Image from the League of Filipino Students
To tell what a person or organization truly believes, don’t look at what they say they believe. Look at what things they show, through their practice, that they prioritize and de-prioritize. This is what we must investigate in order to see who shares the most important goal of communists at the moment. This goal being to break the Democratic Party’s influence over the communist movement, and over the wider liberation struggles.
An easy way to apply this judgement is by seeing what the geopolitical stances of a given political actor are. If they portray Washington’s rivals as imperialist, or claim Russia is in the wrong for carrying out a mission to end U.S.-facilitated ethnic cleansing, they’re clearly incorrect from an anti-imperialist perspective. China is not a capitalist state, Russia is not a fascist state whatever its contradictions, and dialectical analyses of these two countries are able to support what I say. The problem the imperial center’s left has is that there are deep ideological influences within it which prevent its dominant voices both from recognizing these realities about the nature of the new cold war; and which prevent even many who recognize them from doing anything besides simply comprehending the information. To effectively combat the Democratic Party’s co-optation efforts, we have to be counter-hegemonic in our practice, to act like U.S. hegemony is the primary contradiction.
As Mao said, there are types who merely absorb revolutionary knowledge without sufficiently putting it into practice, who want to have their Marxism and their liberalism at the same time. In our task of defeating opportunism and reformism in the imperial center, we have to avoid becoming those unprincipled actors. Many individuals like this can be found in our modern discourse landscape. They’re quite prevalent on social media especially, and their arguments can easily turn people who could otherwise have become counter-hegemonic into agents for their opportunist cause.
The trait that defines this type of opportunist, the one whose role is to assist the Democratic Party even if they themselves don’t view their role as such, is they substitute anti-imperialism for wokeness. Not “wokeness” in the term’s original sense, which was revolutionary in that it represented consciousness among the black masses about their systemic oppression. I mean wokeness in its modern, opportunistic sense, where elites have captured woke ideas to turn them into tools for reinforcing liberalism. The liberal versions of these ideas that get produced by those elites are then adopted by the types of radicals who don’t care about anti-imperialism. This radical liberal theory gets used as a way to rationalize engaging in the practices that reinforce Democratic Party dominance: neglecting the informational war against imperialism’s psyops; exclusively trying to appeal to liberals; viewing the element of the people who are most compatible with the anti-imperialist movement, and who show this by being pro-Russia, as necessarily reactionary and irredeemable.
These types of practice interrelate with the imperialism-compatible ideas that assist in Democrat foreign policy. If you believe that nobody can be pro-Russia without being right-wing, and that those who are most open to anti-imperialist ideas should be rejected simply because they aren’t all on the left, then naturally you’ll be incentivized to adopt the anti-Russia stance yourself. To believe the psyops the liberal academic intelligentsia and commentators promote, like that Russia is imperialist or fascist, that “Wagner” exists in the way we’ve been told it exists, and that the Russian side is guilty of the war crimes we’ve been told it’s committed. At the least, adopting such radical liberal modes of practice will lead you to apathy about geopolitics and anti-imperialism. To a habit of rejecting actions that counter U.S. hegemony, under the rationale that “we can’t affect these events” or that “our own conditions matter the most.” Such notions are about justifying the act of making wokeness overshadow anti-imperialism, when under a Marxist synthesis the domestic and international aspects of struggle would be reconcilable.
The imperialism-compatible left presents being apathetic about U.S. imperialism as an indicator of pragmatism and wisdom. It purposely underestimates the amount of power we can gain over international affairs, acting like we in the core lack responsibility to resist our government’s global crimes because supposedly we can’t change what happens in this area. The leftists and self-described communists who talk like this lack the type of ideological upbringing that produces those who’ve invested themselves in the information war. Because when you’ve gained experience in this part of the struggle, it’s become clear to you just how powerful the act of combating imperialist psyops can be.
Our government is alarmed by the idea of its foreign policy narratives being challenged, and has been growing more alarmed lately amid the resistance to the Ukraine proxy war. This is why it’s indicted the Uhuru members and introduced the RESTRICT act, which would criminalize international anti-imperialist outreach. This is why it’s waged a perpetually intensifying censorship campaign against anti-imperialist voices. This is why it’s taken the care to predicate this censorship campaign on the Russiagate psyop, and on the “supporting Russia is reactionary” myth that Russiagate created the foundations for. The centers of power have been showing us that at this stage in the class struggle, their core vulnerability is losing their narrative control. If anti-imperialist perspectives gain too much prominence in mass consciousness, not only will projects like the proxy war be forced to end, but the DNC will lose its status as the gatekeeper of mass movements.
No longer will Marxism be either prevented from becoming mainstream, or diluted into just another critical theory which liberals incorporate into their ideas. Marxism will be able to gain a strong identity and organizing presence, separate from the Democrats and their insidious influence.
If someone is presenting themselves as an authority on social justice issues, while either rejecting anti-imperialist ideas or barely ever advancing these ideas, it doesn’t matter how “radical” they claim to be. The effect of their decisions is one of helping the Democratic Party. Because like there are anti-woke grifters, there are also woke grifters. The anti-revolutionary, opportunistic nature of our present discourse makes it so that there can be pro-imperialists of both the right-wing and “leftist” varieties. To make the concept of being “woke” into something that again has a revolutionary character, communists ironically need to become more wary of wokeness. Because in a discourse climate with as many grifters and frauds as ours has, usually when you encounter someone who’s eager to let you know they support social justice, they seek to use that to cover up the pro-imperialist nature of their ideas.
There’s absolutely a place for LGBT liberation, black liberation, the struggle for tribal sovereignty, and so on. These things are intertwined with anti-imperialism and class struggle, so much that the identity struggles are in essence themselves all class struggles. The danger is when a person or organization is preaching for these struggles, while neglecting anti-imperialism and class. When you see that, you know you’re looking at a Democratic Party infiltrator within radical spaces.
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