What happens when radical politics lack a mass base? When the ruling class has succeeded at destroying the structural foundations for the class struggle, but the layer of young people who are alienated from capitalism hasn’t disappeared? What happens is that these disillusioned youths get directed away from the class struggle, and towards something that can act as a replacement for genuine mass efforts. In the case of the modern United States, this alternative radical current has mainly taken the form of anti-colonialism. Or rather a version of “anti-colonialism” that’s radical liberal in nature, as it’s detached from the people and can’t come to connect with them.
Keeping U.S. communism liberal & unserious
The other major thing the bourgeoisie have sought to substitute the class struggle with is LGBT politics, which like modern “anti-colonial” politics have been heavily twisted by liberal ideas. To understand how to avoid falling for the culture war traps our class enemies have set for us (especially if you’re pro-LGBT like myself), look at how LGBT issues are treated by actual mass-based communist parties vs how they’re treated within conventional U.S. radicalism.
In socialist Cuba, sexual minorities have gained marriage equality. A comparable example is China incorporating its first trans healthcare clinic. These are somewhat exceptional cases among the socialist states, with most of them being overall socially conservative; they’ve all had to take care not to make themselves compromised by the liberal NGOs, which use LGBT issues as a trojan horse for undermining socialism. When the socialist countries do something pro-LGBT, they need to make sure they’re doing it because they genuinely see this as the best way to advance socialism, rather than because NGOs have intimidated them into changing their practices.
If these powerful parties need to act with such reservation when it comes to social and cultural matters, consider how a communist movement with almost no power should handle them. In the United States, the communist movement has neither state control nor has mass backing, at least at this stage. So when communists here focus on social or cultural issues, we need to be careful not to end up promoting liberal idpol; and there are plenty of U.S. communists who are glad to sacrifice the class struggle in favor of liberal tailism, because opportunism dominates today’s leftist spaces.
By acting like it’s best for a Marxist to center cultural issues, these actors make it so that there’s no real difference between them and the Democrats; just saying you’re for the class struggle isn’t enough to make yourself an effective actor within this struggle. You must build the connections with the working masses that we’ll need in order to win proletarian victory. Which you can’t do if you’re in practice simply helping the Democrats fight the left-wing side of the culture war.
Faced with this reality of how an imperialist party has overwhelmingly co-opted the struggles for social equality, the way that many developing U.S. radicals react is by adopting maximally strong rhetoric on anti-colonialism, and by turning to the most transgressive anti-colonial theories. (Or at least that’s what these theories are sold to them as being.) They declare that they’re no longer Americans, or dramatically destroy flags, or make other such statements showing how aggressively they reject U.S. patriotism. They embrace the theories of figures like Gerald Horne, who’s argued (through a quite poorly researched historical account) that the American revolution of 1776 was a “counter-revolution.” When they find out that history’s biggest Marxist figures viewed 1776 as having represented progress, they’re still able to rationalize upholding Horne’s view, sometimes by saying that these figures didn’t live in the United States. And the historical U.S. Marxists who share this analysis are simply seen by these radicals as chauvinists.
Despite the many ways in which embracing this version of “anti-colonialism” sets somebody up against Marxism’s framework of analysis, these radicals can conclude that they’re simply updating Marxism. Because they aren’t actually building power, though, this new strain of thought isn’t proving itself to be something that can drive history forward. They aren’t doing what figures like Gaddafi or Chavez have done, which is build a socialism that’s distinct from the Soviet model but nevertheless real. They’re simply building movement influence, primarily within social media platforms that have been designed to produce cliques. When a group that centers anti-colonialism deviates from this insular model and builds true community power, like Uhuru has done, most of these “anti-colonial” leftists don’t act in solidarity with it. They have more important things to focus on, like attacking “patsocs.”
This is the role of the types of radlibs who hate the liberal tailist orgs, like PSL and CPUSA, on the basis that these orgs aren’t good enough on “anti-colonialism.” They’re able to recognize that these orgs are reformist and tied to the Democratic Party, but from this they’ve concluded that the solution is to simply act more ultra-leftist than these orgs do. They don’t have a problem with how these parties tail the Democrats on the culture war, because the culture war is entirely compatible with their pan-leftist orientation. They just wish these orgs would make “anti-colonialism,” rather than social and cultural issues, into their main means for diverting energy away from the class struggle.
Both the organized left, and this more online element of radical liberals who complain about the organized left, are having the same effect: to steer people with proto-revolutionary consciousness in an imperialism-compatible direction. The online radlibs have the most numbers compared to the organized left, since online politics are so big and many people who join the liberal tailist orgs end up leaving them. It’s partly because of this that the main “socialist” orgs are incentivized to keep tailing liberals, because their organizing model depends on managing to regularly recruit at least some of these radlibs.
This helps keep the USA’s communist movement compromised when it comes to anti-imperialism. Because the view of the world which these radlibs promote is one where it’s acceptable to be apathetic about geopolitics, as supposedly the best way to fight imperialism is by combating U.S. patriotism. This is a framing that’s compatible with the liberal narratives about how Russia and China are the real imperialist powers, or about how “both sides” are imperialist. And even among the types of radlibs who recognize how this isn’t an inter-imperialist conflict, there’s a lack of commitment to building the coalitions necessary for effectively practicing solidarity with the anti-imperialist countries. It renders useless whatever correct information they’ve been able to absorb.
Uhuru is the only anti-colonial focused org that’s been willing to ally with antiwar groups outside the left, and that’s therefore capable of building a presence beyond the narrow space which the “woke” elements dominate. For this reason, its anti-colonialism is authentic, as it’s actually capable of winning power. So is not the case for what most other “anti-colonial Marxists” have to offer.
The ahistorical ideas behind this unseriousness
The “anti-colonialism” espoused by the majority of today’s left is one whose true roots are not in what figures like Fanon have written, as much as its adherents claim this to be true. Its real ideological basis is in J. Sakai, and in the modern promoters of Sakai’s ideas. Sakai argued that there’s no way the bulk of white workers will come to a revolutionary consciousness, even while U.S. imperialism’s decline continues to bring down living standards and shrink the labor aristocracy. He asserted in Settlers that…
As U.S. imperialism stumbles faster and faster into its permanent decline, once again we hear the theory expressed that some poverty and the resulting mass economic struggles will create revolutionary consciousness in Euro-Amerikan workers. The fact is that such social pressures are not new to White Amerika. For three decades — from 1890 to 1920 — the new white industrial proletariat increasingly organized itself into larger and larger struggles with the capitalists. The immigrant European proletarians wanted industrial unionism and the most advanced among them wanted socialism. A mass movement was built for both. These were the most heavily exploited, most proletarian, and most militant European workers Amerika has ever produced. Yet, in the end, they were unable to go beyond desiring the mere reform of imperialism.
To effectively refute this argument, I’ll need to illustrate some key parts of the U.S. communist movement’s history, ones which Sakai leaves out. When Sakai talks of how reformism prevailed within American communism following the country’s most economically arduous times, a key part of what he’s referring to is the Communist Party USA’s uncritical backing of Roosevelt. This was a mistake that came not from some innate love for reformism among the white workers, but from an organizational structure which gave disproportionate influence to the leader of the reformist push Earl Browder.
In 1945, after starting on a project to restore the party’s revolutionary character, William Z. Foster wrote that “a vital reason why Comrade Browder was able to foist his opportunism upon our Party was because of the super-centralism prevailing in our organization. With his great personal prestige and his excessive degree of authority, Browder’s word had become practically the law in our Party. Consequently, he was able to suppress any analytical discussion whatever of his false thesis…It is my opinion that if Browder’s proposals could have been really discussed, they would have been finally rejected by our Party, but such a discussion was out of the question.”
This is quite different from the narrative Sakai puts forth, where Browder’s policies got the approval of the workers. And as Foster reported following the party’s reorientation, these workers were grateful for how Browderism had gotten defeated: “The morale of our Party members and sympathizers is now being greatly raised by the Party’s new line. They are happy to get from underneath the suffocating cloud of Browder’s opportunism and bourgeois revisionism…The supreme measure of our new policy is its application in practice to the immediate demands and interests of the people. Only if we have successful practical mass policies and activities can we free ourselves from Browder’s revisionism, on the one hand, and avoid the pitfalls of ‘Left’ sectarianism, on the other.”
These facts destroy Sakai’s entire thesis. They prove what nonsense it is to say that white workers have historically reacted to capitalism’s crises by doubling down on supporting the existing social order. They show that the new reformist turn which CPUSA took after World War II happened not because of the will of its working class members, but in spite of this will; the FBI’s covert takeover of the party was a fundamentally top-down event, one the workers couldn’t be blamed for. Yet today, we have figures like Gerald Horne who continue to promote Sakai’s thesis, except in an updated way that doesn’t explicitly uphold Sakaism.
Horne has used the emergence of MAGA to argue that the white workers are fundamentally reactionary, writing: “when Euro-Americans vote across class lines for faux billionaires, we are instructed that the reason is that the opposition did not meet their exacting progressive standards—hence, they voted for the right…Of course, this miscomprehension begs the question as to why descendants of the enslaved even in the same borough and nationwide—marinated in the ultimate class struggle of slaves versus slaveholder—vote against the right wing in extraordinarily high numbers.”
Like how Sakai’s ideas can sound true to the untrained radical, this sounds like a solid analysis to many. Yet it ignores all the facts about Trump’s election that indeed show many Trump voters would have voted differently if the Democratic Party weren’t neocon and neoliberal. Concerns over Hillary Clinton’s pro-war record were a key reason why many military families in swing states voted for Trump; Trump was able to take advantage of the ongoing depression which the country’s working families had been in since 2008, a problem the neoliberal Democrats had been perpetuating; there’s evidence that a decisive amount of Trump voters would have voted for Sanders.
These realities about what actually drives so much of the MAGA base, and about how much the Democratic Party’s betrayal of the working class has helped figures like Trump, make Horne’s grandstanding hollow. He’s also said that “The U.S. left has difficulty acknowledging that Mr. Trump has a mass base. You don’t get 75 million votes from the 1%… it is in the Euro-Amerikan middle class and working class…The left has no notion of settler-colonialism and class collaboration.” With this statement, he’s pulling the same trick that Sakai did: twist history to make it look like the white workers can only ever be expected to support a pro-imperialist path.
Donald Trump is not the kind of leader that white workers (who actually didn’t make up as much of Trump’s voters as the media suggested) will always prefer. He’s the kind of leader that a certain element of them have come to see as the best choice, compared to what the Democrats have to offer. This is further supported by how Trump’s policies are actually much more pro-war than what most of his own supporters prefer; the bulk of opposition to the war in Syria, which Trump advanced, has come from conservatives. And they felt this way while Trump was president, showing that these Americans don’t simply support whatever their own party supports. A disconnect has appeared between what the MAGA base wishes for, and what their leadership is willing to do. Communists must take advantage of this.
Finishing what Foster started
My argument is not that the MAGA base is the sole element which communists need to bring in, but that utterly rejecting this element keeps communists isolated to the left. And we’ll lose if we stay in this place; if we invest ourselves in a mode of practice that’s fundamentally opposed towards what history has shown to be effective. When Foster created that moment of success following World War II, where American communism was on a trajectory towards victory, he didn’t do so by orienting his party around attacking patriotism. This is because Browderism didn’t simply mean flying the American flag; it meant liquidating the Party, with the patriotism aspect being incidental to this.
The correct takeaway from the damage Browderism did is not that we should burn flags, or divide the anti-imperialist movement over things like symbols; what we should learn is that the class struggle can only succeed by centering the masses. By advancing the people’s practical needs, as Foster said. These cultural battles, which have become the predominant thing within the default “Marxist” spaces, are distractions from this task.
Henry Winston—one of CPUSA members who tried to bring the party in a more positive direction following its fall back into liberalism—warned about such left deviations. In his 1973 polemic Strategy for a Black Agenda, he explained that the view of Black America as being an “internal colony” was a misinterpretation of his community’s particular conditions, one which bourgeois theorists were pushing to divide the class struggle. He even identified the same phenomenon I’ve talked about, where the ones promoting such undialectical ideas on “anti-colonialism” assert that they’re just making Marxism fit our conditions:
It is ironic that many of these radicals, who claim that Marxism is European in origin and must be revised in order to apply to the Black people in the U.S., advance theories based on revisions of Marxism by such Europeans as Herbert Marcuse, Leon Trotsky and Regis Debray, as well as the Trotsky-like revisions to be found in the “thought” of Mao Tse-tung. It was especially under the influence of Marcuse and Maoism that the New Left radicals began to be attracted to one or another pseudo-revolutionary theory, including the concept of an “’internal colony” of Black people in the U.S. While Marcuse’s ideas are not identical with “the thought of Mao,” the views of both stimulated anti-Marxist misconceptions of the world revolutionary process, the historic role of the working class and its relationship to the liberation struggles of oppressed people, and the imperative need for strategies based on the specific features and historic development of each country, each working class and each national liberation movement. During every upsurge in the people’s struggles, especially those of the mainly working-class Black people, there is a more extensive activation of counter-measures designed to sustain disunity and block alliance between Black and white workers, together with the Black people as a whole, against corporate monopoly.
Winston argued that the logical conclusion of incorrectly identifying Black America as an internal colony is to fragment the workers. And the same applies to the “anti-colonial” theories which modern ultra-lefts espouse about the indigenous First Nations. Because even though the tribes can much better be called internal colonies, it’s equally backward to use this as justification for sneering at the people’s patriotic sentiments, as Dimitrov explicitly warned communists against doing.
As Winston observed: “Marx recognized that the strategy of struggle under slavery could not be the same as that against capitalist exploitation. And today, despite similarities in oppression, the liberation strategy for the oppressed Black minority in the U.S. cannot be the same as that for a colony. Both, for example, need and would be greatly aided by allies on an international scale; but the Black liberation movement requires first of all a strategy that involves internal allies.” The equivalent is true for Native liberation; without a mobilization by working class people of all colors, exploited people of all colors and nationalities will lose. And the strategy promoted by Horne’s camp, where communists gatekeep the class struggle based on whether people accept their ahistorical theories, is preventing such a mobilization.
If pressed, of course these Marxists would say they want to mobilize the country’s people towards revolution, and many of them even disown Sakai. Yet the only parts of the people which they view as acceptable allies are the ones who are willing to uncritically believe their dogmatic New Left “anti-colonial” theories, and join them in promoting national nihilism.
To find which forces today are best carrying forth the project that Foster began, you need to look to many of the same people and groups who these “anti-colonialists” hate the most. They’ve derisively labeled as “patsocs” everyone who advances Marxism in a way that centers class and geopolitics, rather than the symbolic and cultural battles which pan-leftists have invested in. And that they use this label shows how far the pan-leftists are from a mass-based practice; “patsoc” is a word which people only know if they’ve been deep within an online niche.
To bring communism to victory, and defeat the reactionary power structure that’s behind pan-leftism, a crucial thing we must do is avoid the same kind of trap that the pan-leftists have fallen into. Even if we have the correct ideas, we won’t win so long as we stay confined to a fandom. We have to build an organizational structure that has a base within our communities, that’s capable of providing leadership to the workers who otherwise wouldn’t even become part of a political project. We should continue to combat pan-leftism and its petty-bourgeois radical theories, while doing the mass work required for truly becoming successful.
The algorithm is a game that the ruling class controls, and that’s not connected to the task of building real mass power. The ruling class is going to keep promoting these distractions for as long as it has the means to do so. And we can only prevail by connecting with the majority of society, which these distractions aren’t going to reach. That’s the strategic limit of this discourse psyop our class enemies have been crafting over the last half-century or so: it can influence many people who’ve gone down the socialist ideological pipeline, but it can’t convert the majority of the people to the same mindset. The danger it poses is that it can separate communists from the people, which we’re capable of avoiding if we navigate our conditions correctly.
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