How can we successfully resist the proxy war that the imperial hegemon seeks to instigate in Taiwan, and that would add to the existing wars against Russia, Palestine, Yemen, and numerous other countries? By freeing the antiwar movement from its domination by compromised political actors who refuse to commit to fighting the liberal order.
Ever since the U.S. government succeeded at suppressing the country’s communist movement, and we’ve had to try to rebuild an authentic source of dissent, the movement’s biggest threat has been Democratic Party infiltrators. During the present moment, where the dominant section of the elites is trying to sell a world war, this is still true. Because of the increasing volatility of the circumstances, though, we have an unprecedented amount of potential to take away the leverage which the elites have gained in the class war. And the way we can do this is by building a version of the antiwar movement which isn’t covertly controlled by the Democrats.
This task is now easier than it was only a couple years ago, prior to when Russia’s Ukraine action accelerated the U.S. empire’s collapse and escalated our class struggle. Going into the 2024 election, the elites are using the same tactic for neutralizing the antiwar movement that they used in 2020, when they were working to stabilize the liberal order in anticipation of a war with Russia. Like back then, they’re carrying out a psyop designed to make developing radicals believe the most important task is to fight Trump. Which, if successful enough, will enable the pro-war narratives to be advanced without sufficient opposition. The elites want to make socialists distracted by a fixation on MAGA, and act like the lower levels of capital represent the primary threat while blankedly demonizing MAGA’s supporters.
This psyop was vastly more effective last time around than it’s able to be today. Because that was before the antiwar organizations which don’t tail liberals had been able to gain as much popularity and connections as they now have. In 2020, the default “socialist” perspective in the U.S. was one which tacitly sided with big pharma, and with the capitalist state’s efforts to consolidate monopolist power under cover of the lockdowns. All these actors on the left did was in effect state their support for these power grabs by monopoly capital, while offering critiques that didn’t truly mean anything. As these critiques were tangential to the central ideas being conveyed.
They pointed out how vaccine distribution and lockdowns would work better under socialism, while refusing to challenge the designs of the elites at a moment when the workers were being attacked to an extraordinary degree. Moreover, they ignored the biggest difference between socialist China’s pandemic response, and the USA’s response: that in China, vaccines were never mandated. However many qualifiers these left actors added, they felt obligated to defend the actions of the capitalist state.
The reasoning behind this was that siding with the highest levels of capital on the pandemic placed these socialists in opposition to MAGA in that respect. Which proved to be a shallow achievement, as it made them complicit in an unprecedented institutional and financial power expansion by the liberal elites. They did the equivalent when the liberals continued this takeover after January 6, endorsing the suppression efforts of big tech and the national security state despite evidence that the storming of the Capitol was a product of FBI entrapment.
The outcome was that a year later, when the cold warriors succeeded at provoking Russia into intervening, the Ukraine psyop was able to be much more effective than could have otherwise been the case. The ones who were supposed to be fighting the U.S. empire gave life to the empire by reinforcing its most effective narrative at the moment: the narrative that Democrat policies and ideas must be advanced in order to combat “fascism.” Which within this liberal framework is defined as simply being social conservatism, rather than as the class warfare practice of finance capital.
If the “left” in this country had integrity, and prioritized combating monopoly finance capital rather than pandering to liberal sensibilities, our class struggle would be at a much more advanced stage. And if we enable the opportunistic “socialist” forces that capitulated to the monopolists four years ago, the efforts to resist our present war drives will fail to be effective. For decades, the ruling class has been able to shield itself by cultivating a controlled opposition within not just the broad left, but the communist movement in particular. It’s given media attention, and indirect funding via NGOs, to groups that claim to uphold Marx and Lenin but truly represent a red liberalism. Throughout the 2020s, though, we’ve been seeing this liberal-aligned element lose its monopoly, both over the organizing spaces and over the discourse.
Not only has Ukraine compelled communists, libertarians, and other anti-imperialists to form their own organizing coalition, which will hold another rally in DC next month. It’s also shifted the discourse closer towards a point where the hegemon’s narrative managers have lost their dominance. Where the anti-imperialist side has gained enough narrative strength that this starts to impede the functionings of the war machine.
There are liberal tailist actors, like Ben Norton, who usually take correct stances on the foreign policy aspect of the narrative war. But they subtly undermine the anti-imperialist cause by advancing key liberal elite narratives on domestic issues. When you look at Norton’s Twitter feed, you see tons of material rightly condemning the Zionists for their genocide. Yet at crucial moments in the struggle against monopoly capital, he’s sided with the most wealthy and powerful institutions. He’s promoted the one-sided view of the Covid vaccine that big pharma has put forth about its recent experimental medicine. He’s celebrated Daria Dugina’s murder by U.S.-backed Ukrainian Nazis. He’s worked to exacerbate needless divisions within the anti-imperialist movement by going after the anti-imperialists who are patriotic.
Back when I was under the guidance of the liberal tailist leftists, I was guilty of the latter mistake. Because of Ukraine, though, I learned to reject such ideas and practices. I saw that the ruling class is trying to keep the antiwar movement confined to the leftist circles which Norton seeks the approval of. Then I saw that whenever somebody tries to expand the struggle beyond these circles, the liberal establishment gets upset to an extent that it never gets over actors like Norton. He represents a socialist element that’s allowed to have a major platform, because it’s indispensably useful to the elites. Its role is to make communism and anti-imperialism unable to gain enough mass support or momentum for our ruling institutions to actually be threatened.
Norton’s camp has been able to co-opt the recent anti-imperialist mass energy over Gaza to an extent. But in the longer term, this project to gatekeep the struggle is increasingly in peril. This is because of the growing trend among the people—largely including the parts of the people outside the left—towards opposing the national security state and the war machine.
We’ve seen this with the emergence of the coalition behind next month’s Defeat the Deep State rally; with the rise of antiwar sentiments even among conservative-leaning Americans; with the Free Assange movement, which has included many elements beyond the left; with the increased public skepticism towards the intelligence agencies that’s come about from the Trump era’s ideological shakeups. The country has undergone a political reorientation, where liberals and many “leftists” have become more compatible with imperialism while the illiberal elements have grown more numerous and more antagonistic towards monopoly capital. If Marxists can recognize revolutionary potential where it now exists within our conditions, and nurture the people’s growing anti-imperialist impulses, we’ll be able to ruin the plans of the State Department.
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