For the third world war to succeed as a means of preserving capital, our ruling class is going to need to carry out a massive piece of social engineering. A cultural influence project where they alienate the people of the United States from the rising multipolar world, and the organizing entities that share this world’s interests. This is what the liberal technocrats hope to do through their effort at installing Kamala Harris. They seek to push anti-imperialism out of the discourse by using Harris, and the counter-gangs which will get mobilized after the election, as tools for inflaming the culture war. They want us to invest ourselves in their synthetic fight between wokeism and anti-wokeism, rendering us detached from the conflict that’s happening between international capital and its challengers.
It’s apparent that the empire managers view the pro-multipolar tendency as an imminent danger towards their narrative control, and thereby their ability to keep capital in power. During these last two decades, since the 2008 collapse forced the bulk of Americans into an ongoing economic crisis, the country’s people have reacted by becoming more ideologically compatible with anti-imperialism. An upsurge of antiwar sentiment has occurred within the ideological “right,” challenging the left-right dichotomy that bourgeois politics is centered around. Politically unaffiliated Americans have been seeking out movements that they hope will advance their material interests, making it so that the center can no longer hold.
Monopoly finance capital has managed to divert many of these popular anti-establishment trends, namely by co-opting populist currents like the Bernie Sanders movement and MAGA. Yet amid all the ways our ruling class has been working to psyop the people, and trick them into pursuing false solutions, an ideological trend is emerging that can’t be neutralized through co-optation. This is the one which seeks to align the USA’s people with Russia, China, Iran, and the rest of the global forces that are resisting imperial control.
The system has tried to compromise the pro-multipolar movement. It’s been promoting organizations like the PSL, which claims to be pro-China while truly seeking to insert left-wing culture war agendas into places like the PRC. It’s been putting forth a version of “multipolar” Marxism that’s a vehicle for the woke psyop, seeking to divide anti-imperialists from Russia because Russia isn’t culturally left-wing. Yet these tricks have failed to stop multipolarity from continuing to rise, both as a material force within global events and as a cultural force within the United States. When the bourgeoisie have propped up organizations like the PSL as replacements for a genuine anti-imperialist movement, organizations that authentically represent the multipolar cause have kept picking up supporters.
Last fall, John McCarthy of the Center for Political Innovation observed how the truly independent antiwar coalitions and groups have been getting such success:
What do Rage Against the War Machine and the Black is Back Coalition have in common? They exist largely outside of the nonprofit industrial complex, and have received little funding. This is a problem for capital, which has long supported ineffective leftist organizations under a ‘lesser of two evils’ approach. For years, PSL and the ANSWER Coalition have worked to build their brand as “leaders” of the anti-war movement, seeking fame with no regard for actually accomplishing anything. As long as checks continue to flow in from the nonprofit industrial complex, PSL and ANSWER will happily wave inflammatory signs in downtown areas, with no expectation of growing their membership or having any national impact. They do nothing to threaten their funders’ interests. However, they have no success stories to offer – they depend on being the only game in town. If a movement is independent, raises its resources directly from the people, and does not take direction from the foundations and the NGOs, that movement is a threat to the Becker network and to its employers. At this critical juncture in history, while the United States inflames international tensions and Americans at home grow more and more skeptical of foreign wars, we need a true anti-war movement.
This rise of authentic dissent has shown that the first stage of the state’s counterinsurgency, where the empire uses information warfare against ideas or organizations that threaten it, can’t work on its own. NGO-independent antiwar forces have been able to build a growing amount of influence, regardless of the smears the state has directed towards them or the efforts to discredit their anti-imperialist position. The bulk of the left has joined with the imperialist media in attacking the Rage Against the War Machine coalition, and has refused to join with the Black is Back Coalition in agitating for Hands off Uhuru. Yet the projects to confuse and divide anti-imperialists have failed, in that they haven’t stopped these and other principled communist formations from making progress.
For this reason, the state is now in the process of transitioning to the counterinsurgency’s next stage. Towards a point where it’s made illegal all activities which challenge the drive towards World War Three, especially pro-Palestine organizing. If the indicted members of the Uhuru organization are convicted on their “Russian interference” charges, the rest of the pro-Palestine groups will be criminalized too. The trial of these three movement leaders on September 3 will decide whether the state gets that victory, so we must use this time to mobilize for Uhuru as much as we can. A big part of this task is simply getting the word out about the case, which has been overwhelmingly ignored by the media as well as by the organized left. Keeping the people unaware of this effort to criminalize a massive amount of speech is what the war against Uhuru depends on.
The next phase in the crackdown plan is going to depend on selling a narrative: that Kamala Harris is the lesser of two evils in this election, and that everyone who isn’t on the right therefore must join with the Democrats in an “anti-fascist” united front. To understand why Harris truly represents the main wing of fascism, and why the coalition we truly need to build is one which looks quite different from “leftists unifying with liberals,” we need to look at what leftism represents in the context of modern capitalism. At how leftism can’t truly be separated from Harris and the Democrats, because it acts as their primary fighting wing.
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The main way that leftism is aiding the designs of our ruling class has to do with how much apathy it’s cultivating among people with discontent. My fellow traveler Islamic Socialist has observed that “The Communist movement needs professional Communist representation, not a bunch of half-hearted fellow travelers paying lip service to a movement they aren’t actively organizing. There is, arguably based on just some of the biggest influencers, roughly a few million leftists in the US and potentially over 10 thousand active organizers across all left-wing parties and organizations combined. This is uncalled for. The fact our current left-wing culture sustains this entitled individualism to pay lip-service but not actively participate shows that the majority of leftism itself is an utterly useless psyop to keep people disengaged.” And creating such mass lethargy is only one side of what the psyop is doing.
It’s this lack of actual involvement among most of the people who come to leftism, made possible by the destruction of the USA’s old communist movement, that lets bad actors dominate the small element which is active. These actors are thereby able to build a kind of militant fighting force that’s small, but is just what the liberal fascists need for carrying out their goals.
The left-wing counter-gangs are seen by the ruling class as preferable to the right-wing ones. Because if the state were to use the Proud Boys or Patriot Front as its main tools for counterrevolutionary proxy violence, this would expose the state’s fascist nature; it’s the supposedly “anti-fascist” militant groups that can best be sold to the public. I’ve articulated this point many times, but what recently became clear to me is the deeper cultural reason why leftism has so much utility within the counterinsurgency. Counter-gang ops in the modern USA so heavily rely on appealing towards wokeism because under our conditions, wokeism can best do what counter-gangs are supposed to: divert discontent towards counterproductive ventures that aid capital.
When the imperialists developed the counter-gang strategy in their wars against Africa’s decolonization movements, their goal was to present the social elements which desired liberation with false sources of leadership. With intelligence-operated groups that claimed to be the real revolutionaries, while attacking all of the truly authentic anti-colonial forces. We’re seeing the equivalent of this psyop in today’s America, both from the left anti-communist “antifa” anarchists and from the white supremacist “dissident right.” The latter element is absolutely going to have a role in the agent provocateur activities that the feds will stir up amid this election; especially if Harris wins, we’ll see the Proud Boys and their FBI handlers carry out false flag attacks.
The goal with these right-wing counter-gangs is to create the justification for a crackdown against illiberal groups of all kinds, whether MAGA, libertarian, or communist. And the left counter-gangs will doubtless be used for the same purpose wherever the state finds this necessary. Yet their main role is to fight against the targets of this purge directly, because the ideology they represent is the one that best aligns with liberal fascism.
The liberal fascists have been able to engineer a cultural hegemony that allows for anti-communists to market themselves as “anti-fascist,” and to obscure their reactionary activities through language of social justice, because liberal fascism promotes a left utopian idealism. It advocates for using technocratic control to try to destroy all that challenges the vision of the ultra-rich liberals. That’s why the Democratic Party, and the dominant ruling class wing it represents, are fundamentally compatible with these left-wing militants: they functionally want the same things. They share the goals of degrowing the economy in the name of environmentalism; of shutting down all speech which challenges the culture war’s left wing: of responding to society’s problems by punishing the masses.
These are the things the PSL has promoted by saying it wants to dismantle the power grid, by supporting big tech’s acts of censorship following the January 6, and by putting together road blockages that simply hurt regular people. If the way I describe the PSL’s energy program sounds hyperbolic, what it says perfectly aligns with my assesment of it. The PSL calls for “Ending all fossil fuel and nuclear energy use” (emphasis mine). This means that the only realistic outcome of the vision it advocates for is one where the people get subjected to degrowth, because we can’t build an adequate or energy system while discarding nuclear.
This is why China, a country the PSL claims to support, has heavily implemented nuclear energy as part of its climate plan: nuclear is an absolutely indispensable ingredient in any serious project to replace fossil fuels. To abandon nuclear is to condemn the people to a new dark age, let greenhouse emissions persist as fossil fuels are used to compensate for the shortcomings of the “renewables,” and let the rich exclusively enjoy reliable energy. When you center your practice around idealism, you end up siding with monopoly finance capital, which justifies its anti-human actions through rhetoric about justice and progress.
Michael Parenti wrote that “the fascist threat comes not from the Christian right or the militias or this or that grouplet of skinheads but from the national security state itself, the police state within the state.” In other words, this threat comes from the most reactionary parts of monopoly finance capital, which include the liberals and the radical liberals. They’re among the most reactionary because it’s their ideology that seeks degrowth; that seeks to turn history back to the pre-industrial age. The lower levels of capital that have invested in MAGA are in a way more progressive than this, because they want more industry. The dangerous fallacy in the thinking of the PSL camp is that social conservatism necessarily equates to fascism. This view directs attention away from the liberal fascists just because they’re socially progressive; it also gets Marxists to fixate on fighting capital’s lower levels, which aids the ultra-monopolists.
Islamic Socialist concludes that “liberalism is the left-wing of fascism, and…a war must be declared on liberalism as part of the war on fascism; similarly, a war must be declared on western leftism, because western leftism, rather they know it or not, is the second controlled opposition to block the masses from moving to the functional left if and when liberals fail to block them.” I would go slightly further, and say that leftism as we know it is the fighting wing of this liberal fascism. In its militant iterations, that’s the role it’s taken on. And when you study the nature of these ideologies, this alignment between the two makes perfect sense.
When the the intelligence apparatus started on its project to weaponize the New Left, crucial to this was cultivating a version of “Marxism” that seeks not to construct, but to tear down. That forsakes communism’s true essence of being about developing society towards its next evolutionary stage, in favor of a focus on blankedly destroying what exists in the present stage. That’s how we get anti-popular sentiments, anti-growth ideology, and counterproductive tactics like flag burning. As the system shifts towards the next stage of eating itself, these ruling class ideological weapons will be among the biggest threats we face.
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Since I started writing this, many new things have happened within the collapse of the imperial order. Last week’s war crime by “Israel” against Beirut has led to the Zionist entity now bracing for an imminent retaliation from Iran, making “Israel” and its imperialist backers scramble. Washington knows that it can’t win a war against Iran, especially when Iran’s force is combined with the massive military power which Hezbollah has gained. Many are saying we’re hours from World War Three, but this is a bit of a fallacy, because in essence World War Three started years ago. We’re only getting closer to the phase of it when the imperialists can no longer avoid the world war taking on a nature which they can’t manage. (Moreso than it already has; Ukraine has brought about an epic strategic loss for Washington.) In reaction to this peril the empire is facing, the stock market has crashed, bringing us closer to the unprecedented economic disaster that we’ve long been approaching.
This next economic disaster is going to be unprecedented because we’ve never been at a point where capitalism’s contradictions are as extreme as they are now. Never has technology been as advanced as it is today, and therefore as able to replace human labor. How valuable something is comes from how much human labor goes into creating it. So the system’s ability to generate value is less robust than ever. The Great Depression was exceptionally destructive because technology had progressed to a new point. This progress had brought about staggering deficits between how much value capitalism could produce, and what the economy needed to function. Amid the computer revolution and new advancements in automation, we’ve been seeing a new version of this crisis, with the 21st century’s own great depression having begun in 2008. And we’ll soon see it get much worse.
The rapid development of artificial intelligence over these last couple of years has made it so that this next downturn will be even more severe. It’s made it so that still more types of work can now be done by machines, further bringing up the inescapable deficiency within capital. And the ruling class, faced with a level of crisis that their economic system hasn’t yet seen, is going to become even more driven towards escalating this world war. The imperialists are afraid of their war provocations bringing unmanageable blowback, like with Iran and Hezbollah, yet their system needs the third world war to get much bigger. So they’re working towards new massive escalations, likely with China.
The “solution” that liberal fascism is going to present for the economic crisis, alongside these unhinged military adventures, is the further shrinking of our economy. They want us to look at how technological progress is making the present economic order ever-more dysfunctional, and think the answer is to undo this progress. To force the vast majority of people into a historically regressed state of living, where they’re frequently subjected to rolling blackouts and live with ever-lower wages, so that the wars can continue and profits can be kept up.
To carry out this austerity project, they’re not going to need to convince the majority to accept these things. They’ll only need to mobilize the left counter-gangs towards making sure no substantial resistance against the degrowth plan emerges. That’s why the types of leftists Islamic Socialist talks about are obsessed with attacking the so-called “patsocs”: any Marxist who doesn’t hate their society’s people, but rather loves them and wants to bring them growth, is viewed as an enemy by the counter-gangs. They even say we’re fascists for wanting a socialist industrialization, when the actual fascists are doing all they can to stop it from happening. We could make our technological progress into something that raises living standards rather than hurts them, but our rulers and their anti-growth shock troops seek to keep things on the present path.
If we can overcome this next stage of the counterinsurgency, and keep advancing the class struggle amid whatever the counter-gangs try to do to us, we’ll clear a crucial obstacle. When it becomes apparent that proxy violence can’t halt our progress, the ruling class will have to rely more on direct state violence, which comes with serious risks for the state. Cop City is a paper tiger; the military is a paper tiger; the state knows that the more naked violence it inflicts on the people, the closer things could get to the revolutionary tipping point. To the moment when a critical amount of the masses switch towards the side of the anti-monopoly coalition. For things to reach that stage, we’ll need to have survived everything else the counterinsurgency has confronted us with. Which will make us all the more prepared to survive the state’s most violent, desperate attempts at self-preservation, and make the continent ready for socialist construction.
We know we’re capable of winning the ideological fight throughout this next stage, if we keep working to build something beyond the online sphere. The ones who’ve been taking the lead within the struggle against imperialism’s psyops are pivoting towards more in-real-life work, and becoming less invested in the rigged game of social media. This week, Caleb Maupin wrote about the “innovationist turn”; the shift where CPI has come to represent itself as “innovationist,” both as an outreach tactic and to affirm its strategic flexibility. “Social media is just a toxic distraction full of performance artists and flim-flam men,” he concluded. “A big part of the ‘innovationist turn’ is a focus on recruitment in real life and pivoting away from the online spaces…The number of attacks and provocations our organization has faced, attempting to pull us away from our tasks and into one ‘marsh’ or another, is not small. We must focus on carrying out our function, doing the work that we do to educate about anti-imperialism and get the message to as many people as possible. Everything else is a distraction.”
This failure by the psyop managers to divert us is another sign that we’ll keep building more mass connections. What about when the attacks from our enemies escalate, and they use a combination of counter-gang violence and state repression? Then we’ll go underground if need be. But as long as we continue on the good path we’ve gotten on, even in that scenario we’ll be in place to keep building on our gains, and endanger the state further. Then, if the state uses the armed forces to try to crush us, it could ensure its own demise. This country’s people would not accept having their government wage war against them, and as long as we’ve put in the work to offer them a viable alternative, they’ll embrace us.
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