The failure of Washington’s Ukraine proxy war has created the conditions for an opening to emerge within the imperial center’s internal class struggle. If the empire’s geopolitical maneuver had succeeded, and the sanctions had proven effective enough to cause Russia to collapse, the empire would soon be in the process of subduing China and revitalizing global neoliberalism. Then American capital would be strengthened, the system would be fortified, and the prospect of revolution would be made distant, because the American hegemony which props up the system would be reinforced. The climate crisis will devastate the capitalist world regardless of the outcome of our geopolitical struggle, but the imperialist bloc’s losing that struggle has accelerated the revolutionary process. On a macro scale, it’s allowed for China to hasten its project to develop the productive forces of the peripheral countries, which is incrementally making neo-colonialism untenable. This makes the success of the class struggle more immediately probable in the core.
Our victory has been made more probable because with this great strategic miscalculation of the empire—which may be looked back on as its final defeat prior to when it began to truly unravel—has come the demise of the empire’s foundational myth. This is the myth that the USA is exceptional, that the laws of history don’t apply to it. The world, and the American working class, are seeing that the USA is absolutely capable of falling to the same errors which have destroyed past civilizations. That it can do heinous and reckless things to try to hold onto its imperial spoils, such as provoke a war and then sacrifice the material wellbeing of its own people in order to prolong the conflict. The imperialist narrative managers will always insist that Russia is to blame for it all, but anyone who’s honest can see that this is the U.S. empire desperately trying to deflect responsibility. This deflection won’t work, because the consequences are coming for our ruling class no matter what. Those consequences being an increase in the severity of the country’s social crises, to the effect that the people’s discontent becomes irrepressible.
As we’ve already been seeing in Europe, where the process of imperial decay is further along, unrest is inevitable when the ruling class has destroyed the people’s livelihoods. Across Europe, America, and the other capitalist countries, with this last year’s increase in inequality will come increases in popular revolts. Which the system can survive, but only if it manages to sufficiently co-opt and divert these uprisings. That’s where the initial job of the communists comes in.
Our responsibility is to guide the people’s outrage at their conditions in a direction that can actually bring about the overthrow of the bourgeois state, rather than another protest movement that gets redirected into reformism or suppressed due to lack of sustainable organization. We have to bring the education, training, and mobilizing structures to the people which are required for creating a genuine threat towards the ruling class. This is a project that depends on purging our radical spaces of the ideas which the system uses to keep the popular movements ineffectual. In the core, those ideas foremost consist of pro-imperialist narratives. Particularly the ones that get promoted by our imperialism-compatible “left.”
Since the communist movement got suppressed in this country, the people’s liberation causes have been monopolized by the manufactured scam which is the “new left.” This is a version of the “left” that’s fundamentally averse to class struggle, and claims class can be fully replaced with identity issues. Essential to selling this lie is the reinforcement of U.S. imperialism’s propaganda. By cultivating a “left” that’s committed to defending pro-imperialist narratives from a “progressive” perspective, COINTELPRO has created a buffer against the emergence of a vanguard. Of a force that can provide revolutionary guidance to the people. The “leftist” organizations and social media brand-builders which decry Russia’s anti-fascist war, promote the atrocity propaganda against countries like China and Syria, or direct unfounded critiques towards anti-imperialists have been granted a certain kind of power by the state. This is the power to gatekeep who and what is considered acceptable within radical spaces, to decide how the liberation movements are run.
They wield this power unilaterally, without giving the people they’re speaking for the chance to truly choose who they want to be in charge of organizing efforts. As Parenti observed, the essence of their purpose is to block the advancement of class struggle:
Seizing upon anything but class, U.S. leftists today have developed an array of identity groups centering around ethnic, gender, cultural, and lifestyle issues. These groups treat their respective grievances as something apart from class struggle, and have almost nothing to say about the increasingly harsh politico-economic class injustices perpetrated against us all. Identity groups tend to emphasize their distinctiveness and their separateness from each other, thus fractionalizing the protest movement. To be sure, they have important contributions to make around issues that are particularly salient to them, issues often overlooked by others. But they also should not downplay their common interests, nor overlook the common class enemy they face. The forces that impose class injustice and economic exploitation are the same ones that propagate racism, sexism, militarism, ecological devastation, homophobia, xenophobia, and the like.
The “anything but class” left, as Parenti calls it, has in the age of the new cold war weaponized imperialism’s demagogic narratives to advance this goal of diverting from class politics. The left anti-communists, as well as the self-identified communists who oppose Operation Z, are campaigning to vilify and exclude those who have principles. These types exploit the anti-China, anti-Russia cultural consensus that the media has manufactured, using the anti-imperialist stances of the serious communist parties to portray these parties as untouchable within an activism setting. Their goal is to portray us as supporting a “genocide” against the Uyghurs, a “war of aggression” against Ukraine, and every other evil that Washington’s targets get fraudulently accused of.
The desire to utilize this opportunistic smear tactic is the true reason why these anti-Marxist leftists care so much about upholding the State Department’s narratives. To effectively wreck movements, they have to sell just how much they feel for the peoples who Washington’s adversaries are supposedly violating the rights of. They perform outrage against those who challenge the atrocity narratives because this lets them curry favor with the Democratic Party, and the State Department by extension. Which are the entities that their loyalties truly align with, because it’s these entities that put forth the foreign policy ideas that provide them with effective narrative weapons against communists. They believe imperialism’s lies not because they’re naive, but because they’re corrupt. That’s what separates them from the majority of the American working class, who at present only believe imperialism’s lies because they’re all the average American has so far been exposed to.
The less power these wreckers have, the better the working class will be able to escalate the class struggle. The struggle’s left-wing enemies perpetuate their monopoly over radical spaces through the illusion that without support from them, no communist will ever be able to succeed. The truth is the other way around. It’s only until communists fully stop caring what these frauds think that we’ll gain the leverage necessary for mounting a serious opposition to the bourgeoisie. The more unified and large we make the anti-imperialist coalition which Washington’s Ukraine failure has produced the conditions for, the less power the left movement wreckers will have. That’s why they’re at present trying to discredit the idea of such a coalition, seeking to discourage anti-imperialists from allying with anybody who they haven’t approved as worthy of working with. No matter what we do, the wreckers will always say we’re doing it wrong. That’s their game, to sow doubt in perpetuity. The more we stop listening to them, the more effective we can be.
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