What can the U.S. empire’s narrative managers do when none of the pro-Israel arguments are truly working? When nothing they say or do can prevent millions from demonstrating for Palestine worldwide, or stop young people from abandoning the old Zionist dogmas? Ideally, the Israel narrative would be able to act as a replacement for the Ukraine narrative, letting the empire use a new story after the old one loses its usefulness. That’s what the empire has always done with its routine of rotating villains and heroes; but it can’t do that now, because this proxy war against Gaza wasn’t planned. It was started in reaction to an anti-colonial revolt whose effects the empire can only hope to mitigate. The ability of the empire to influence the popular consciousness has gone down; partly because of the people’s growing disillusionment over Ukraine, and partly because of U.S. hegemony’s decline in both hard and soft power.
When it’s impossible to sufficiently contain the initial backlash towards this proxy war, the best option of the elites is to prevent the people’s spontaneous outrage from bringing about a serious growth in the influence of the authentically revolutionary organizations. Our rulers hope that a sufficient number of the people remain divided, distracted, and detached from the genuine forces of anti-imperialism. Then the war machine will be allowed to continue, starting a war with Mexico if it doesn’t start World War II. The process of austerity will be allowed to keep accelerating, driving even more Americans into poverty. And should the plans of our intelligence centers be realized, the national security state will successfully hunt down anybody who tries to challenge the power structure.
Even though this war, austerity, and repression is going to happen to some extent, we have the ability to reduce the extent to which these evils occur, especially the wars. How much effect we’ll have depends on how well we manage to stop the state from fulfilling its goal to make all authentic dissent irrelevant. We can keep the operations of our orgs going amid the intensifying crackdown, and build a base of mass power which lets us continue to have such momentum. To reach this status of being unbeatable, the most important thing for us to do in the present stage is influence the activist discourse towards favoring serious anti-imperialist practice.
The state’s controlled opposition groups are trying to gatekeep the pro-Palestine struggle, and discredit all anti-imperialists who aren’t controlled by the Democratic Party. Their goal is to prevent the people from seeing these anti-imperialists as worth building a relationship with, and keep these truly transgressive parts of the movement marginal. We can stop ourselves from being isolated in such a way by not just arguing against the ideas of the compatible left, but expanding beyond it; by establishing a perpetually growing base of mass support that’s not invested in the “left” niche, and therefore isn’t susceptible to the narratives which the gatekeepers put forth about us.
This is what the African People’s Socialist Party is doing by recruiting from the Black working class, while building all the necessary anti-imperialist alliances. Due to its transgressiveness, the APSP has come under covert attack from the PSL, the most effective source of controlled opposition within Marxist spaces. Amid PSL’s scheduling its Palestine rally at the same time and place as Uhuru’s November 4 DC march, APSP’s publication has observed about the underhanded ways PSL is dividing the anti-colonial cause:
In the past fifteen years, ANSWER has never accepted the Black is Back Coalition’s call to organize their base to participate in the anti-colonial Black People’s March on the White House. This, in and of itself, is a statement of how the PSL/ANSWER has measured the significance of the anti-colonial struggle of black people. It also contextualizes their ability to undermine our anti-colonial struggle with this contending November 4 mobilization…A genuine solidarity with the anti-colonial struggle of African people should have driven PSL/ANSWER to raise in their meetings with other organizations that a Black-led March on the White House, which has taken place on the first Saturday of November for the past 15 years, was scheduled to happen on that same date, with urgent political and practical objectives to defeat a dangerous assault on free speech with implications for the whole anti-colonial struggle.
This bad-faith way of operating that’s default within the modern “left” is why I’ve had to recognize that the types of anti-imperialists who’ve undergone the particular journey which I have; where I started out as a pro-PSL leftist, then learned that’s not the right path; aren’t the primary demographic we need to be reaching. My experience is not one shared by the vast majority of people, as the leftist circles I encountered represent only one little subculture. The primary demographic we need to be appealing to are the types of Americans who otherwise would never get involved in anything political, unless they encounter a movement like ours which offers them a viable way to assert their interests as workers.
PSL claims it’s doing that, but in practice it’s only reaching people who either are already involved in the activism scene, or are liberals that will only accept the truncated version of “socialism” which PSL represents. To truly get out of the movement and into the masses, we must reject the standard modern U.S. leftist practice of reselling the rhetoric and aesthetics of the Democratic Party. We must appeal to the people not by acting like most of them are liberals whose central concern is stopping Trump, but by connecting with them on what the majority of them are truly concerned with. That being their perpetually declining living standards, which can only be improved if we defeat the U.S. empire and build a workers state.
That’s the idea idea the Center for Political Innovation and its coalition partners are working to bring to the people with their December 2nd convention in Portland. CPI and those adjacent to it understand that the most revolutionary-compatible elements of the people are not the ones who will be receptive to a “socialist” platform designed to imitate that of the Democrats; if we’re serious about communism, we’re going to put forth a program and image that’s fundamentally distinct from liberal idpol.
The efforts of the PSL and its defenders to isolate Uhuru; and to do the same to Uhuru organizing partners such as CPI; are part of the effort to keep authentic opposition hidden. While the media purposefully ignores the Uhuru case, the gatekeepers within the left work to make Uhuru get as little exposure as possible while attacking its allies. We can beat these narrative control tactics by refusing to be intimidated by the threats from these gatekeepers to “cancel” us; what does it mean to be canceled when all the people who’ve joined in on the campaign against you are part of a niche, one that’s not capable of making most people join in on their efforts? The majority of Americans, especially the workers, lack the social proximity to these political spaces which would make them able to be influenced by the narratives against anti-imperialists.
The anti-solidarity psyops that the state and its counter-gangs are putting forth can’t be effective if these Americans get brought into the struggle. That’s why my focus is increasingly on making events like the Portland conference, and the upcoming Rage Against the War Machine rallies, succeed at reaching Americans who’ve been alienated from bourgeois politics. It’s among these Americans where we’ll ultimately find most of our friends.
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