One of the most important things I’ve learned from living through the last ten years of political upheavals in the United States, and from studying the history of class struggle, is that we cannot simply celebrate when a part of the capitalist power structure collapses. Before, during, and after these disruptive events, we need to be working to assert agency over the situation. To build connections with the people, educate the masses on how they can advance their interests, train our inner cadres, and become in place to take on a leadership role as the struggle’s decisive moment comes closer. This is the first thing we need to keep in mind as we observe the unprecedented breakdown of the USA’s bipartisan bourgeois “democracy.”
Since 2016 and its related crises, it’s been clear that the country’s two big ruling class parties can’t go on in the way that they normally have. The refusal from both the Democrats and the Republicans to rectify the ongoing economic harms which 2008 did to the working class has guaranteed their demise. The question is how well the workers, and the organizers who seek to bring the workers to victory, can outmaneuver the ruling class amid this chaotic moment.
When I say the two parties are headed for demise, I don’t mean they’ll soon no longer be able to hold state power, because the USA’s electoral system is rigged to make sure only they can ever dominate the offices of government. Over a century ago, in response to the proletarian movement’s efforts at utilizing electoralism to take power, the state made it so that third parties could no longer replace an existing main party. Therefore while the two big parties continue to spiral downward, they won’t disappear (at least as long as the capitalist state exists). But they also won’t be able to hold power as they once did. The most important role that both of them have is to manage the discourse in a way which pushes out revolutionary ideas. To make it so that politics are defined not by a battle between the ruling class and the people, but by a battle between two teams the ruling class has set up. Under our conditions, this is increasingly difficult for them to do.
The Democratic Party was only able to regain discourse dominance following its defeat in 2016 through coordinated efforts at shrinking the discourse itself. Through a campaign by the intelligence agencies to orchestrate massive online censorship against dissident voices, justified by the “Russian interference” stories these agencies fabricated. The Biden campaign’s deep state allies used the pandemic to police information even more heavily, culminating in the infamous incident where the FBI got big tech to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story. Then, when federal infiltrators made sure that Trump’s most militant supporters could manage to break into the U.S. Capitol, the Democrats carried out a liberal coup. They expanded presidential “counterterrorism” powers, censored anti-imperialist content by Palestinians in particular, and prepared for their long-planned escalations with Russia.
The widespread public outrage over war-exacerbated inflation, and young people’s abandonment of Biden over his crimes against Gaza, have guaranteed that the Democratic Party will fall. The only way Biden may “win” now is through great new election interference by the intelligence agencies. Which would only provoke a new election legitimacy dispute that this time creates even more public doubt about the results. And if Trump wins, it’s not like the Democrats will be able to use his presidency to make people forget about their own party’s sins, like they could do to an extent during Trump’s first term. The Palestine genocide is a shame that’s going to haunt every major Democrat politician from here on, because history will remember it to the same degree as the Armenian or Rwandan genocides. A hundred years from now, whatever may remain of today’s U.S. liberals will still be having to defend themselves from the condemnation that comes upon Palestine genocide deniers.
Should liberals feel the weight of this reality in the shorter term, and Biden loses the election, the Republican Party will then fall apart almost as fast as the Democratic Party. Trump winning this year would be the worst thing to ever happen to MAGA, because MAGA has always depended on the illusion that its leaders represent a break from liberal politics. That they’re actually working towards ending the wars, dismantling the permanent security state, and breaking the dominance of monopoly finance capital. If Trump comes into office in 2025, MAGA won’t be able to maintain this illusion.
During Trump’s first term, he could keep most of his base on his side by diverting attention towards the deep state, acting like he was valiantly fighting to take back the government from forces that opposed him on everything. That his Syria and Russia policies aligned with the deep state’s preferences was something he distracted his base from through culture war tactics. Trump and the other controlled opposition rightists pretend like defeating the deep state only means combating wokeness, so that the MAGA base won’t focus on the issues that matter most.
This partly works, but not everybody in the MAGA base has been willing to overlook Trump’s imperialist activities. The more libertarian or paleoconservative elements within this base have felt betrayed when Trump has bombed Syria, as reflected by how the Trump World figures who align with these elements reacted in this way. And Syria is a relatively well-hidden part of U.S. foreign policy compared to the Ukraine proxy in war, which Trump has shown he’ll continue. His stance on Ukraine is that he aims to make the other NATO members pay more for it, an idea that’s sold through the “America First” angle but is really just a statement of intent to continue the existing policy. If Trump prolongs Biden’s wars, the MAGA movement will lose momentum, leaving the politicians who seek to carry on Trump’s brand without a sufficient mass base. Because Ukraine has become the litmus test for whether a politician on the “dissident right” is authentic.
The country’s people urgently need these wars to end, or they’ll keep being harmed by our inflation crisis. It’s obvious to anybody with so much as a proto-revolutionary consciousness that our government is refusing to rectify our living standards crisis, and that what it’s instead prioritizing is a global death machine. Right now the propagators of the anti-woke psyop are trying to obscure this reality by framing Palestine as a “woke” issue, essentially so that they can make opposition towards the “Israel” proxy war look cringeworthy to conservatives. But how effective can this trick ultimately be when the “Israel” war is fundamentally connected to the Ukraine war, which the MAGA base has rejected in the greatest numbers?
Part of how well we manage to bring together the different demographics of antiwar Americans depends on whether the pro-Palestine struggle gets dominated by the “woke” elements of the left. By the leftists who seek to exclude everybody from the struggle who isn’t within their particular ideological niche, or who isn’t at least a liberal. To take advantage of the duopoly’s breakdown, and build a mass workers force, we need to understand that the “woke” and “anti-woke” sides are two color revolutions being pitted against each other. We shouldn’t respond to the anti-woke side by putting ourselves on the opposite end of the culture war. The culture war is a ruling class trap.
Our focus needs to be on building coalitions among other antiwar elements, establishing a presence within the unions so that we can agitate among other organized workers, and advancing the information war against U.S. imperialism. Many modern U.S. Marxists believe we can construct a mass workers party through pan-leftism, where we establish alliances with anarchists and the other “woke” elements. Trying to do this will only set us back, because these elements won’t accept us as allies until we’ve compromised our anti-imperialism in favor of “leftism.”
We can only win against our ruling institutions on the basis of solidarity with Russia, China, and all other anti-imperialist countries; as well as by nurturing the anti-imperialist impulses of the country’s broader masses. We can’t do this while trying to appease the “left.” Most of the U.S. left is hostile towards these countries, and takes the anti-popular stance of petty-bourgeois radicalism. They key to building this alternative political force for the people is transcending leftism, and centering our practice around what the masses need.
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