For Marxists in the United States to get a sense of what it’s realistically going to look like to build socialism where we are, we need to examine in depth how the existing socialist projects came to be. To consider not just their practical achievements, but also the cultural and historical factors which made these achievements possible in the first place. In every country where socialism is explicitly being built, or where it in effect is being built, this progress exists on top of what the previous society already was; on the cultures of these places as they had previously been. This is maybe the most important thing for communists in the USA to keep in mind at the moment, because internalizing this lesson allows us to meet the people where they’re at. To avoid becoming detached from the masses, and connect with them in a way that most U.S. communists haven’t been able to for the last half-century.
Why was communism mainstream prior to the rise of the “New Left”? Why could the Black Panthers create a force which genuinely threatened the state? Because the practice of the Panthers was a mass-based one; one which led them to form coalitions with every element of the people that was revolution-compatible, including white workers who (at first) held racist attitudes. Henry Winston criticized some Panther members for embracing the New Left’s “internal colony” theory, and his critique was correct, but the organization nevertheless held the old communist movement’s knowledge about how to win the people.
U.S. communist orgs have since failed to replicate the successes of the BPP, and of the early CPUSA, because after the BPP got crushed those New Left deviations became fully dominant within American communism. What we’ve called “communism” in this country for the last half-century has mainly been something that’s not communism, but radical liberalism. An organizing clique that’s given up on reaching the bulk of the workers, in favor of pandering to an intelligentsia element that’s receptive towards the New Left “critical theories.”
This problem is fixable, and we can fix it by applying this great lesson which the history of class struggle has taught us. The lesson that socialism can only be built on the basis of sublating the society within which it comes to exist. There are the more obvious examples of this, like how Chinese socialism has been built by sublating Confucianism. But then there are the examples that have almost entirely been overlooked by modern U.S. Marxists, even the ones who recognize China as being a socialist state.
For instance, Iran has been building an economy that’s in many ways equivalent to the one which countries like China have, even though Iran’s ruling ideology isn’t socialist outright. This reality has been illustrated by one especially controversial article featured in Midwestern Marx, which provoked a backlash from the idealists who see this as an affront to their narrow concept of socialism:
Iran’s system has a deeply grassroots character built on mass working class support, which makes its political system extremely difficult to dislodge- despite the best efforts of the US Pentagon and the CIA, the Zionist entity, the Gulf monarchies and their Wahabbi/Salafi proxies. It can be argued that Iran is not only anti-imperialist, but socialist, a rare model of Islamic socialism that has not existed elsewhere since Libya’s model of Islamic socialism was destroyed in 2011…Whether the ideology is Marxism Leninism or Shia populism/Islamic socialism, the institutions themselves are very similar. One cannot possibly understand how the Islamic Republic has held together for 45 years in the face of war, sanctions, imperialist encirclement, and ethnic separatist terrorism if one doesn’t recognize the popular and working-class backbone of the Iranian state.
Part of why Iran hasn’t come to call this socialism is because the word “socialism” is associated with atheism, which the Iranian Islamic Republic isn’t compatible with. In terms of the economic system that Iranians live within, though, this rejection of the label hasn’t made too much of a difference. Given that the socialist projects under governments which call themselves socialist look so much like what Iran has, where society has been organized to give democratic control to the workers, this system would be basically the same if the country were to instead be a “Socialist Republic.” The main difference would be in the country’s social policies, which would likely still be conservative given the country’s cultural conditions.
Is America’s next revolution going to involve this same quality that Iran’s revolution has had, where socialism effectively gets constructed but it’s not called socialism? This is possible, given how many Americans associate the word “socialism” with things that are antithetical to their cultural identity. As a Marxist-Leninist, I share the view by Marx that communists should abhor to conceal their views, and that we should therefore advance socialism and communism while being open in wanting them. Should this type of socialism come into being where we are, though, we shouldn’t become ultra-leftists and try to tear it down. And as our class conflict continues to escalate, we should advance communism in a way that the masses can truly relate to. We shouldn’t hide that we’re communists and want communism. We also shouldn’t try to negate everything about U.S. culture as it now exists.
It would be totally counterproductive for us to wage a war against U.S. patriotism, or against Christianity. National nihilism is never a good path for communists, not unless one lives in a truly fake country like “Israel” (in which case it’s not even national nihilism). Socialist projects like the one in Nicaragua have shown that Christianity is compatible with socialism. And most importantly for our situation, in the modern United States it’s extremely poor practice for Marxists to put cultural battles at the center of what they do. We’re in a moment where our ruling class is desperately trying to use culture war discourse psyops to negate the country’s rising class consciousness. The worst thing communists could do is assist our class enemies in advancing these psyops, and say: “yes, we do think symbolic and cultural issues are that important.”
We will overcome the anti-“woke” psyop, which is looking to be finance capital’s primary narrative tool during this next stage of the class war. We’ll overcome it by putting forth an agenda that’s capable of winning over far more people than this psyop can convince. The anti-woke discourse, and its inverse within wokeified left-liberalism, can only bring in a fraction of society. A plurality of the USA’s people are right now politically unaffiliated because of this; the only thing that could get them into politics is a program which can raise their living conditions. Communists have such a program, and bringing it to the people is a crucial part of how we’ll sublate our society into socialism. The same spirit that led so many Americans to become communists in the last century is showing up again, coming out in developments like the rise of opposition towards imperialist wars. We can turn this into a mass mobilization against our imperialist dictatorship, and a project to build socialism for our conditions.
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