Humanity for Peace, the organization that’s holding a rally this week on Hiroshima Day, is putting forth these demands:
- the immediate ending of all funding and weapons to Ukraine.
- convene immediate unconditional peace talks.
- the dissolution of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)
- a new international security architecture must be created to end the division of the world into blocs, eliminating geopolitics. This new architecture must take into account the security concerns of every sovereign nation, large or small.
These ideas are, in essence, shared by the primary leaders who’ve been facilitating the transition to a multipolar world. Pepe Escobar has observed how “The year 2022 ended with a Zoom call to end all Zoom calls: Presidents Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping discussing all aspects of the Russia-China strategic partnership in an exclusive video call…On their coordination to ‘form a just world order based on international law,’ Putin emphasized how ‘we share the same views on the causes, course, and logic of the ongoing transformation of the global geopolitical landscape.’ Facing ‘unprecedented pressure and provocations from the west,’ Putin noted how Russia-China are not only defending their own interests ‘but also all those who stand for a truly democratic world order and the right of countries to freely determine their own destiny.’”
The fact that Russia’s actions in Ukraine are supported by socialist states like the DPRK; and by Global South liberation movements like the one led by Burkina Faso’s Captain Ibrahim Traoré; shows Humanity for Peace is advancing a program that’s collectively backed by the world’s fastest-rising political forces. Those being the forces that are replacing American power.
This is why Humanity for Peace’s graphic displaying these demands has been getting a wildly outsize reaction (relative to its exposure in the places where it initially got posted) from the forces which seek to make NATO continue dominating the discourse. Reddit, the social network that in effect functions as a discourse management tool for the Democratic Party’s online wing, has been seeing this graphic widely shared. This has suddenly made Humanity for Peace’s program commonly known not just among English-speaking pro-NATO partisans, but also among a variety of European ones, as I’ve discovered upon finding German-language commenters who’ve linked to the graphic. Obviously these actors have been sharing the graphic with the intent to ridicule Humanity for Peace’s ideas, but this could backfire.
The pro-NATO pseudo-fandoms behind this mass mockery campaign feel comfortable widely sharing the graphic because Reddit is an echo chamber, seemingly making it implausible that these ideas could reach the country’s broad working class. Yet the fact that these pro-NATO discourse management centers have felt the need to respond to the graphic so sensationally and disproportionately is an indication that the more actions the anti-NATO movement takes, the more threatened the discourse managers get.
The worst thing that could happen for the Democratic Party; as well as for its narrative management wings in the online spaces, the corporate media, and elsewhere; is the USA’s workers being widely exposed to the same anti-imperialist ideas driving most of the rest of the world to increasingly defy American hegemony. The interests of this country’s workers align with this global effort to end the hegemon’s rule; therefore if too many of these workers get the opportunity to absorb the ideas behind this effort, the entire system gets destabilized. Externally, the empire becomes unable to maintain the dollar’s dominance, as internal mass opposition towards the war machine renders untenable the global war operations which keep the dollar strong. Internally, the empire becomes unable to keep using the Democratic Party to co-opt and divert the class struggle, as the workers have become too educated to accept their rights movement being led by an imperialist party. These are the two disaster scenarios that NATO’s narrative managers are tasked with preventing.
The more they’ve worked to stop this upheaval of the discourse, though, the more we’ve seen a trend: the events that get produced by the actions of the new cold warriors end up leading to the same disruptions within the liberal order which they fear so much. When their eight years of warmongering over Ukraine enabled an unacceptable series of escalations by Washington and Kiev, escalations which provoked Moscow into intervening, this only provided the cold warriors with a temporary gain in their perceived credibility. The supposed mandate to unify behind NATO which the Ukraine war created throughout Europe can only be viewed as such for so long; there’s a limit to Europe’s loyalty towards Washington, and the grievous economic costs of the Ukraine war have in the long term made their relationship more strained than it would have been otherwise.
Commentator Radhika Desai observes why bringing about the Ukraine proxy war represented a doomed gamble for the hegemon:
China. Knowing that Europe, already reluctant to go to war with Russia, would be even more reluctant (for sound economic reasons) to join any anti-Chinese venture, Biden sought so resolutely and completely to sunder Europe from Russia and bind it to the US through the Ukraine war that it would have no choice but to go along with the US on China later. However, this enterprise got off to an unpromising start and is now unravelling. Marshalling unity even against Russia was hard, involving as it did inflicting a great deal of economic pain on Europe. Even with the Biden Administration’s historical luck of having astonishingly compliant leaderships in so many capitals, pre-eminently Berlin, NATO unity over Ukraine conflict has been more a show than a reality, with a minimum of real and maximum of show compliance. Sanctions have generally been confined those that hurt the least, leaving so many western companies still operating in Russia one wonders what the fuss is all about. Weapons supplies have focused on those that are easiest to spare, often obsolete, leaving Ukraine with a ‘Big Zoo of NATO equipment’ that is hard to deploy or repair efficiently.
The momentary reunification of NATO, and the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline, have been hollow “victories” compared to the defeats the conflict has brought to the empire. With the acceleration of the progress by BRI and BRICS that Russia’s special operation has brought, ultimately Washington’s rivals are in a better place to define the 21st century than they would be if Russia had continued to respond passively.
These international victories for the anti-imperialist cause aren’t the only unexpected outcomes that the new cold warriors have brought by starting the war, though. Their overconfident attempt to destabilize Eurasia has also turned into a catalyst for the rise of a new anti-imperialist movement within the heart of the empire. A movement that’s capable of sabotaging U.S. capital’s final, desperate plan for trying to maintain power in a post-American world; that plan being to engineer a further degrowth of the economy, while implementing a liberal fascism which suppresses counter-hegemonic political actors.
The irony is that if this plan is as successful as the schemes the defenders of the liberal order have been employing so far, it will be the thing which unintentionally ends this order.
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The present phase of the power struggle between the liberal culture hegemony, and those who challenge it, began when the liberal order’s credibility as a viable post-Soviet world system became threatened in 2008. The anti-Bush movement, and the revelations of Iraq WMD fraudulence that aided this movement, had only represented a counter to the hegemon for so long. Due to the liberal tailism of the movement’s leadership sources, such as ANSWER, the demonstrations failed to take on a revolutionary and sustainable nature. So when the neoliberal economic order imploded at the end of the Bush era, the ruling class was in a state of crisis, but it also was able to try to reinforce liberalism without being challenged by any strong revolutionary presence.
The empire’s attempts to compensate for its economic decline through military aggression had lost Washington much credibility. And with China’s rise, along with Russia’s break from being a U.S. client state, the world’s anti-imperialist forces had undergone a resurgence in strength throughout the decade. These emerging global advantages for revolutionary politics, though, wouldn’t be able to bring the U.S. closer to revolution until a radical force emerged within the core.
So throughout the Obama era, the ruling class was able to successfully fortify liberalism. With Occupy Wall Street, the state not only carried out a repressive campaign against the elements of the movement that could be seen as a threat; it also, more importantly, co-opted the class struggle via the Democratic Party. The movement was a mass reaction to worsening economic conditions, a reaction that largely had a spontaneous character. It couldn’t gain leadership from revolutionary organizations, and it was made unable to bring its participants towards Marxism in part due to its vulgarized rhetoric (talking about “the 99%” in a way which obscured the particular worker-capitalist nature of class conflict) and due to its attracting participants who largely weren’t even workers (rather lumpen elements).
As the imperialists started up the new cold war, the serious opposition they encountered was mainly from American RT journalists, who would get attacked by the neocons but weren’t yet viewed with as much apprehension as they eventually would be. This changed in November 2016, when liberalism’s weaknesses were revealed.
The 2008 crisis made Trump’s election possible, not because of “economic anxiety” but because of the loss in institutional trust that economic downturns inevitably create—including among voting bases like Trump’s, which wasn’t even particularly working class. It had also happened in the context of a left-wing populist movement having emerged that year; a movement whose reformist leader, Bernie Sanders, wasn’t able to stop many within his base from seeking out alternatives to the Democratic Party. Simply the fact that such an event had been able to manifest was enough to provoke the upholders of liberalism into panicked attempts at restoring normalcy. Which wasn’t possible, since capitalism’s long crisis can only grow more severe, so they had to at least aim for maintaining dominance over the narrative.
The way they tried to do this was by constructing a conspiracy narrative about the Trump campaign having worked with Russia to interfere in the election. This was an idea that would let them portray the antiwar movement, and any other movement which sought to act independently from the Democratic Party, as a synthetic invention of a foreign adversary. In 2019, after this “Russiagate” accusation had lost perceived credibility everywhere outside the neoliberal propaganda echo chamber, Aaron Maté observed the corrupt secret maneuverings which had made the accusation come to be treated seriously in the mainstream. Maté wrote of how Attorney General John Durham and Attorney General William Barr, who were carrying out a DOJ investigation into Russiagate’s origins, had been able to find a series of suspect events to look into; one of which being intelligence asset Christopher Steele’s clearly unreliable “reporting” on Trump’s personal life and supposed links to Russia:
We have yet to receive a credible explanation for why intelligence officials thought it was appropriate to take cues from an unverified collection of lurid conspiracy theories about Trump—all paid for by his political opponent. What has already been revealed is damning enough. The FBI cited the Steele dossier to obtain a surveillance warrant on former Trump campaign aide Carter Page in October 2016, telling the court that it “believes that [Russia’s] efforts are being coordinated with Page and perhaps other individuals associated with,” the Trump campaign. Its source for that wild supposition was Steele, whom it described as “Source #1” & “credible.” Then there is the role of the CIA under John Brennan. Multiple news reports make clear that the CIA is a principal focus of Barr and Durham’s inquiry. In breaking the story of the expanded criminal inquiry, The New York Times includes the curious claim that Durham has asked interview subjects “whether C.I.A. officials might have somehow tricked the F.B.I. into opening the Russia investigation.” Although there are limitations on how much we can make of one sentence, that is a tantalizing clue pointing to Brennan. The former CIA director has taken credit for launching the Russia investigation…
After the Special Counsel investigation that was supposed to prove Russiagate failed to produce evidence, the narrative managers temporarily shifted to China as their main target. The CIA-fueled unrest in Hong Kong, and then the pandemic, made them better able to propagate psyops like the “Uyghur genocide” and the “Taiwan is its own country” argument. And the liberals and liberal-aligned “leftists” accepted these ideas, partly because Russiagate had just inculcated them with hostility towards anybody who challenges pro-imperialist narratives.
When Trump’s destabilizing leadership model got replaced with a new version of the Obama administration, the narrative managers got an opportunity to placate socialist or socialist-adjacent movements; as domination by liberals always creates obstacles towards revolutionary efforts, and Russiagate had already allowed for anti-imperialists to become heavily censored and stigmatized. With January 6th, the liberals were able to effectively carry out a counter-coup, where they used the actions of the American right to censor Palestinians and (other voices opposing U.S. foreign policy) while intensifying repression against all judged to be “extremists.”
These were the advantages the narrative managers had by the time their efforts to escalate the tensions with Russia finally brought about a European proxy war. Yet when the Biden administration then tried to maintain this control over the narrative, at the same time it perpetuated a wildly destructive and clearly unnecessary military adventure, these advantages became no longer enough to keep the situation stable. Biden’s driving up inflation, and creating a danger of a third world war, would inevitably lead to the rise of an anti-NATO movement. This was a threat that the narrative managers would then have to try to neutralize, potentially bringing a narrative disruption more severe than the one from 2016.
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The narrative of the liberals and liberal-adjacent leftists who opposed this February’s Rage Against the War Machine rally was that it had been a failure; but the fact that these actors felt an urge to attack the rally in itself proved the rally posed a genuine threat towards our ruling institutions. The ones with the task of gatekeeping radical spaces on the Democratic Party’s behalf have decided to try to censure and isolate this new anti-imperialist coalition, which proves this coalition deserves our support.
Between RAWM, and this year’s rally put on by the anti-Russian left formation ANSWER, RAWM was the one which provoked outlets like MSNBC to attack it. This is because even though ANSWER calls itself the “ANSWER coalition,” it’s not truly a coalition; it hasn’t done the crucial thing RAWM has, which is forming a collaborative effort with forces which aren’t exclusively on the left. Many of the people represented by RAWM’s non-left elements, such as the Libertarians, are members of the most conscious element of the people: the element that’s come to an anti-imperialist consciousness. The communists within the RAWM coalition have been able to recognize that this element doesn’t exist solely on the left; and that many of those who claim to be on the “left” are in fact obstinately pro-imperialist in their thinking and practice.
It’s because of this that our ruling institutions have been acting like RAWM, and the permanent organizing project which has since emerged from it, are a genuine threat. These institutions aren’t concerned when they see a group of liberal-adjacent leftists claiming to support a compromised version of anti-imperialism, while not intending to expand their outreach beyond the niche minority within “left” activist spaces. When they see communists who share the pro-Russian stance of global anti-imperialist movements building something that truly exists independently from the Democratic Party, there’s reason for concern. That’s why as soon as Humanity for Peace (a project that RAWM is responsible for) got a little bit of visibility, the propaganda wings of these institutions (in this case Reddit) tried to counter it.
When the rally takes place tomorrow, we’ll see whether the corporate media joins in on the campaign against Humanity for Peace. Should we find a way to make its demands widely known, which the Redditors are ironically doing the most to make happen, no doubt the narrative managers will try to discredit it on a larger platform. In the longer term, what can truly decide whether the present iteration of the anti-imperialist movement succeeds is how much it’s influenced the discourse by the end of the 2024 election cycle. If this movement can make the Democratic Party unable to define how our culture views the Biden administration’s actions and ideas at the end of next year, the Democrats will have definitively lost their monopoly over organizing spaces at a crucial juncture in the class struggle.
Cornel West has the potential to bring a big part of this disruption we need within our national dialogue. For a candidate who speaks out against the Ukraine psyop to gain a significant amount of the vote, or at least sustain a significant amount of relevance within the conversation, would to an extent permanently diminish Democrat control over the mass consciousness. It would greatly expand the amount of the people who’ve resolved never to vote for a Democratic presidential candidate again, due to becoming aware that a viable alternative exists to lesser-evil reformism. That alternative is to build an anti-imperialist movement capable of defeating the state; which is only possible on the basis of a principled rejection of ideas and actions that reinforce the Democratic Party’s dominance.
The Democrats, as well as the anti-Russian left orgs that tail the Democrats, are going to try to portray voting for West as a betrayal of marginalized people; but this could be made more difficult should the many black Obama voters who’ve lately become disillusioned with the Democrats join with West. And that’s a real possibility, given how clearly Biden has shown himself to be one of the backstabbing white liberals Malcolm X warned about.
Politico has reported that the DNC is worried about just such things happening: “some Democratic officials and strategists worry that the urgency to vote for Biden has dissipated for some voters since Trump left the White House. They are anxious that young people, in particular, might be receptive to West’s message…There is also a belief among CBC [Congressional Black Caucus] members that the drive to elect the first Black speaker — Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries — would be a motivator for Black voters, too…Many advisers to Biden downplay the threat West holds in pulling away Black voters, pointing to Biden’s record in appointing both the first Black female vice president and Supreme Court justice. They also note record low Black unemployment rates.”
These are things the Democrats are saying to make themselves feel less anxious. Malcolm X said that “If you stick a knife in my back 9 inches and pull it out 6 inches, there’s no progress. If you pull it all the way out, that’s not progress. The progress is healing the wound that the blow made.. And they won’t even admit the knife is there.” By an honest assessment, the Democrats aren’t even pulling the knife out by one inch; the context these advisers leave out is that black families have been suffering the most from the rises in gas, food, and housing costs which Biden’s war has been exacerbating.
These things make it obvious not only that a major political disruption is coming, but that the liberals are trying to block out this reality. Many workers, black workers in particular, now have the potential to become radicalized; and this radicalization could turn plenty of them into communists should they learn about the recent liberal fascist maneuvers to suppress black communism, maneuvers which have been directly related to the proxy war. By indicting the members of the African People’s Socialist Party in retaliation for their speaking out against the Ukraine psyop; then creating a bill (RESTRICT) that would codify the fascist legal logic behind the indictments; the liberals have made enemies of a great amount of the people.
By provoking war in Ukraine, the imperialists made the job of their narrative managers ultimately far harder. They let the anti-imperialists become able to point to a highly destructive, highly visible series of crimes that our government is committing, and rally a growing number of the people around ending these crimes. The proxy war’s failure is prompting the imperialists to pivot towards a campaign of hybrid warfare against BRICS, and against the broader series of countries which may align with China. And they hope this war can be mostly concealed from the public, like how other new cold war components such as AFRICOM or the sanctions have been able to exist with relatively little mass scrutiny.
RAWM, West’s campaign, and the other counter-hegemonic developments which the proxy war has helped make possible are capable of making the war on BRICS unable to be hidden in such a way. Because what happens when the people become impassioned about fighting imperialism? More of them start to closely follow reporting about the crimes of their government. That’s the longer-term threat which the backlash to the proxy war has the potential to create towards the empire. Should communists navigate our conditions properly, what could follow this shift in mass consciousness is the final defeat of the capitalist state.
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