Being unable to prevent the world from finding out about Zionism’s crimes against humanity, the U.S. empire’s narrative managers are looking for ways to regain dominance over the discourse. This is the driving factor behind everything the major media and the political entertainment machine do these days: a desire to shift the conversation away from reality, and towards the psyops which our ruling elites want us to focus on. This is why Taylor Swift has been named by Time as 2023’s most important person despite the state of today’s political climate: the media bosses want to pretend like Gaza isn’t particularly important to think about. This effort to culturally rehabilitate Zionism is also going to inform what kind of material Hollywood creates next, with the Pentagon now hoping to influence movies in a way that diverts people’s focus away from Palestine.
In the realm of electoral politics, we’re already seeing what this next stage of narrative management is going to look like: a controlled anti-woke campaign, designed as much to distract from the reality of Zionism as to generate sympathy for it. This narrative manipulation campaign, led by culture warriors like Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy, is a discourse psyop. A psyop that works not to promote one idea, but to manufacture fights over wedge issues so that the ruling class ideology can’t be challenged. That’s why Ramaswamy is one of this psyop’s major agents, even though he tries to distance himself from Israel’s present genocide: he’s still denying that he’s anti-Israel, which makes him essentially identical to the hypocritical “liberal Zionists” who disavow Netanyahu while not wanting to give the land back. When an actor like this pushes the culture war, the effect they have is to assist Netanyahu, whose genocide depends on a discourse that’s been diverted from what matters the most.
The only way to fight a discourse psyop is by refusing to contribute to the discourse in the way the elites want you to; by resisting any impulses you may get to enter into counterproductive arguments, and instead focusing on how best to challenge the power structure.
In the case of the woke vs anti-woke discourse psyop, the correct way for Marxists to respond has always been to not follow the example of the conventional “left.” Because “leftism” as we know it in today’s USA, when a mass-based workers movement hasn’t existed for decades, naturally takes on the form of a controlled opposition. It’s designed to lead developing radicals away from doing something truly counter-hegemonic, and merely copying the posturing of the Democratic Party. Which makes their efforts helpful towards the interests of the elites, contributing to the cycle within our cultural conversation that keeps the liberal order dominant.
At the moment, this cycle is switching over away from the era in which the “woke” side dominates. The “woke” aesthetic isn’t compatible with the clash of civilizations narrative that the war against Palestine depends on, and wokeness was already close to losing its usefulness with the failure of the Ukraine narrative. The immediate future of pro-imperialist propaganda is one where pro-liberal, anti-woke voices like DeSantis and Ramaswamy get promoted; while BreadTube and the other facets of woke ruling class propaganda come to be less relevant. This doesn’t mean wokeness will stop being dominant within the “left” itself, though; which is exactly what gives the narrative managers the ability to perpetuate the present discourse cycle.
The only way Marxists can effectively combat Zionism’s psyops is by building a version of the communist movement that’s based not within reactivity towards the anti-wokes, but within an effort to build a mass movement. And to go lower and deeper into the real masses, as Lenin said, we first need to make our efforts genuinely independent from the Democratic Party. Independent both organizationally, and ideologically.
This is what the leftists who tail liberals don’t recognize about the Rage Against the War Machine organizing coalition, and the types of communists which back RAWM: these communists don’t view building this coalition as the end goal, we view winning the people as the end goal. Which we can only do by participating, on an equal organizational footing, in a coalition with the antiwar forces that don’t seek to tail liberals. Like when the Bolsheviks worked inside the non-socialist trade unions, the outcome of such alliances is that revolutionary politics prevails. Which in our case means that whatever elements of the culture war initially had influence within the RAWM political experiment, the culture war has not been able to define the coalition’s activities. The coalition’s organizers don’t allow for anyone to disrupt it with culture war divisiveness. Its central focus is on what matters most at this stage in the class struggle: combating U.S. hegemony.
The lesson Marxists need to take from this is that when you see a project to free the antiwar movement from the Democratic Party, it’s wise to back that project from the start. In order to achieve the progress we need, wherein the woke vs anti-woke discourse psyop has been made unable to divide the different kinds of anti-imperialists, it’s necessary to support the antiwar coalition-building effort during its first stage. When Lenin entered into his partnership with those trade unions, he did so with the correct expectation that it would lead to the communists becoming able to reach the masses. Which is absolutely a worthwhile reward for defying left-wing purity standards, as if that in itself is something we should consider unfavorable. That’s how we can defeat the anti-woke psyop: by taking all the steps required for revolutionary victory, which means rejecting the tribalistic neuroses of the culture war.
The way to ensure that the anti-woke psyop succeeds is by exclusively associating with those who are “woke,” which the left has been doing for decades. If we keep the USA’s socialist movement confined to the activist niche, where the only newcomers can be liberals, our enemies are going to be able to advance their goals without any effective challenge. The most conscious part of the masses has never been synonymous with Democrat voters and radical liberals. And throughout the new cold war, this demographic has only been getting less revolutionary-compatible.
The Democratic Party’s leaders have outright said that they now seek to appeal to higher-income, traditionally Republican voters at the expense of their popularity among the party’s old working class base. Both because of this pivot, and because of the anti-Russian propaganda that so many liberals have embraced out of partisanship, within a couple years after the 2016 election more liberals than conservatives had become supportive of foreign intervention. Ukraine and Israel have since made this liberal embrace of imperialism even more pronounced, with the kinds of liberals who listen to Bill Maher now being brought towards internalizing the war on terror mindset.
This shift has also applied to the radical liberals, who are only supporting Palestine because it’s disadvantaged for the time being. As soon as a people become strong enough to win against the U.S. empire, like the Chinese and the Russians have, radical liberals oppose these people’s anti-imperialist efforts. And for their own sectarian reasons, such leftists have become reflexively ready to denounce anybody who supports these countries. “Leftism” is becoming, in effect, an increasingly reactionary ideology. Which is why the answer to the anti-woke psyop is not to gatekeep the anti-imperialist movement so that only “leftists” can be part of it, but rather to expand the movement into the broader masses. That’s the only way for the class struggle to be authentically anti-imperialist, instead of something entirely shallow. Because if we tailor the movement so that only those most to the “left” are compatible with it, inevitably we’ll start abandoning core principles within the struggle.
As we seek to defeat the empire’s Israel war effort, that’s the lesson we need to take from Ukraine: we’ll lose if we respond to anti-wokeness in the way the narrative managers want us to. There are supposed Marxists who’ve opposed Russia’s anti-fascist action in Ukraine because they think doing so will make them rightist, which is pure cowardice and opportunism. If we reject the discourse psyop that the elites are engineering, this psyop will fail to stop the anti-imperialist coalition from growing.
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