Between the masters of monopoly finance capital, and the elements of the left which believe the people are fundamentally reactionary, there are fundamental similarities. Both hold an elitist view towards the masses, in which the average person is seen as a threat towards progress. And it’s because of this detachment from the people that both the highest-level capitalists, and the pessimistic leftists, are able to rationalize advancing their ultimate goal: to bring chaos, accelerating the breakdown of our civilization.
This is the logical conclusion of assuming that only those in one’s own clique can be trusted to decide how history goes. When one lacks faith in the great majority of society, the destruction that follows is a self-fulfilling prophecy: by assuming the people aren’t qualified to determine their own destiny, one acts to hold back revolutionary progress, which lets society further decline. When somebody tries to break this cycle, and build a mass movement to defeat monopoly capital, they’re seen as dangerous according to this insular worldview. And among the parts of the pessimistic left that have a violent component to them, such optimistic radicals have come to be seen as “fascists.”
This phenomenon represents a danger towards optimistic socialists, and towards our allies in the anti-imperialist struggle. We must identify the nature of this physical threat that monopoly capital’s “left” counter-gangs pose, and become able to protect ourselves from it.
The sinister thing about the pessimistic left’s recent tendency to call communists “fascists” for supporting Russia and China; or to portray our coalitions with non-leftist antiwar actors as “red-brown alliances”; is that these statements are implicit threats. The standard belief among radical liberal, ultra-left spaces is that anybody who challenges the “left” dogmas is a fascist, which makes them seen as deserving of violence. This is the effect that spurious fascism accusations have: to introduce the possibility of “anti-fascists” using terrorism to try to silence anybody who deviates from their subjective concept of what “leftism” means. As much as the propagators of such rhetoric would try to claim plausible deniability, the inescapable truth is that carelessly bringing language like this into the discourse necessarily escalates the situation. It creates an environment that’s unsafe for anybody who’s targeted with the “fascist” label.
We should take these threats seriously because the federal agencies are working to cultivate “anti-fascist” groups that have the mentality and the resources to wage a terror campaign against anti-imperialists. The more developed of these groups can be found in the anarchist branches of “Antifa,” which are heavily managed by the feds and are guided by a fanatical left anti-communism. The PSL is a more widely marketable one of these counter-gangs, with its members frequently absorbing the anti-populist ideas shared by the anarchists. The trait these groups share is a type of organizational cohesion that’s based not within desire to build a relationship with the majority of the people, but within a sense of resentment towards society. The individuals among them who have the motivation to start participating in a terror campaign are not driven by any attitude that’s conducive to socialism. Their motive is connected to a desire to tear things down, rather than to construct a better future for the collective.
This is the corrupting effect that comes from embracing the pessimistic mindset in regard to radical politics. Because these leftists share the “basket of deplorables” view of their neighbors that the Democratic Party promotes, they’ve concluded that the only way we’ll ever get a revolution is by defeating these neighbors.
When I was in the vicinity of the radicals who hold this view, I would hear people make wildly bleak predictions about the country’s future. Predictions which depended on the notion that at least a third of the country can be expected to join a coming fascist insurgency. One idea I heard was that the right-wing militias are undoubtedly going to be so successful at menacing communists in the rural areas, all of us will need to retreat into the cities, and then try to fight off the reactionaries from those geographically tiny havens. In the imagination of somebody who’s guided by this radical version of the Democrat ideology, only the most blue areas can initially be won by the revolutionaries through mass work. With the rest of the country therefore being destined to become a conflict zone before we can ever achieve socialism.
These are the kinds of expectations the Democratic Party and its aligned media outlets seek to instill in left-leaning people. Through their scaremongering about an imminent “civil war” that MAGA is supposedly going to instigate, they’re training those who’ve come to Marxism to embrace a tacit alliance with monopoly finance capital. This is an alliance born from fear; fear that if communists don’t get enough liberals on their side, “fascism” will win. That’s the idea behind the standard practice of the predominant socialist orgs, in which impressionable young recruits are instructed to overwhelmingly focus on combating the less powerful wing of capital.
When the PSL has mainly focused its time and resources from recent years on protesting about issues like abortion and Kyle Rittenhouse, the rationale behind this has been that tailing the Democrats is necessary for building an anti-fascist united front. Supposedly the Democratic Party’s base, which such activities are designed to overwhelmingly attract, represents the only group we can trust. If we were to expand beyond this group, like the optimistic socialists are doing, we would simply be empowering fascists.
It’s a way of thinking that comes from a reaction to the alienation these leftists feel from society, which the cynical leadership of the liberal tailist orgs are able to exploit. By reinforcing the dangerously false “fascist” narratives about radicals who seek to win the masses, while acting like left-liberals are the only ones with revolutionary potential, the Marxists who embrace the pessimistic mindset are empowering the ultraviolent left anti-communists. They’re also cultivating “Marxist” equivalents of the Antifa anarchist counter-gangs, making for an increasingly unified and radicalized layer of “left” fighters for monopoly capital. The World Economic Forum oligarchs and the intelligence centers are finding allies within the “anti-capitalist” elements that share an elitist view of the masses, and are therefore willing to aid capital’s highest levels.
To outmaneuver these forces of reaction, we’re going to have to make our cadres able to defend from the counter-gangs. To succeed in this, though, we must learn from the errors of our counterparts within the radlib-aligned strain of Marxism. As we build our organizational infrastructure, and physically train our members, we need to operate with the intent of ensuring that we’ll be able to win the people and build socialism. Not with the intent of bringing about adventurist destruction, as the left counter-gangs want to do. They seek to fight for its own sake, as a way to gain personal catharsis for their alienation. Because of this, they fight with carelessness and lack of discipline, whether in the physical realm or the narrative realm; they’re willing to promote any smear from any source, so long as this lets them hurt their enemies. They’re initiating the chaos and conflict, while we’re merely working to undo the harm they create.
The agents of monopoly capital can afford to be sloppy and reckless, as their institutional backers will protect them no matter what. But we can’t afford not to be strategic and pragmatic in our decisions. We must act with restraint and tact, only doing what’s absolutely necessary to advance the interests of the revolutionary cause. If we advocate for warfare, the people will see us as simply being more agents of the ruling class, because chaos and violence are what the elites want. The left counter-gangs are the ones who are doing this; we must position ourselves as the answer to the menace they pose.
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