Late-stage capitalism is about selling scams to the people. Scams designed to keep a declining system going by convincing the people that the structural violence within these measures for keeping profits up is worthwhile. An example of this kind of social engineering is the narrative that Washington and European elites used to justify their placing Greece into debt bondage, as a supposed solution to the country’s reaching an economic apocalypse from its capitalist crises. Yanis Varofakis, one of the few involved in Greece’s handling of the situation who tried to stop the austerity plan, wrote a call for resistance that reminds me of what the resistors to Biden’s proxy war are saying. He called for those with integrity to bring: “Truth to power. Truth to our partners. Truth to the citizens of Europe. Truth regarding the sorry state of our banks. Truth about our ‘surpluses’. Truth about non-existent investment.”
We must do the equivalent in response to the policies the U.S. government is enacting to try to maintain the liberal order. Even though Varoufakis couldn’t prevent Greece’s being sold out, his endeavor provides an example for us. Victories for the liberation struggle are built on previous attempts that failed, but still represented progressive events; the 1917 revolution wouldn’t have felt as doable without the Paris commune. Amid the dark conditions that the ruling class is cultivating, we must struggle for working class victory. At the moment, the most meaningful act within this struggle is to advance the information war. Which entails exposing both imperialism’s psyops, and the hypocrisies of liberalism within the imperial center.
This can be done by providing the people with answers to the question that they’ve increasingly been wanting answered: why are their economic circumstances undergoing another vast series of shocks only fifteen years after 2008? The government can’t provide them with answers, all it can do is continue promoting the lies behind its wars while making more false promises. The truth is that the factors which produced our present economic crisis, and gave the government an excuse for further austerity with this week’s debt ceiling resolution, are all things that our government is responsible for. Including and especially the factor of the Ukraine war. The two parties and their corporate puppeteers engineered the conditions that led to a new war in Europe. They cultivated a Federal Reserve which has been carrying out a scheme by banking executives to drive down living standards so that employers can gain more leverage. They designed an economy that’s extremely financialized, concentrated, unstable, and set up to prioritize militarism over social spending.
Now that they’ve exploited the latest crisis this system has brought to make the austerity paradigm even worse, they’re trying to sustain this cycle of disasters which get followed by additional attacks upon the working class. The way they aim to sustain it is by selling the next steps in their war against the proletariat as something progressive. By convincing us that a severely shrunken economy, and a diversion of even more resources towards militarism, are things leftists should support.
The argument they’re using to convey this idea is something we’ve already been seeing for a long time. The Democratic Party’s narrative managers assert that to save the planet, we need degrowth, and that the new cold war against Russia and China is part of what’s required for reaching this goal. We’ve seen this with John Kerry’s assertion that expanding the military buildups against Russia and China is something the USA needs to do in response to the climate crisis. We’ve seen this with the implications from imperialism’s propagandists that Russia and China share the most culpability in delaying climate progress, even though China is almost a decade ahead of its Paris accord pledges while the U.S. military is the largest institutional polluter.
The argument these ideas come from is that the USA, being the leader of the liberal order and therefore supposedly the only one capable of bringing the globe to a positive climate outcome, is therefore justified in doing whatever necessary for countering the world powers which threaten its global authority. Because the liberals present their model of governance as the sole one capable of preventing environmental catastrophe—as well as further disease horrors, after how relevant public health has become in the last decade—they conclude that fighting the new cold war is simply a cost of saving civilization. Austerity is also supposedly necessary for this, since within the degrowth ideology, the people rather than the system are seen as the thing to blame for global warming.
And this argument has persuasive power among leftists, insofar as the representatives of what we today call the “left” are so opportunistic that they’re willing to in essence go along with the narratives of the imperialists. To narratively assist the liberals with these policies, one doesn’t have to outright support austerity, or Ukraine aid, or AFRICOM, or Washington’s effort to occupy the southwest Pacific so China can be countered. They only need to act more concerned about left sectarianism, or tailing the Democratic Party, or promoting radical liberal theories, or the other self-interested things the imperialism-compatible left does, than about fighting the system. The globe’s primary contradiction is U.S. hegemony, the primary contradiction in the imperial center is class, and the primary contradiction in our discourse spaces is radical liberalism. Because radical liberalism is what motivates those who are supposed to represent the revolutionary struggle to prioritize ideas which don’t fundamentally threaten the ruling class.
The system is not endangered when leftists repeat the same critical theories that the New York Times regularly features. What it is threatened by are the ideas that challenge imperialism’s psyops, and that expose the Democratic Party and its narrative managers for their complicity in imperialist violence.
The efforts to liberate the LGBT community, Black people, Native people, and other minoritized groups have the potential to take on a revolutionary character, and often have throughout U.S. history. What the radlibs leave out is that in an environment where these efforts got co-opted a long time ago, they can only be revolutionary when one advances them in a way which simultaneously promotes the class and anti-imperialist struggle. The way to do this is by rejecting the radlib idea that the people in the imperial center are fundamentally reactionary, which leads a developing radical towards elitism and detachment from the people.
As soon as you start thinking the interests of the U.S. working class fundamentally differ depending on their skin color, view the American people as synonymous with their government, and emphasize what divides the workers more than what unites them, you’ve been duped into aiding the Democratic Party. The Democrats and their policies depend on there being a “left” and a “communist movement” that aren’t interested in winning, that care more about gaining influence within the insular “New Left” spheres which the three-letter agencies have cultivated.
The New Left was created to replace the genuine communist movement, which got wiped out first with McCarthyism and then with the destruction of the Panthers. With the Ukraine war, which has driven most of the country into poverty and thereby exposed the radlib lie about Americans mainly being labor aristocrats, we have an unprecedented opportunity to rebuild that movement. The way to do this is by rejecting sectarianism, dogmatism, and left opportunism, then building a working class movement that exists beyond the insular left circles. There’s an extremely powerful idea we can use to advance this goal: that our government has sold out the working class to fight a war which Washington is truly the one to blame for. If we bring this idea to the workers, and fight the psyops the liberals use to argue Russia is the aggressor, we’ll bring tens of millions to communism. The imperialism-compatible left isn’t doing this, because it doesn’t want to win. To bring truth to power and truth to the people, we must reject the advice of these servants of the Democratic Party.
————————————————————————
If you appreciate my work, I hope you become a one-time or regular donor to my Patreon account. Like most of us, I’m feeling the economic pinch during late-stage capitalism, and I need money to keep fighting for a new system that works for all of us. Go to my Patreon here.
