In our task of defeating the state, we must ask: what’s the issue that’s most relevant to the majority of the population within our society? What’s the concern that can unite the most people around the cause of working class solidarity? With Biden’s Ukraine proxy war, which has driven over 60% of Americans into living paycheck to paycheck, it’s become more apparent than ever that this issue is class exploitation. Therefore to win the people, which is indispensable for defeating the state, class exploitation is what we need to emphasize. That along with U.S. hegemony, which is the thing that’s incentivized our government to start an economy-destroying war for the sake of defending American power. The dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, the war machine, and the Federal Reserve’s scheme to drive down living standards so that employers can be given more leverage are among the main points of outrage which we can put forth.
They’re the things that can bring the majority to class consciousness. Using them as ways to create mass appeal for communism doesn’t mean we have to disregard the colonial contradiction. In fact, when we do our job as theoreticians properly, we’re able to illustrate the link between modern American colonialism and these class/imperialism related issues. Because under our conditions, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie can’t be defeated without in the process bringing maximally expanded tribal sovereignty. All of these issues are connected. The usefulness of making these majoritarian issues into rallying points is that it’s what will let us win. Which is what will let us rectify the injustices perpetrated upon the First Nations peoples, who are only a minority because of genocide.
The idea the New Left centers around is that if we were to incorporate the majoritarian issues into our practice, even simply as pieces of rhetoric that are essential for building a broad base of support, we would be betraying the cause of social justice. Which is absolutely untrue, the two are capable of being reconciled. Yet the New Left, in the form of its modern adherents, continues to assert there’s a contradiction between the two that can’t be rectified.
The more attention you pay to these types of ideas, the ones that seek to discredit dialectically informed practice from a “radical” angle, the more you see the essential notion these radical liberals seek to convey: that the people are fundamentally reactionary. We can see this in the emergence of two major recent arguments within left discourse: one, that MAGA has proven the white workers are essentially synonymous with the U.S. government; and two, that this means the pro-Russia stance in the new cold war is a reactionary stance.
The way the New Left’s modern representatives argue MAGA has revealed the white working class’ incompatibility with other other workers is predicated in the same unscientific reasoning behind Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” comment. The intent behind that comment was not anti-racism but contempt for working class people, because Clinton and the other liberals are most inclined to judge those they perceive to be lower class. The irony is that the premise their contempt is based upon is incorrect, because MAGA isn’t even disproportionately driven by working class people as compared to other popular movements. From a statistical perspective, there’s no honest reason to see it as especially proletarian in character. The reason these liberals have propagated this narrative is because they don’t seek to heal the country’s historical divisions between people of different colors, but make themselves look like they’re capable of resolving such inequities. Which they of course can’t, so their only option is to blame working class whites for the persistence of systemic injustice.
If the white workers are incurably reactionary, and being pro-Russia is associated with reactionary politics according to liberals, then engaging in serious anti-imperialist practice should be avoided for fear of aiding reactionism. This is the idea that’s been sold to the left via Russiagate, the psyop whose goal is to propagate the narrative that the GOP “sold out to Putin.” It’s on this basis that the gatekeepers of our popular movements try to discredit the idea of combating imperialism’s psyops. Because this task requires backing Russia’s special operation, as well as building a multi-tendency anti-NATO movement, the empire-compatible left says these things aren’t worth it, since the popular base for these causes lies outside of left-wing spaces. The effort to combat NATO is made out to be a white, right-wing cause, so it’s regarded as unimportant, as a distraction from the more meaningful issues.
The issues these leftists seek to put into conflict with anti-imperialism are the domestic identity struggles: indigenous liberation, black liberation, and so on. What these leftists leave out is that none of those struggles can succeed as long as we neglect the task of combating imperialism’s psyops. U.S. hegemony is the strongest link in the chain of our capitalist state’s control. This is apparent from the introduction of the RESTRICT act, which would criminalize international anti-imperialist solidarity work, and from the Uhuru indictments, which targeted communists for challenging the Ukraine psyop. If the state is shifting to direct repression against anti-imperialists, we must be doing something right, and the act of combating these psyops must have more power than the imperialism-compatible left wants us to believe.
The state is so scared that the anti-NATO movement will keep gaining power, and bring the core’s workers to a synthesis between the domestic labor struggle and anti-imperialism. As soon as a worker in the core gains the awareness that they must fight in solidarity with imperialism’s global victims, they become a serious threat towards the ruling class. When this happens on a movement-wide level, the threat becomes all the more serious, and communism is allowed to become mainstream again.
If the state is trying to prevent this outcome, both through its intensifying repression and through its discourse manipulation, how can the bulk of the people not have revolutionary potential? If the bulk of them were labor aristocrats, or class traitors who are sure to help the capitalists, why are they the ones the state is trying so hard to stop from being exposed to anti-imperialist perspectives? We know what labor aristocrats do when they see any belief within the pro-imperialist orthodoxy challenged: they defend those ideas, because their class status has given them an incentive to become emotionally invested in them. A shrinking minority of Americans have this class status. That’s why only a minority of the population, mainly consisting of materially comfortable liberals, seriously cares about destroying Russia. The rest only believe NATO’s psyops at present because these psyops are the only accounts of the conflict they’ve so far seen.
The New Left doesn’t see it as a priority to combat the psyops, because they see anybody who supports Russia’s defiance of U.S. hegemony not just as wrong, but as an agent of reactionary politics. Which increasingly creates a dilemma for them, because even though they in theory support the idea of revolution, we’re seeing a rise in anti-imperialist sentiments among the people—the ones who are essential for making revolution happen. Support for aid to Ukraine is declining, and a coalition has formed between pro-Russian communists and libertarians to bring the true accounts of the conflict into our mainstream discourse. Those among the people who absorb the coalition’s anti-imperialist analysis are to become more visible actors in this discourse. Because as the liberal-aligned “communist” parties decline, Marxism’s principled anti-imperialist element is becoming the default strain that communists gravitate towards upon being radicalized.
The imperialism-compatible leftists can only respond to these developments by viewing an ever larger part of the masses as reactionary, even more explicitly than they do already. Whenever you hear one of these opportunists say that backing Russia in this conflict is reactionary, they’re calling the people reactionary. Because being consistent about siding against U.S. hegemony is simply the logical thing to do for a worker who understands their class interests.
Helping defeat U.S. hegemony, via waging an information war that renders Washington’s efforts at maintaining this hegemony untenable, is the most meaningful thing they can do to advance their interests at this stage in the class struggle. Weakening the narrative support behind Washington’s sanctions, war machine, and global destabilization psyops is what’s necessary for bringing the imperial state to the point where defeating it becomes possible. It’s also what’s necessary for breaking the Democratic Party’s grip over organizing spaces, and thereby letting the class conflict escalate. As the NATO psyops are what maintain Democrat influence over these spaces. To vilify every worker who does what’s needed to advance this goal, and acts in solidarity with the Russian people’s fight against U.S.-backed Banderism, is to vilify the people for asserting their material interests.
The argument these kinds of leftists use to say anti-imperialism is reactionary comes from how the right wing of the country’s ideological spectrum, as well as the more right-leaning flank of Marxists, are so far the places where sympathy for Russia has predominantly come from. What does this actually say though? It doesn’t say that opposing U.S. hegemony is wrong, it says that what’s considered the “left” in this country has failed to get the right priorities as the new cold war has developed. Instead of focusing on anti-imperialism, which it should consider the most important thing at the moment, it’s focused on building a support base among radlibs by reinforcing their views.
They justify this by positing liberals as the most valuable element of the masses, but the truth is that liberals represent a minority which isn’t compatible with revolutionary politics. They’ve rejected fighting for and winning the people, in favor of an opportunistic project that isn’t capable of defeating the state. This is the difference between the New Left as it exists in the era of the new cold war, and the Marxists who are serious about winning.
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