If the forces of popular revolution want to gain greater narrative power, they’ll need to present a vision that’s demonstrably better than the visions our class enemies put forth. That’s more compelling than promises like “Trump is fighting the deep state,” which I think has been more effective propaganda than many within anti-imperialist circles realize. “Silicon Valley MAGA” has exposed its true nature many times, yet this hasn’t rectified the pro-Palestine movement’s weaknesses, nor led to sufficient mass mobilization. So the ruling class psyops are still able to have far more impact than they ought to.
The antiwar movement has long been operating with the belief that when the machine gets exposed, it will lose; but now that it has been exposed, the machine keeps speeding up its slaughter unimpeded. We must learn from this failure on our part, and build a mass movement that will persist, no matter how many psyops its enemies invent.
The MAGA base is certainly in the process of turning against its leadership; major voices have arisen within the discourse to call out how Trump is betraying MAGA. But the task of dismantling the Trump psyop—and thereby weakening whatever psyops replace it—is far from over. This is because even though there’s disillusionment among the masses, even though there’s widespread awareness about things like Gaza, it’s not enough to merely expose power. Not when the imperial state acts as brazenly as it now does.
This is a point that I’ve made a couple of times already, but with each day it becomes more important to emphasize; with every moment, we see our government enable the Gaza genocide to accelerate more and more. The last two months have been the worst that Gaza has ever seen, and this has all happened after the American people’s recent shift in consciousness on Palestine.
These compounding failures indicate wider deficiencies within our social movement; deficiencies that we absolutely can rectify, if we truly take control of the narrative. This doesn’t simply mean speaking truth to power. Those within the antiwar movement have confronted the people in power plenty of times, and it simply hasn’t changed things; it hasn’t even been one of the factors behind the pro-Palestine societal shift, which has largely happened because of Gaza genocide footage on social media platforms.
It’s because our movement remains far too invested in the “speak truth to power” tactic that the empire can still spread confusion with so much success. That when a misleading rumor arises, like this week’s story about Trump planning to recognize a Palestinian state, the rumor will fool many people who are otherwise quite conscious on Palestine. The outlets and commentators who’ve been reporting this claim uncritically are missing the wider context: that Washington is building stronger ties with the Gulf Cooperation Council, a U.S.-subservient entity which rhetorically takes the position that Palestine is a state.
This is the grain of truth within the “White House plans to recognize Palestine” story, and it’s so lossely connected to reality that the most overtly anti-Palestinian White House officials can confidently deny the claim itself. All that’s happening is a symbolic switch-over which won’t represent any kind of progress within Palestine’s liberation, and will let the White House superficially claim to be friendly with the Palestinians.
This ploy shouldn’t have worked at all; it should have backfired. But because the pro-Palestinian movement has so many weaknesses, the Trump White House and its spokespeople can successfully sell the rebrand. The left wing of alt media, and the NGO-tied activist groups which it’s connected to, lack a vision that can capture the revolutionary mass energy. So the right-wing of alt media is able to keep its narratives of false hope alive, repeating these deceptive statements without meeting any sufficient challenge.
Such a challenge is emerging, though. It’s coming from the actors in our discourse which have transcended both the compatible left, and Silicon Valley MAGA. Jimmy Dore is an example of such a voice; after thoroughly breaking from the left, he’s also been platforming the kinds of perspectives that oppose Trump from an antiwar, anti-monopolist position. And it’s largely because of the work he’s done over the years that the conversation was made ready for those who present a Marxist-Leninist version of his politics. Infrared, Jackson Hinkle, and the ACP are all part of the trend he represents; the trend where carriers of the popular revolutionary agenda have broken awat from the established frameworks, and forged a distinct path. A path that the bulk of the masses will want to follow them in taking.
Recently Dr Calliounes, a thinker within the Marxist-Leninist collective Infrared, gave the advice to “Stop seeking normalcy. You will not attract anyone. No one is normal anymore. We live in a world of aberrations. People want the irregular. They are attracted to Holy Fools and ‘Crazy Wisdom’. They want to be shocked. They want to be psychically smacked. Mentally kicked. Shocked out of their cynicism. This is the average experience. There is no need to appeal to normalcy. No one wants normalcy. Stop appealing. Infrared Students, become Insane. Become ‘Crackhead.’” This is said with humorous language, but we should take seriously the content of what Calliounes says. In order to break the cognitive hold of our enemy’s psyops, we’re going to need to break out of the old patterns within the discourse. “If you defer to the preexisting forms, the forms come and eat you,” he concludes, “Infrared Students must reform their own understandings, and in turn the stone-set understandings.”
It’s because Trump understands this principle about getting attention that he was able to win over so much of the U.S. masses, including many of the most advanced among them. Trump did not conform to the forms that had been established; which made the media proclaim he could never get elected, but it was his lack of respect for normalcy that made him appealing. Consequently, anyone who’s tried to “stop Trump” while sticking to the preexisting forms has failed.
The Democratic Party has collapsed, the “Never Trump” conservatives lost a long time ago, and the liberal tailist left has lost its former relevance. Infrared, and the broader current of principled communists which it aligns with, must not make the same mistake that these trends did. That mistake was to fundamentally misunderstand how the American people think, and expect them to be won over by political actors who have nothing of interest to offer. Amid this failure of most establishment-backed ideologies, the main ideologies with relevance are Silicon Valley MAGA, and those who seek to build a genuinely dissident movement.
We within the communist movement are far from the only ones in the latter camp; we have widespread allies among the libertarians, and the types of conservatives or independents who’ve been getting disillusioned with Trump. There are many on our side in this battle, and we have the potential to bring in millions more. It depends on whether we’ll avoid the failures of “anti-Trumpism,” and make our movement not about a culture or personality war but about a vision for the future. We need to demonstrate to the masses that class struggle is how we can truly defeat the imperial state, and build a society free from war, corporate control, or the liberal order’s other evils.
Because Silicon Valley MAGA has shown itself to be another wing of that order, we have truth on our side. Just because we possess this truth, though, doesn’t mean we’ll succeed merely on that basis; this is the error of all who’ve spiraled downwards after trying to take down MAGA. For communists like us, the point was never to destroy MAGA, but to bring it to its next stage; a stage where MAGA has joined with the workers struggle. As Youhanna Haddad of Midwestern Marx has explained about this strategy:
MAGA communism does not claim that Trump’s agenda is progressive. Indeed, MAGA communism’s biggest proponents — like Jackson Hinkle of the American Communist Party — regularly criticize Trump’s conservative policies. Rather, MAGA communism is simply a mode of outreach to the disaffected and irreverent workers in Trump’s base. It is about harnessing conservative aesthetics to successfully sell them leftist ideas like ending “globalist” imperialism and nationalizing Big Tech. MAGA communism does not presume that Trump himself is a communist. It merely acknowledges that his working-class base can and should be part of the transition to a socialist future. To that end, MAGA communists like Hinkle meet American workers where they are, using patriotic imagery/rhetoric to pitch communism.
Liberalism is decaying, and Silicon Valley MAGA is decaying along with it. Until we build up enough popular organizational power, though, our enemies will keep accelerating their anti-human schemes. We cannot afford to tail, or to be complacent. The future depends on whether we’re willing to break out of the old forms, while showing the people why class struggle is the correct path.
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