October 7 made the left no longer relevant in the way it had been for most of the Biden era, and communists can take advantage of this development. November 2024 was when the Democratic Party, along with its left-wing appendages, got revealed to be no longer vital; but truly their collapse had come much earlier. Within our practice, communists must account for this shift, where the radical liberals who used to be our main ideological antagonists have become too marginal to deserve our attention. These radlibs can no longer serve their old purpose within the discourse; today, the far right is a much more worthy foe of ours, as it’s the element that’s being propped up by the algorithms. However, there are certain types of leftism that continue to be boosted; those being the very most reformist, pro-Zionist “progressive” currents. They are our other main opponents during this era.
As the imperial state advances its genocidal plans, and expands its war on the working class, what we must do is make communism gain a mainstream presence in our new political landscape. Which requires pulling Gen Z away from both the “dissident right,” and the reformist “progressivism” that social democrats like Hasan Piker are pushing.
In the post-October 7 age, our ruling class doesn’t want to elevate any kind of leftism that supports the Palestinian resistance, even in an idealistic way. At this stage, the only form of left-wing politics that’s getting pushed is Bernie Sanders’ “democratic socialism”; which, depending on your definition of left-wing, is not even on the left at all.
The fundamentally pro-capitalist and pro-imperialist nature of this ideology shows that there isn’t truly any left in the United States, and there hasn’t been one for a long time. Much of Gen Z already understands this; the Sanders base had become disillusioned with the Bernie movement years before October 7, but it was the multiple betrayals of Palestine from this movement’s leaders that alienated even more of Gen Z from them.
When Hasan tries to rehabilitate the social democrat movement, the purpose this serves is not to create a realistic path for the movement to gain power; the U.S. ruling class was never going to let a social democrat win, we found this out when they rigged the primary for Clinton. The purpose is to keep mainstream U.S. politics inside of a pro-Zionist consensus, with there being no version of the left that authentically opposes the genocide.
The problem with this plan is that the bulk of Gen Z simply isn’t compatible with a pro-Zionist “progressivism.” Almost half of Gen Z already say they support Hamas, and this American mass base for anti-Zionism can only grow. Anyone in this camp who may be won over by Hasan’s pitch will do so in spite of their core beliefs, and can therefore be convinced otherwise if they find out about Sandersism’s colonialist character.
We can win this ideological battle, but only if we fight it in the correct way. To bring Gen Z into the communist movement, we’ll need to show them why our position is the correct one; and for those of us within the American Communist Party, we’ll have to prove our institution as being the force which can deliver what Gen Z wants. We are proving ourselves, in that we’re carrying out the community aid efforts and working-class leadership projects which establish us as being credible. But winning the masses also means adopting a universalist way of reaching people, as Dr Calliounes of the ACP-adjacent Infrared community recently advocated. Stated Calliounes about the necessity of expanding our ideas beyond their existing niche:
The Science of Marxism must become an annoying thing. It must involve itself in every thing. It must become inescapable. It must become the new Liberalism. It must become the new universal position. Whether or not you call yourself Fascist, Islamist, Liberal, Republican; everyone must be pushed into attaching Marxism onto themselves. And you can do this, only if you eat everything up. Infrared must claim everyone and everything. No more lazy Infrared Students, eating from their teacher’s bowls constantly. Make your own soup, and share it with the class. Don’t be a burden on the teachers, whose poverty everyone exploits. Make your own soup. Make your soup with every ingredient. Don’t let anyone else use those ingredients, without using your soup.
Because of the progress made by 20th century socialism, and by socialist China’s spectacular recent advancements, Marxism has already gained enough presence that many non-Marxists feel the need to try to incorporate it. The problem is that because Infrared’s ideas haven’t yet become universal, actors like Hasan feel comfortable with putting forth completely twisted versions of “Marxism.”
When Hasan attempts to talk about class struggle, he ends up reducing capitalism to a mere workplace model, and portraying socialism as a project to “democratize” the economy as the end goal. The outcome of this simplistic thinking is that he advances the “cooperatives are socialism” narrative, which fits with the social democrat agenda of endlessly trying to reform one’s way out of capitalist dictatorship. It hyper-focuses on certain individual aspects of capitalism, without treating this system as a larger mode of production; which makes it fully compatible with imperialism, finance capital’s global expropriation system.
It’s because social democracy has no answer to imperialism, and therefore no real answer to Zionism, that the reach of somebody like Hasan within Gen Z is inherently limited. Hasan’s dilemma is that he’s simultaneously trying to appeal to the professional managerial class, and also to the broader Gen Z circles; yet Gen Z is overwhelmingly not of the PMC, but of the working class, with our economic collapse making its ranks progressively more lumpenized. The Gen Z masses are increasingly being forced to subsist on renegade income sources, pushing them out of the working class and into the lumpenproletariat. (This will apply to Gen Alpha to an even greater degree.) The lumpenization trend creates new room for counterrevolutionary actors to gain cultural influence, but these actors will only succeed if we let them.
Should Marxists navigate our conditions correctly, we’ll be able to turn the lumpenization of the American masses to our advantage. The crucial thing is to not be rigid in our thinking and practice, but rather branch out into new areas of culture which communists aren’t even touching right now; that’s what Calliounes says we must do. The reactionaries who target the lumpen youth, or who try to further lumpenize youth from precarious working-class households, have been appealing towards concepts of lifestyle. They’ve been selling gang culture as the path to empowerment in a crumbling society, amounting towards a lumpen version of the pro-capitalist “hustle and grind” manosphere philosophy.
How successful can this psyop be, though, if we make Infrared into something with a broader cultural vision? If we use our dialectical training to provide the youth with a lifestyle model that’s based within popular revolution, and that offers them a path towards collectively rejoining the working class? We can bring Gen Alpha into the revolutionary project, like we can with Gen Z; the key is to understand what their needs are, and show ourselves as being the ones who will fulfill those needs.
The trend is towards the younger generations embracing the anti-Zionist struggle, and the wider class struggle which it’s intertwined with. Inside this radical mass current, some will be convinced by Hasan’s arguments, but the bulk of them do not have the class role which makes somebody truly compatible with social democracy. Our society is becoming ever-more ripe to experience an unparalleled consciousness shift; one led by thinkers who represent the science of popular revolution, and therefore have an innate advantage over all actors which seek to keep us in the dark about this science.
Calliounes has determined that “Infrared students should not be beneath the streams of culture. If they wish to have influence, they have to open a new stream and spring from the ground.” This is how we win our present battle against the Bernie movement revanchists and the gang fetishists, and gain the people’s support: by fully coming into our role as intellectual leaders. As Lenin observed, the working masses are not alienated by intellectualism when it takes forms they can relate to; they actively seek out information sources which give them deep insights into their conditions. The distorters of Marxism provide shallow insights, as do the newer types of psyop peddlers who’ve begun targeting Gan Alpha; which is what puts them both at great risk of failing. The innovators and scholars of Marxism can give the masses the depth they desire, if we put in the work to do so.
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