep themselves strong for their next project: a new series of war provocations, whether against China, Mexico, or both. This destructive effort—along with the campaigns to destabilize the BRICS members and the recently liberated African countries—is going to come with unprecedented attacks on the proletariat. The elites want to assign Harris to facilitate the murder of millions of people abroad through massive imperialist wars, while their domestic degrowth schemes quietly lead to the social murder of far more workers. The human costs of capitalist collapse have been made so much greater by this “leftist” enabling of the liberals at such a pivotal moment as the pandemic. And the eventual costs could prove to be far larger should our ruling class bring about its desired conflicts.
We can place such a crucial amount of blame on the liberal-aligned socialists because even though they’re a marginal force, if they were to reject opportunism they would become immensely powerful, and would be able to genuinely threaten the architects of degrowth and war. Their role is to keep the proletarian struggle ineffectual, forsaking a mass-based practice in favor of exclusively appealing towards Democrats and radical liberals.
An authentic communist movement would be able to connect with the growing anti-imperialist impulses of the broader masses, who are alienated from the liberal minority’s increasingly pro-imperialist politics. It would build a resistance towards medical tyranny that’s revolutionary in character, rather than surrendering that cause to the right. And it would connect with anti-imperialist sentiments wherever they can be found, rather than compromising on anti-imperialism so that less liberals will be scared off. Such a practice is how we could give the movement against U.S. hegemony enough momentum for our ruling institutions to actually be endangered.
Such an iteration of the communist movement already exists, but we still have much work to do towards strengthening it. It’s found within the pro-Russian Marxist orgs that have been forced to break from the compatible left, particularly since the escalation of the Ukraine conflict. These formations have been building networks with the other major antiwar organizing outlets which are independent from the Democratic Party. And they have potential to create a new disruption towards liberal narrative hegemony with their coming Defeat the Deep State event. This and the other projects from the antiwar movement’s independent wing could have enough impact to hinder the plan at installing Harris, and to advance the class struggle to its next stage. If we can sustain these operations, while defending ourselves from the ultraviolent “Antifa” counter-gangs which will first be used to try to crush us, we’ll be in place to win this power struggle.
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