Using paramilitary proxy forces, ones that will be deployed within U.S. borders to suppress dissent, is the desperate path that our ruling class is pursuing. Facing the decline of the imperialist system, and a society that’s increasingly unified in its opposition to this system, the elites are working to pit two color revolutions against each other. One of these color revolutions is “trad” in nature, with an increasingly prominent part of it being the “dissident right” figures who outright promote Nazism. The other one is the radically woke element, which effectively acts as a proxy for the Democratic Party by advancing an extreme (and at times ultraviolent) version of liberal culture war politics. I’ve already written about these dual ideological forces, but something I recently realized is exactly what kind of role they have within the class conflict. What kind of effect they’re having amid this stage in our social system’s collapse.
It’s not just that these counter-gangs and proto counter-gangs are diverting discontent away from class struggle. The other way they’re working to impede progress is by perpetuating chaos within our society. The chaos that our ruling class needs to keep itself in power amid the descent of the country into appalling conditions, and the rise of proto-revolutionary consciousness. The mass base for revolution is there. But a crucial obstacle towards our connecting with these masses, and building a force of popular mobilization, is the discord which our rulers are manufacturing. Discord that comes from numerous destructive social forces; ones which both arise from capitalism’s conditions on their own, and are actively nurtured by the intelligence centers.
The class war is not just between the workers and the capitalists, but also between the workers and the proxies of the capitalists. These proxies range from highly funded political operatives who have abundant resources at their disposal, like the Proud Boys, to the gangs that recruit impoverished teens into projects for proliferating CIA drugs. Fascist agitators, career criminals, perpetrators of mass public violence—all of these elements, whether their motives are political or not, have the effect of strengthening our class enemies. They’re the forces that are exacerbating the destructive impacts of capitalism, keeping people scared to go in public, demoralized, and divided. Disparate as they are, they all exist because of our present social system, and they all act to reinforce this system.
To overcome these chaotic forces, and succeed at building a revolutionary force amid the crises they help perpetuate, we communists need to understand what our relation to these elements is. To recognize that counter-gangs exist on not just the right but also the left, and avoid being manipulated into enabling the leftist ones just because they call themselves “communist.”
I’ve talked about how what we call “antifa,” even though its members describe themselves as socialists or even “Marxists,” is truly a fighting force for the militant wing of left anti-communists. I’ve also gone into how communists shouldn’t ally with gangs just because their members are economically dispossessed, or pretend that the lumpen are of the same class character as the workers. Practices like these are advanced by the “pan-leftists,” the wing of modern U.S. Marxists who seek to keep communism tied in with the left at all costs. The pan-leftists are adversaries that mass-centered communists need to combat within our own spaces of discourse, but it’s becoming apparent that on a larger scale, they pose an additional kind of danger. A danger of giving the “dissident right” the fuel it will need for its campaign of state and counter-gang violence.
To use anti-wokeness as the narrative basis for its next wars, degrowth efforts, and attacks on civil liberties, the deep state needs to keep communists under the control of this discourse psyop’s woke side. It has to neutralize its opposition, then divert this opposition towards unwittingly aiding capital’s interests. And pan-leftism, with its insular focus and hostility towards antiwar groups that go against its dogmas, is the ideology that can fill this role. If Marxists are made to accept the core pan-leftist idea—that revolution will necessarily come from the left—then the “dissident right” and “trad” forces will advance without any serious challenge. The same people who would otherwise have built an effective revolutionary force will be stuck in their wokeist culture war bubble, unable to gain mass support or ideologically counter the reactionaries.
The outcome will be that the ultraviolent forces within the left can be used as powerful agitprop for the “trad” side. As tensions within our society escalate, they’ll carry out increasingly adventurist actions, spurred on by Democratic Party fearmongering about Project 2025 and other focal points in the culture wars. That’s the biggest danger of “antifa”: that it will escalate its conflict with conservative America, giving the anti-woke psyop the fuel it needs to produce a purge against dissent. The big danger of pan-leftism is that it will let these ultraviolent elements speak for communists, making Marxists unable to separate themselves from these malicious agitators. If Marxists place “left unity” above integrity, and let our practice be compromised by a desire for pleasing the ultra-lefts, we’ll be unable to win the masses. Which will let the right win by default.
This outcome is avoidable, because both pan-leftism and “dissident” rightism are by design unable to win the people. As Mao said, reactionaries are ultimately weak, because they’re divorced from the masses. This is what pan-leftists don’t truly understand, because they think Marxists can win by investing ourselves in the left rather than by investing in the people as a whole. The left represents a niche within American society, which doesn’t care about cultural issues as much as leftists do. We can afford to alienate ourselves from the left—which comes with harmful baggage anyhow—because the ones we really need to win over are the people as a whole. And this means not pretending that the cultural rhetoric which appeals to leftists is the same rhetoric that appeals to the average person.
The anti-woke psyop can be defeated not through investing communism in wokeism, but through showing that communists represent an effective opposition towards our liberal institutions. The bulk of our society is against these institutions, and is in that sense already on our side. So for us communists who reject pan-leftism, the foremost thing to do is build connections with these disillusioned masses, most of all the ones who’ve been alienated from bourgeois politics. The “trad” side will mobilize their fanatical anti-communist vigilantes against us, and the pan-leftists will do the inverse by working to purge us from the left. But so long as we put in the work to build an institutional strength of our own, this won’t even impede us, because we desire a clean break from the left regardless. We are in place to outmaneuver the forces opposing revolution, if we take advantage of the opportunities before us.
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