Imagine for a moment that you’re stranded on a desert island. You’ve been shipwrecked, washed ashore. You have your health and you have supplies for the time being but your vessel is smashed and there is no shelter from the glaring sun. You have all the wood, nails, saws, know-how, everything you need to make a sturdy little abode — comfortable even. You could make it big or small, simple or complex, you could paint it if you want. You’ve got options. Except every time you look at a hammer you can’t help but throw it into the waves. This simple, elegant, necessary tool provokes such fear and disgust, that you can’t even look at it. It drives you mad to the point where you’re trying to slap nails into 2x4s with your bare hands until your palms are bloody and useless. Days later you’re found. You’ve succumbed to exposure looking like a lobster, sunburned to a crisp with mangled claws where your hands used to be.

You don’t hear people expressing whole-sale rejections of “all the -isms” as much as you used to. That particular phrase may have had its heyday in the 90s. But all too often it feels like those folks won. While there has been a moderate surge in people identifying themselves as some form of socialist or abolitionist or anarchist (or capitalist) over the past year, and feminist for a little while longer, most talk of these kinds of -isms is derisive and many see them as mere labels to either low-key avoid or collect like playing cards, to supplement their identity, without really engaging with what they mean or god forbid organizing collectively to make them manifest. Broad, derisive and often purposefully obtuse terms like “woke” and “tankie” hinder necessary conversations by obscuring and lumping together all kinds of ideas, with these terms often meaning different things to different people in our fractured discourse.

But if we are to radically change the world for the better, with all the force urgently required by our circumstances, we need to bring all the positive force of -ism back into everyday discourse. Bring it back with a vengeance. The point isn’t that all -isms are good, but that we need to bring back the descriptor in its full meaning. Not as a way to dismiss an idea or shove it in a box, but as a way to collectively dig into ideas and have any real kind of constructive social conversation. In this sense, not only do we have to bring back old -isms but we need to make new ones! We need to rid ourselves of the *individualism* (and use that term to effectively dissect that phenomenon) that claims every idea as something original and outside categorization, and that prevents us from seeing meaningful patterns on every scale minuscule to global, every day to epoch-shaping.

Let’s dissect why Twitter promotes “lefter-than-thou-ism,” how thats a particular reflection of the individualism and the lack of vision and the low sights of American liberalism and leftism, how it brings people down without any positives, and how destructive it is on organizational and ideological levels, rooted in the notion that the world can’t be changed and we just have to carve out our personal brand or lucrative niche. Let’s talk about racism — not *only* as an accusation and conversation-ender, a way to dismiss or shun something that is racist (all of which is often necessary) but to deepen our collective understanding and see how it fits together with the broader picture of white supremacy, national oppression, and capitalism-imperialism. Lets talk about communist internationalism — what it means that we are bound together, the morality of that, even discussing the competing notions of that between Connely-ism and Lenin-ism or, dare I say it, Avakian-ism or even the eclectic muck that is Marcy-ism. Let’s nail down Chomsky-ism and Davis-ism, which many, many people follow no matter what they think they’re doing (and which I’ll return to later in this piece). The fact that public intellectuals may develop -isms about them (whether they like it or not) isn’t a commentary on the essence of these people as individuals. Nor do they have -isms because all their ideas are original, or because they’ve brainwashed their followers; but because they put together certain ideas with certain methods in ways that either offer deep insight into how the world actually works or that obscure it, often some of both. They may uniquely connect to how many people see the world or they may be ignored, and either way they may be consequential. And if we want to have meaningful conversations about that, accurately defining and portraying their -isms can contribute enormously to that.

Sometimes personal -isms may have an advantage over constructed -isms. Angela Davis professes abolitionism but if you take on the entirety of abolitionism by dissecting Davis-ism, someone can come out of left field with a revolutionary or anarchist interpretation of “abolition” or something that Gilmore or almost any academic left of Bernie Sanders has said in the last few years. They might be mutually exclusive to Davis’ work but still fall under the name abolitionism and instead of debating ideas to find the truth you end up aimlessly throwing around ideas that sound half-good. Especially when dealing with liberal ideas, prominent individuals are forced to have somewhat more consistency than their broad schools of thought or vague terminology. And we have this beautiful, simple three-letter tool with almost endless possibilities that can help us navigate these abstractions like nothing else.

These examples just scratch the surface of what we can constructively talk about — and do — if we unleash the -isms.

-Isms are modes of thinking, worldviews, theories, ideologies, the different logics that we use to make sense of the world and if we are lucky, to create the world anew. -Isms can be wildly out of sync with reality, leaping off the edge of evidence and facts and critical thinking, hoping that the bungee cord of society is strong enough to keep one from hitting the rocks and smashing their head wide open, and maybe even to reel one back in. Or an -ism can correspond with reality, providing structure so that correct ideas are able to make sense and function in the world, taking society itself to new heights, even reshaping the -ism itself in light of new evidence or better methodology.

And let’s talk about what happens if we keep this tool locked away.

With the demise of the Soviet Union in the early 90s, the American empire-sanctioned thought-leader Francis Fukuyama declared the “end of history.” This framed the new age of unchallenged empire in the imaginations of millions. And it helped usher in a new wave of anti-ideological thought (wrap your head around that). “At the end of history,” he wrote, “it is not necessary that all societies become successful liberal societies, merely that they end their ideological pretensions of representing different and higher forms of human society.” He said that any attempt to improve upon his favored liberal society — a hegemonic empire reigning over a world of slums and preventable disease, faceless oppression and exploitation, with extreme wealth concentrated in the hands of a few backed by enormous military might with absolute poverty stretching over huge sections of the globe — was merely pretentious, using “ideology” as a scheme to cover the same selfishness that capitalism openly bases itself in.

But this was not an original idea. Similarly (though not the same), every fascist movement claims that they are merely returning to the natural order; that outside, novel ideas are what has messed everything up. Look at the fascist attachment to conspiracy theories for starters. Systems are never the problem — merely conniving conspirators and once they are exterminated the worthy can live happily ever after. Or go even further back. The defeated confederates rarely framed their struggle as a fight to create or advance something, only as a return to what they framed and may well have understood as the natural order free of outside ideas. Any notion of Black humanity was alien, an imposed -ism, and any rebellion on the part of Black people was due to outside agitators. Ta-Nehisi Coates has collected key statements of the confederates in their own words in his article “What This Cruel War Was Over” for the Atlantic. Let’s take a walk through this history and marvel at their references to “an imperious law of nature (that) none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun,” that an attack on slavery was an attack on civilization on the one hand while on the other what the union demanded was nothing less than “submission to the mandates of abolition.” Writing on behalf of the confederate governor of Alabama, Stephen Hale explained “among the Republi­can party, the election of Mr. Lincoln is hailed, not simply as [a] change of Administration, but as the inauguration of new princi­ples, and a new theory of Government…”, one which the north had declared war in the pursuit of. If you believe that your ideal society is simply the natural state of things, it follows that any consciously developed frame of thought is alien, invasive, at best something to use defensively. But if you see that there is no human nature, that we are all in this together without a rule book but with the tools to figure things out and create something worthy of our children, then clearly such -isms are vitally necessary and really fucking exciting. The confederates’ self-proclaimed anti-ideology is echoed in those who later attempted to reframe “the war of northern aggression” as an attack on states rights and who today fly the confederacy’s flags and defend their monuments but, of course, aren’t doing so to promote white supremacy and racism. No, they have no agenda. They are merely “celebrating their heritage.”

What’s behind the fear of -isms?

Capitalism-imperialism provides the structure to the lives of billions of people on this planet. It is alienating and atomizing in every regard from survival to culture to philosophy, all enforced by brute force. It compels people first this way and then that and then both at the same time without any kind of warning or guide, or even acknowledgement. The notion of people consciously and voluntarily changing things is alien to all of this. The notions of appreciating the ideas that most closely correspond to reality, ideas that serve humanity as a whole, wherever they come from, and regardless of profitability, are anathema. When we take -isms seriously, we go beyond irrational fears of outside agitators, beyond the marketplace of ideas, into the scientific clash of ideas to get to the truth.

What happens when -isms are taboo? In these situations we see three dynamics.

1. Intellectual discourse is squashed, dreams for a better future become only that — dreams disconnected from current reality.
2. Political action focuses on individuals rather than systems, becoming punitive, accusatory, with an endless search for all-but-literal superheroes.
3. World views are reduced to competing claims of ‘Blood and soil.”

What can happen when -isms are embraced?

In and of itself, this doesn’t solve much. It gives us a chance. “-ism” isn’t synonymous with idea but when we take isms seriously, what we’re doing is taking ideas seriously. Isms are after all a certain kind of idea. They are ideas with some level of consistent logic. They’re ideas that advocate for one thing over another, whether that’s an understanding, an action or a whole society. Without isms, knowledge becomes a set of facts to collect and horde, creating a false dichotomy between “experts” given authority by the system on one side against marginalized people whose authority can only stem from “lived experience” on the other. What isms provides is the notion that the imperialist-sponsored “experts” could just be wrong, and the marginalized people have the capacity to objectively understand the world.

When we embrace -isms without reserve we have the tools we need to struggle with each other on the level necessary to create change in the real world. When we organize around -isms we can win real power and make new worlds. Without them the best we can do is defer to power and beg for change from the outside, scratching at the doors even though no one’s home to hear us. Dismissing -isms precludes the possibility that we could construct something new. Until we recognize this tool that we have, an abstraction that reflects something fundamental about how ideas work, we’ll just be stuck in willful ignorance and self-induced helplessness, at very best trying to pull down a house with our bare hands til our palms are mangled and bloody and time runs out for us all.

The basis to move forward

These may sound like some good ideas that everyone can agree on. It may sound like an attempt to even the playing field for different kinds of ideas. But if we follow this logic through even a little bit it hopefully becomes clear that those would be illusory goals and not worth chasing in the first place. Because you can’t escape it — any idea to get from one place to another is based in one ism or another.

In writing and revising this I’ve had to come to grips with the fact that the chances of publication on any “left” website or forum are pretty low but they drop significantly lower if I follow this argument through to its clear conclusion. Namely that this argument is not for some neutral ground or “unbiased” perspective, nor does it grow straight out of the earth, but this conception has in fact developed from my erstwhile application of and commitment to the new communism developed by Bob Avakian. This is a cohesive theory with a lot of answers in its own right, but it’s also a theory that embraces the kind of explicit discussion and disagreement and searching for the truth that I’ve been talking about throughout this piece. The epistemology of the new communism — the basis of truth in this -ism — is “both partisan and objective,” which is a phrase taken from Marx himself but given new life by Avakian who states that “everything that is actually true is good for the proletariat… all truths can help us get to communism.” He’s posing our means and ends in opposition to the commodification of and utilitarian approach to truth and ignorance under capitalism. This methodology explicitly grapples with the relationship between certainty — necessary for decisive life-or-death action and necessary to build from one conclusion to the next — and doubt, and the role evidence, power, history, coercion, and the very fabric of society play in that relationship. This is an epistemology and overall ideology that, once in power, can set a framework for a society where people using a broad array of -isms can work productively together towards a deeper collective understanding of reality while also collectively contributing to developing theory amongst the most advanced.

One place this has been laid out is in the “Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America” which goes deep into how that new society could function. This piece of speculative non-fiction stands out sharply against our current reality and even current conversations about “change.” But to be blunt, to imagine getting anywhere near the seizure of power, people need to begin taking up elements of this approach now en masse. The more the new communism is taken up, the more every positive element in society can contribute to real liberation.

Our species has an amazing gift to be able to recognize reality, learn from what we see and hear as well as from others and abstract all that into whole systems of thought. It’s an elegant tool, one which itself reflects something about how the world works. We are capable of doing it in different ways, some of which correspond closer to how reality actually is and some further afield. We have the capacity to get it right or to get it wrong, or to use it for small-minded purposes, or to see what actually exists so clearly that we can imagine and collectively consciously create a different better way to be. Either way, each and every one of our actions are determined by the worldviews we subscribe to. It’s not simply that people often disagree over how to understand the world but that the very nature of our society, divided into exploited and exploiting classes, historically evolved out of ignorance, creates, molds, and reinforces those differences, giving us every reason to deeply interrogate our understanding of the world. In such a world, what legitimate reason could there possibly be to not openly and explicitly discuss how to understand the world? In such a world, how is it even imaginable that we could really enact fundamental change without struggling over what worldview is driving our actions and those changes?

Why even your favorite politicians got ‘money for wars but can’t feed the poor’

When you set out to change the world and recruit others into that process, there are two big categories of conversations you often end up having:

1. ‘How does the world actually work’ and ‘how can it be changed’ or

2. ‘How do we trick, convince, cajole, bribe, or force people into making a better world?’

Sadly, it seems that with each passing year more and more people are only interested in or only capable of having that second type of conversation. But Bob Avakian said something uncharacteristically pithy that I’ll come back to repeatedly here: “What people think is part of objective reality, but objective reality is not determined by what people think.”

Revolutionary Communism isn’t popular at the moment. The notions of scientific leadership, of putting humanity first, of critically figuring out what program and action will advance the struggle to overthrow this system — none of those are particularly popular at the moment. And for a lot of folks that unpopularity is reason enough to totally dismiss the whole package as totally unrealistic, unworthy of even a passing glance. In fact the opposite of most of those things are very popular — with individualism running amok across the American political spectrum. We have an uphill battle in changing how people think.

But these unpopular things seem to have just as much effect on actual policy as things that are polling very well — for example the demands for a $15 minimum wage (67% support) and Medicare for all (56% support). What’s going on there?

The most popular politician is a ‘socialist,’ yet…

For a brief moment in late 2019 and early 2020 Bernie Sanders would show up in a city with 3 or 4 days notice and tens of thousands of people would drop everything to come and see him. Starting in 2017, polls were clear that he was the most popular politician in the United States.

In 2018, AOC and the Squad surged into office with mass popularity and enthusiasm. Then Sanders pulled ahead of the dense pack and won the first primaries and caucuses of the 2020 Democratic primary. Meanwhile the ranks of the Democratic Socialists of America were surging. Surely their realistic, popular program would have advanced on one front or another. But in all of this, not one speck of their program has been brought into reality on the national or state level.* Not by pressuring elected officials. Not by getting elected. Not by any other means. While fascism surged forward from the highest offices in the land, these folks were alienated from any real power even within the opposition party. Many progressives and democratic socialists have referenced the philosophical framework of the Overton window, saying that shifting the discussion over things like Medicare for all, the Green New Deal, and even the term ‘socialism’ has been a major victory. Conveniently, and with the help of self-reinforcing social media algorithms, this ignores that such an Overton window was also embracing fascist ideas and delusions totally divorced from reality — with the striking difference that those fascist ideas were deeply connected to the power structure and policy implementation.

While powerful fascists disconnected from reality, the impenetrable wall separating the democratic socialists from power became fodder for the DNC leadership and fascists alike, fueling claims that the socialists are all bluster. While this isn’t the worst thing about their program, it does raise a central question; how is it that the popularity of politicians and their political programs seems to have nothing to do with what’s actually implemented? How is it that popularity and power are on two totally different tracks?

The basis of political power in this society

“The essence of what exists in the U.S. is not democracy but capitalism-imperialism and political structures to enforce that capitalism-imperialism.

What the U.S. spreads around the world is not democracy, but imperialism and political structures to enforce that imperialism.” -Bob Avakian

The US dominates the global economy, based on a dominant position in a historically evolved generalized system of capitalism-imperialism and managed via the WTO, IMF and various trade agreements and enforced through the threat of war — even nuclear war, as well as strategic coups and interventions. The United States military is the largest, most violent, most well-funded killing machine the world has ever seen. The United States “leadership” role in the world is based in military might and economic dominance, all within the confines and framework of globalized capitalism.

The governance of the United States serves those functions. Maintaining a functioning domestic society comes second and serves that. Think about a job at Walmart. The point is to sell stuff. The resources and code of conduct in the break room (or whether you have a break room at all) are secondary. Even those things that are popular and get implemented — they are implemented because they serve the rulers’ (or at least some of the rulers’) visions for the empire. But metaphors are limited. So let’s use an example.

The Home Front

As part of AOC’s campaign, she harked back to “the Democratic Party of FDR.” He was claimed as a Democratic Socialist forebear, with his signature New Deal. And now with Biden’s inauguration some are hoping for just as sweeping changes. But context matters. The 1930’s were a time of intense economic hardship, and its tempting to view the New Deal programs merely through the lens of giving people jobs and reining in out-of-control wealth inequality through government intervention. But let’s take a more global approach. Technology was advancing at an unprecedented clip. Western Europe’s colonial project was going through immense changes with a very uncertain future. Fascism was on the rise. The Bolshevik revolution was inspiring people across the globe to look for radical solutions. War was looming. The US was not yet the top-dog imperialist but the most basic dynamics of capitalism-imperialism were pushing the United States to expand its imperialist ambitions and it’s competition was facing major crises. Does it come as a shock that in this context Germany, the Soviet Union, and the United States were all making massive state-sponsored efforts to expand their infrastructure? If these were major considerations in implementing the New Deal, is it really reasonable to think that something similar could be brought into being now, when the production base of the US empire is in dependent and subservient countries of the global south?

On another tip, the mythology of the civil rights movement of the 1960s tells us that Black people began to protest some bad stuff that had been happening for a long time, and after a few years of non-violent local protests and some big national ones, some vague “struggle,” most people began to support civil rights, and the government made some concessions. Some say those concessions were good, others say not good enough, but most peddle the same history. What’s missed is that the positive change that occurred was one of a number of possible political outcome of a thick, shifting web of social and economic relations. Through the course of the Second Great Migration, things were gonna change for Black people, for the South, and really for all of the US one way or another. Sharecropping was becoming less profitable, but not everyone could go to the North, or pack into the major cities.

It could have gone from an already horrendous position to something much much worse, absolutely genocidal even. It didn’t have to go there, but it could have. And in some ways it began moving in that direction, especially between the end of World War 2 and the when the Civil Rights Movement as we know it broke through. Now, there have been courageous Black people rising up in every generation for four hundred years. But within this swirl of events and dynamics, a courageous minority of Black people seized significant political initiative. And that struck a chord thats still resonating today.

Look at the context. The battle for imperialist supremacy was heating up between the US and the Soviet Union. Oppressed nations around the world were rising up. The communist revolution in China was inspiring righteous rebellion around the world, and leading people to look into fundamental solutions. The position of Black people in the US improved in proportion to the existential threat posed to the empire by the courageous action of ultimately small groups of Black folks and some others in a period of acute international crisis.

The legitimacy of the United States government, the way it ruled, and most importantly its ability to lead the western imperialist bloc (the self-proclaimed “free world”) to victory was being called into question and therefore they acted to set new terms of what was legitimate and what was illegitimate. The southern sheriff and some other overt racist features of American society — many of which were holdovers and outgrowths of the increasingly outmoded sharecropper system — were sidelined. Often gradually, sometimes through the force of the national guard. Voting rights were secured. These forms of oppression were replaced by the the relatively faceless atomized white supremacy of redlining, de facto employment discrimination, cultural co-option, etc. with Rizzo, Daley, and ultimately Hoover shifting the narrative away from Jim Clark and Bull Conner. In significant ways this improved the lives of millions of Black people, and advanced towards even deeper changes. On the other hand, Black leaders demanding more than that were assassinated, with their organizations wrecked. The underlying contradictions continued to shift. A lot has changed since then with even many of those victories for the people, tools painstakingly carved for liberation, being transformed into weapons against us. Other forms of oppression have come to the fore, while unreformed old ones come back with a vengeance despite opposition from the majority. Even as People of Color come very close to being the majority. What does all this show?

The ruling class is not a reasonable force — there is no table to take a seat at and have a discussion. It’s not about ideas and voices, or even heated arguments. It’s not about polls and popularity and winning debates. In order to affect anything under this system, and ultimately to overthrow this system, there needs to be forces objective to the ruling class posing acute challenges to their system. Peoples’ struggle — including non-violent mass struggle — can become one of those objective forces. Revolutionary leadership can become one of those objective forces. But it’s vital that we see it in that light — as a force and not a conversation. On that basis, we can see where our force can fit into the whole scheme of things, in relation to international competition, the basic dynamics of capitalism-imperialism, the limits of the natural world, global struggles against oppression, etc. We can see the ways in which our force can change the whole game, and how that is clearly outside the avenues of change provided by the current system.

World Peace

The popularity of opinions, desires, policies, programs, or figures in itself doesn’t exert force. After all, the popularity of “world peace” or “ending hunger” or “curing cancer” is sky high — to the extent that these are common compelling factors in all kinds of mainstream and cultist religious belief, because people don’t see them as possible through real-world means. But they can move beyond mere aspirations, even beyond the endlessly disappointing “rational arguments” that never get anywhere under this system. In order for that to happen, most fundamentally, the mode of production must be radically transformed to be brought in line with achieving those goals. To achieve that, a materialist political program to make those transformations needs to be brought forward and it must be fought for all the way through. Fundamentally that means we need a revolution, replacing the might-equals-right system of capitalism-imperialism with a radically new system. And we need that urgently.

As we consciously build towards that end, it means recognizing and seizing on the key contradictions and crises of this system, connecting with mass struggle for justice or bringing people into struggle. But even in those circumstances of fighting for goals short of revolution, that should be consciously serving the advance towards overthrowing their whole system. Otherwise we’re at best prolonging a doomed civilization, if you can call it that. And after the seizure of power this fight will continue in a different context and on different terms.

The use of ideas

Its true and necessary to recognize that we aren’t in a civil conversation with the capitalist-imperialist rulings classes, that we can only lay down passive or rise up and exert force (often non-violent) for change. That said, the ruling class does not only act as an objective force on us, the people. The dominant ideas of any age are those of the ruling classes. That happens in large part spontaneously. But the rulers consciously aim to shape public opinion through many means as part of maintaining their power. The assassinations of certain Black leaders in the 60s showed people very clearly where the limits of their freedom were. Different factions of the ruling class use ideas in different ways to achieve that. Taking a look at their different approaches might clarify that further.

The ideas that make Bernie the most popular politician are ideas that “make sense” for Americans within the logic of capitalism-imperialism. People should have healthcare. We should deal with global warming. And on and on. The Democratic Socialists are always subtly changing the terms from ‘people should have healthcare’ to ‘Americans should have healthcare,’ (a little reverse Overton window action) and in terms of implementation, you have to suspend any understanding of what America really is and the empire’s evolving interests, but once you do, on a superficial moral and logical level, they make sense. You could say this of Warren too, “she’s got a plan for that.” They take on the “arguments” of their opponents in mainstream American politics, and if this was all just a battle of ideas among the rulers, they would win hands down. As crises mount; it’s not absolutely out of the question that one or more of these policies might be implemented as a release valve for pressures on the system, if the country can afford it while maintaining its economic and military stranglehold on the world. But their main impact now is to maintain the struggles over these basic moral issues within limits reasonable to this system. Like the shift manager who empathetically tells you “hey man, I’ll bring up (set schedules or more hours or dealing with harassment…) at the managers meeting, but you know corporate…” they’re always more popular than their peers who act as straight-up tools of the company. But does that popularity get them anywhere? No. They never deliver on what their employees want and they don’t move up the ladder unless they change. And if any of those things ever actually get implemented, it won’t be because of them.

Meanwhile the mainstream Democrats don’t have policies or plans, at least when it comes to assuaging people. They just have ideals, aspirations. In fact they have ceded their party’s program to the Bernie wing. After all, no one would read it or take it seriously but them. The mainstream is content with the old “working toward a more perfect Union” schtick. For some reason they can never make much progress on these aspirations even when they control every lever of power. That reason is because they are doing everything they can trying to maintain the empire as stable as they can.

The Fascists use ideas as a bludgeon. For their base, they create reality. And for the rest of us, every bald face lie and bad-faith argument they get away with adds to their power.

It’s easy to look at this and dismiss it as all lies and hypocrisy. But when you recognize that these are sections of the ruling class weaponizing ideas to further their vision of the American empire, the vision they see as the strongest version of that empire, you can see the connections between the theater and the reality. And then we can put that up against our understanding of what contradictions they face and where the power lies.

Our power

The cult of popularity infects every element of this society. From celebrity worship to entrepreneur culture, from informal social media “branding” to career development to dating app profiles, from legal strategy to political advocacy, popularity is given way more than its due, if not presented as THE key to success. The charity photo-op is shamelessly used by everyone from presidential candidates to CEOs to “socialist” collectives and racial justice organizers. The logic goes that if you can ingratiate yourself to people for them to like you, then you can get whatever you want.

This reflects how we are trained to see everything, even ourselves, as commodities. In those positions where you are the actual commodity, this can be of some use. But the blunt reality is that this logic doesn’t lead to success on the terms of the awful way the world is, or for the beautiful way it could be. The capitalist path to success is through creatively exploiting people. What you produce can be unremarkable, as long as you can exploit people more creatively or brutally than others. Popularity can sometimes help put lipstick on that pig. Meanwhile the path to communist revolution lies in putting the full reality of what we face before people as broadly as possible and connecting that with struggles over the key contradictions and crises of this system, all toward the goal of seizing state power.

Just giving people what they tell you they want isn’t gonna get you anywhere with anything. Tailoring your program to what you think people want will leave you in the same place, but probably with some debts you can’t pay. Giving people a vision of the best they could hope for within the logic of this system won’t actually get you power, and definitely won’t fulfill that vision, while blinding people to what kind of better society we could really achieve. People have plenty of nice- or even great-sounding ideas that make sense in the right frame of reference, responsive to all the current debates, that could provide people with what they want and need if only… if only it weren’t for the objective reality of capitalism-imperialism, American empire, global warming, the anarchy of production, the brutality of the state, and the fact that without science people will continue to go along with all of that.

For a real revolution, you need science and to provide the people with that science. To ground oneself and a growing core of people in in uprooting and overcoming the foundational issues facing humanity — global warming, all sorts of brutal national divisions, gender and sexual oppression, endless wars, the most basic way that our world sustains and reproduces itself.

We’ve got to recognize that change must start there, anything less being cosmetic and ephemeral and then provide people the tools to make that change. That might not be popular, but it’s the only real power we could ever get our hands on. And that recognition is more powerful in terms of liberating people than any ‘reasonable’ policy proposal under the capitalist-imperialist system could ever be.

“What is important is not what people are thinking, or even what they’re doing at any given time, but what they will be compelled to confront by the workings of this system — that it is the contradictions of this system that provide the basis for the revolution that we’re working for, and it’s by working on those contradictions that we work for that revolution.” — Bob Avakian

*While I’m curious as to what victories they may claim on local levels, I’m confident it won’t reverse the findings.

Recommended for further study of these issues:

• The Five Stops: Why This System Can’t Be Reformed (video), by Bob Avakian (excerpt from this, which is text)
• The Material Basis and the Method for Making Revolution by Bob Avakian, Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party
• On Developments in Nepal and the Stakes for the Communist Movement: Letters to the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) from the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, 2005–2008
  (With a Reply from the CPN(M), 2006)
• Why America Is Not — AND CANNOT BE — a Force for Good in the World — Revolution Newspaper
• The Oppression of Black People, The Crimes of This System and the Revolution We Need — Revolution Newspaper

In the days following the fascist attack on the Capitol Greg Carr commented,

“The more I think about it, the more I have the feeling that America finally broke in the last week. I don’t mean that it was ever “fixed.” I mean that its white frame finally cracked beyond sustainability under its own weight. That isn’t a thing to lament. Quite the opposite.”

Right now everyone who’s working or even hoping for a better future has got to ask themselves — am I trying to paint a beautiful new picture or find a new fix for that old frame? With any honesty, more than a few may be surprised by their answers.

Capitalism-imperialism crushes the life out of people around the world, forcing the great majority into an existence where their creativity and insight are squandered if not destroyed. But every ruling class faction in every country finds its own unique, often imaginative, ways of legitimizing capitalist-imperialist rule through every crisis. Creativity in this pursuit seems boundless and it’s endlessly encouraged. It’s rare, if ever, that these uniting mythologies come pre-packaged from some elected official or think tank. Most often they are creative and idealistic variations and interpretations on old themes, developed collectively by people who refuse to live in the old way any longer, contorted through the realities of this system into new horrific normals. As you dream about and strive for a better future, are you dreaming about what humanity really needs? Or are those dreams being twisted to legitimize and maintain this empire, maybe modifying it and making it more livable but keeping it intact?

Divisions and Crises

“The divisions among people in a society like this — including the unequal and oppressive divisions between rich and poor, white and non-white, men and women, and so on — are real and objective. Democratic Party politicians keep saying things like “Trump is dividing us instead of uniting us.” But these divisions are not caused by the “divisiveness” of someone like Trump. Trump makes use of these divisions in pursuit of his fascist agenda, but neither he nor anyone else has caused, or could have caused, these divisions — they are rooted in the very nature, functioning, and requirements of this system, in the way all this has historically evolved. To eliminate these divisions, it is necessary to eliminate this system.” — Bob Avakian

The crises facing the ruling class today are mounting. Global Warming threatens humanity while destabilizing economies and alliances and undermining that pillar of the US empire: oil. The tens-million-strong refugee crisis and other demographic changes wrought by imperialism (and in part by global warming) rip up people’s lives and social relations causing major ideological shifts and redistributing or even wiping out the social bases of important political forces. White people in the US are losing their majority status and changes are playing out in the ethnic makeup of the largest cities and the smallest towns. Competition amongst subordinate nations for a bigger piece of the pie and a stronger negotiating voice simmer as the largest among them (still subordinate but unhappily so) strategize to ascend to the throne.

Over the last 5 years, Trump & co have taken hold of the deep divisions in this society to deal with these snowballing crises, doubling down on the horrors of this system with real consequences for millions of lives, and recast America’s political landscape. It has been clear every step of the way that Trump’s fascist base represented a minority. A key sticking point for the fascists themselves is that they represent a shrinking portion of the population, as this system’s driving contradictions are changing the demographics of this country beyond anyone’s conscious control, eroding the domestic white majority as a side effect of ripping up billions of lives around the world through war, hunger, ecological crisis and more. The election made their minority status even more clear and yet they are not slithering away, are even gaining ground in some ways, especially in the streets. The Tea Party should be ringing bells in people’s heads right now, reminding us the consequences of fascists unleashed in the streets repolarizing society toward their aims, sucking up all the air of opposition. But we are way beyond that today with Trump, Pence, Cuz, Hawley, and more sitting to the right of Sarah Palin’s wildest dreams.

So what explains the fascists’ outsized power in contrast to the size of their social base? Is it just their passion? There is extraordinary hate that emanates from the base — the white supremacy, the christian fascism, the misogyny and xenophobia, and more. But ultimately, their power is not just a sum of those parts and its not just that people feel those things, though millions feel those in their hearts and are willing to live and die for them. Their real power comes through the fact that the fascist clique, which Trump has played a key role in consolidating, has solutions for the crises that the ruling class faces — global warming, the refugee crisis, unruly subordinate powers, etc. Not solutions in the interest of humanity, mind you, but solutions to maintain their power in the face of these crises or even schemes to use them to advance their power. And those solutions rely on violently reasserting white supremacy, misogyny, xenophobia, Christian fascism, a doubling down on American military power and promoting a deep disconnect from reality. This is what is meant when it is raised that a significant source of the fascists power and unity is that Trump hates the same people his base hates. This is an extremely strong unifying factor. Not only can that give insight on what feeds the fascists’ power but it can also provide a look at what restrains the power of the majority.

The Liberal Program

The ruling class Liberals — especially the Big D Democrats — have no clear answers for the ruling class’ crises. They have no vision. What does that mean?

At the top it means this:

Global Warming

In a world with accelerating global warming, the Liberal order aims to maintain their global empire in the ways that they have maintained it for 70 years, with oil itself and access to oil-producing countries as key assets and bargaining chips. Yet their form of rule drives them to simultaneously acknowledge a basic understanding of reality and science and “cooperate” with the “international community” — meaning relying on more than brute force to maintain a leadership role amongst other powers, maintaining the impression that those other powers can gain from voluntarily subordinating themselves to the US.

The technology exists to make significant strides towards non-CO2 emitting energy, but to do so would undermine a key pillar of the US empire, and the way that has structured the global economy and power relations. This would open the US up to serious competition. Meanwhile the modern American Liberal paradigm cannot muster its capitalist class to cooperate, sacrifice, and transform itself in the ways that European social democracy does or that the US did in the late 30’s-70s. Deregulation is one of the key elements that maintains the ties between the US political structure and its economic powerhouses*. These are thick intractable contradictions.

White Supremacy

As demographic changes erode the domestic white majority, and the comfortable white middle class is undermined including in suburban and rural areas of the country, much of the basis for classical liberal white supremacy — boiled down to its essence in “Get Out” — is being undermined. When oppressive relations are unspoken, they rely even more on the stability of unequal relations of power. While elements of the mentality are widespread, the actual communities that foster that mentality are disappearing, as the much-vaunted “white middle class” disappears and is either integrated into more diverse sections of the population or isolated into hardening fascist cores. While changing demographics alone will not end white supremacy, they will transform it. The fascists’ proposal is some mixture of ethnic cleansing and putting all people who aren’t white in explicitly subordinate positions. The Liberal proposal is… to put their head in the sand and to maintain unspoken oppressive power relations that correspond to a time when there was a large, comfortable, stable and segregated white middle class.

At the same time, precisely because they have no vision or program, the Liberals’ biggest selling point is that they have much more influence among — and can maintain legitimacy among and rule over — people of color. Fascists don’t even try. So the Liberals aim to rely on those demographic changes to win elections even as those same changes undermine their rule.

External Enemies and Internal Cohesion

Which segways into the deep issues the Liberals face in connecting to their base of support. As much as American Liberalism relies on an individualist ethos of live and let live in order to pacify the masses, their central mythology of “the arc of history bends towards justice” requires something to smite, or at least something to contrast against. They are bloodthirsty imperialists. But simply admitting that comes with a high price that’s best to avoid if you can. They need a worse enemy. In the past this has been a source of strength for the Liberal rulers over domestic conservatives and fascists. The wealth that the US sucked out of oppressed peoples at home and abroad afforded white people rights that they could contrast against authoritarian others. When US interests dictated the need to enter WW2, the liberals had the upper hand in mobilizing against foreign fascism. As the top-dog imperialists, internal divisions and power balances became ever-more inseparable from global economic transformations. Through pushes and pulls the Liberals maintained that upper hand against segregation in the 50’s and 60’s, “totalitarianism” in the 70’s and 80’s, and Islamic theocracy in the 00’s and 10’s. These campaigns have all been rooted in geopolitics and power rivalries but have all taken on strong ideological components — through politician’s speeches yes, but also through the media, through education, supreme court cases, labor laws and workplace trainings, grants to non-profits, etc. The liberals have been able to set the terms so strongly that they could often unleash sections of their base of support amongst the oppressed and those that empathize with the oppressed to fight their ideological battles without too much fear that this base would turn against the empire. As much as revolutionaries may want to take credit, these have been major factors in promoting a population the majority of which see wars of aggression as unconscionable, explicit racism as an evil, who see women and LGBTQ people as full human beings, and who don’t believe that empathy ends at the border. The rulers have even hamstrung themselves from open political persecution. At the height of the cold war, the US imperialists’ ideological offensive against totalitarianism promoted their perceived lack of explicit political repression and “freedom of thought” in ways that suited them very well at the time. They instilled generations of people growing up here with enlightenment ideals of the right to individualistically explore political ideas, all while seeing those ideas as your own property — maybe something to express or identify with but not to seriously advocate, strategize or struggle for and definitely not to scientifically study.** These sentiments have important righteous aspects to them even as they have, in limited and contradictory ways served the interests of Liberal sections of the ruling class and we’ve seen them promoted for and sculpted by that. At the same time fascists used some of the same ideological campaigns to their ends, as they grew their power within the American Republic, emphasizing the anti-communism during the cold-war, emphasizing the racist xenophobia through the War on Terror, etc.

Since Obama’s presidency, there has been a conscious effort throughout the ruling class to pivot that main enemy to China, as China has become a significant imperialist force on the world stage. Without invading countries or directly challenging US dominance, without even pulling the strings of proxy wars (Russia’s bread and butter), China has increased its influence over countries and economies worldwide.

But the ruling class Liberals (and the fascists, for that matter) have been unsuccessful in pivoting the population to perceive China as a major threat in the ways they have done to those isms of the past. And they can’t actually fight what is clearly the most pressing threat today — global warming. The Liberals have staked their position as against the increasingly powerful open white supremacists. But they also can’t uproot white supremacy without ripping this whole country apart nor maintain it as it has been. They can’t maintain their empire without treating the world as a battlefield, even if they aim to do it with less “boots on the ground.” They can’t force companies to employ people domestically in meaningful jobs and they have nothing meaningful with which to incentivize the ultra-rich to contribute to the social welfare. There’s no Soviet bloc with notorious financial restrictions anymore. The ultra-wealthy can go anywhere. The Liberals can’t even take on the domestic theocrats in any serious way. In addition to their worship of order, they are the party of domestic unity. Whereas for the fascists, the immense force of the US military is their power, for the liberals what is much more important is the threat of that immense force, a threat which all but disappears if the country is at war with itself.

There are still live land mines across Southeast Asia left by the US imperialists, deadly detritus from old battles even as the power relations have radically changed. They kill children whose parents weren’t even born when the war was raging. Meanwhile, these ideological leftovers from past battles at home are the only remnants that can come back to hurt the empire, but they may yet contribute to taking the whole thing down.

The Consolidation of the Weimar

And now with Trump the fascists have turned from a general pole of attraction and scattered powerful interests into a consolidated and united fighting force. In the same way that Trump was not just a pendulum swing to the right, but the consolidation of fascsim, there has been a similar effect among the Democrats. It’s created not just another rightward lurch by the Democratic Party but a situation where the Democratic Party now represents the whole array of the ruling class of the American Weimar. Biden represents this through both his ties to Obama and the Party’s pre-split heyday and the fact that Obama picked him because he was the most conservative of Democrats, chosen to balance Obama’s Blackness. And we all saw the parade of Republicans at the DNC. This comes even as oppressed people and young people who are on the opposite end of the Democrat coalition are — in ever greater numbers and ever more vocally — their most impassioned voter base. Like the Weimar, deep-seated individualism plays a major role in enabling these forces to see themselves as a united cause.

In this situation, what does the Liberal ideological offensive look like? How are they cohering their base? One way is through a fetishization of the trappings of American Democracy and institutions and especially among older people a fetishization of the Democratic Party itself. During the primaries, this became a virulent anti-Bernie movement, during the general election it took the form of posing voting in opposition to any and all other political activity. And now in the aftermath of the election a concerted effort as part of this of going back to brunch. Promoting trust in the system. Promoting an individualism which goes as far as not caring whats happening in the world, or at least not doing anything about it, but not so far to become a fascist, wanting to fuck over everybody else to get yours.

But this is not enough for many. It used to be the case that all the liberals had to do to disarm those looking for solutions was trot out a Kucinich, a Sharpton, or even a Dean in the primaries every four year to rope such folks back into the political process. When the liberal conception of power had legs, and the Democrats had vision, power and momentum to effectively run the empire, this effectively diverted the opposition that did exist outside of the duality, isolating those who stuck to their principles.

The overall polarization has maintained between the poles of the fascists and the weimar, for the most part corresponding to the Republicans and the Democrats. And even as they both continue to transform dramatically, they also continue to resurge. But the fact is that for the first time since the 60s there have been consequential ideological forces on the scene through the course of this whole election independent of the leadership of the Democratic Party, to its “left.”. This should be recognized. But are they good forces?

Today’s Left: An Expression of the Same Contradictions

These forces have emerged out of these very same contradictions: the crises in the world, the crises in the empire, and the crises in the empires attempts to maintain and reforge legitimacy. In such a situation, it’s clear that you will have some people responding to such crises by looking for truly radical solutions, ones that overthrow the whole system. And yet that is a tall order. Is this what we’ve seen finding expression in this left?

In a situation where the status quo is falling apart and simultaneously being enshrined and reinforced as the bulwark against fascism, moderate improvement seems radical. There are also strong pulls on even many oppressed and exploited people in the imperialist core to find a different ways to improve the world while maintaining their overall position in it, to find a different way to stay on top of the world, to see this as opportunity for advancing ones’ own group or even ones’ own ambitions, to solve one crisis while leaving others for someone else, or even solve one crisis by doubling down on another. To the extent that people can, there is a pull to dig your head deeper into the sand, find a way to ignore the world more effectively than in normal times — if you squint really hard, some folks say that can even start to look like justice.

So we have a deep contradiction of many good people, many who want something better but are reasonably afraid of the leap that is required, asking these questions, all of which ultimately amount to “how do we maintain this empire?”

After all, a radical solution calls into question not just the ways that we ourselves have been wronged but it calls into questions how the whole world works, our place in it, notions we hold dear, forcing us to reconsider even our very conceptions of justice, identity, even existential questions about purpose and the universe and consciousness. A radical solution is not simply an improvement, it will require sacrifice and change on our own part and on everyone else’s.

In such a situation, some latch onto a reform or set of reforms as the best of bad options. Others think their reform is the golden key. But either way we see people twist their highest aspirations into policy proposals for an improved American Empire often undermining and distorting basic and/or revolutionary demands, concepts and legacies in the process, and obscuring the nature of what we’re up against. Think about every “sensible” policy that the powers-that-be write off: medicare for all, cancelling student debt, raising the minimum wage, the green new deal, reforming the police, Covid relief, etc. Like Kleenex for Tissue, some of these have come into the current lexicon as replacements for our most basic needs: Healthcare, education, a decent life, etc. Terms like systemic change and abolition are fashioned and re-fashioned to maintain a lofty aesthetic while leaving the capitalist-imperialist system intact. And many analyses of capitalism itself reduce it to just another -ism — a bad word meaning systemic greed or merely specific conditions of employment..

While many of these ideas aren’t new, their value to the ruling class has increased exponentially alongside these crises. Without any coherent inspiring vision that they can follow through on, sections of the Liberal rulers back these efforts enough to keep advocacy going, or to tinker around the edges. Through grants, charities, advocacy and community service organizations, academic institutions, alternative media, arts funding and more, along with more explicitly political non-profits, money flows into the programs that know the boundaries. Whether they genuinely think they can reshape the empire or see them as the kind of things society should aspire to, they fail at actual implementation because these are rational answers for people’s crises, not real-life answers for the ruling class’ crises. But the failure is constantly framed as a problem of individuals: the Republicans and the centrist Democrats that just happen to be there in the way. The effect is to consume peoples passions for justice in dead-end discourse over creative ways to maintain the empire.

Meanwhile, these same sentiments and proposals serve fascist sections of the rulers as well, with Trump being the most explicit with this. He parades the fact that these reforms will never come to fruition under this system, fueling an impotent rage at the Liberal leaders, who are ‘supposed’ to want these things. The fascists frame this situation as scheming elites manipulating the little guy.

The ruling class interest provides popularity (or even perceived popularity) to specific versions of these ideas without actually advancing them towards implementation. This has transformed many useless dead-end idealistic proposals by well-meaning but delusional people into ideological factories churning out new justifications for this system — as real radical ideas and organization become liabilities to the popularity of these policy proposal products.

Even many who attempt to go beyond individual policy proposals, with tepid notions of socialism or Democratic socialism or anarchism maintain the notion that there are people or organizations or traditions or specific systems in our way, as opposed to the basic structure of the system of capitalism-imperialism.

Through all of this, bourgeois modes of politics and thinking are constantly fed and reinforced, contributing to a parasitic “left” that only really exists as discourse, without any impact, constantly sniping at eachother and everyone else. With the increasing value of these ideas to sections of the ruling class, the popularity of such ideas rises, the popularity itself is presented as success, and left populism surges, even as fascism advances. No matter how popular or impassioned that base of support is, this dynamic serves to keep even these reformist struggles within the normal channels of advocacy and discourse, where they cannot even implement their own ideas. This dynamic ends with truly radical ideas being not only ignored but despised, given pariah status. After all, the logic states that the left discourse is making progress (in gaining popularity even if not power), and talking about real revolution would rock that boat.

Grasp Revolution

For many living in the belly of the beast, the crises facing humanity and the crises facing the system can often seem helplessly tied up in eachother, inseperable. To a great degree we are trapped in here — our lives shaped by the success and failure, the shape and form of the monster we’re a part of. But in these times of great potential, positive and negative, if we can untangle our imaginations from this empire, we might be able to join humanity and get out of the swamp altogether. During the Cultural Revolution, a slogan was popularized to frontally challenge those capitalist-roaders who took over upon Mao’s death and turned China into first a sweatshop for the west and now increasingly a bloodthirsty imperialist power. The slogan was “Grasp Revolution, Promote Production.” To constantly be grounding oneself in for who and for what you are working, not just in the abstract but very directly. at that time, it was very literally about production, but until we control the means of production, this should still have meaning. As we dream of a better world, in order to set our course, we cannot base ourselves in what seems popular, or seems like it has a shot through the logic of the system’s discourse but instead we must be constantly deepening our understanding of how our actions are directly related to seizing power and liberating humanity.

*To a large degree, instead of punishing dangerous ideas as the Soviet imperialist ideas did, the US propped up and funded a whole range of useful ideas

**That’s deregulation for those economic powerhouses and regulation for everyone else in order to enforce that deregulation.

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Of All Possible Horrors, Why These?

There are seemingly endless websites, newspapers, documentaries, docudramas, podcasts and more these days that fill peoples’ lives with true stories of the crimes of this system — from heinous crimes that might only affect one or a handful of individuals to crimes so vast that they shape all of society. Meanwhile many people who see that things need to change to one degree or another are looking for deeper answers, watching whole youtube channels and reading tomes, PDFs, and manifestos, trying to understand some of the deeper structures of society.

But where do these two things meet? If you become convinced of the need to overthrow the system, do you watch the news just to tell folks ‘see how bad it is?’ Do you play advanced connect the dots just to try to convince people that anything they’re outraged about should turn them into revolutionaries? Do you follow along with your fingers crossed waiting for signs that the time for change is coming? Or do you just put your head down, ignore the wider world and plug away at your most immediate struggles, knowing that its all connected? Is there anything more one can do?

If we’re able to really gain some understanding of the system we live under, would it be possible to understand not just why it’s bad, not just why things are the way they are, but maybe what the major forces shaping current events are in real time? Clearly the things that are happening are horrible — but why these things, why now? Could we understand what connects the horrors that are happening and what sets them apart from the much wider array of all possible horrors? And if we do that, could that give us insight into what needs to be done, in this moment, to advance towards revolution?

Even as Marx plumbed the depths of the capitalist system, uncovering its most basic elements and contradictions, he continuously wrote widely published articles and letters about the dynamic developments pitting various ruling classes against eachother and various sections of the same ruling class in heated battle. Even as the latter more often paid the bills, these activities weren’t separate or in opposition. This was the world he was living in — the dynamic world of capitalism, whose most basic churning contradiction held within it the prospect of a radically better world and whose extremely dynamic contradictions on many levels were constantly shaping and reshaping the world, the struggle to change it, and people’s understanding of it all.

The Real American Exception

Some of the blame for the poverty of analysis today lies with the stability of US imperialism — with a generally consistent governing consensus and dominant ideology for 70 years since the end of World War 2, including an overall successful and smooth transition from the Cold War to sole superpower status. Many people from many different perspectives cannot imagine a significant shift in the US power structure, or the governing ideology. For radicals and self-proclaimed radicals this has all too often meant that they see Trump as just more of the same. If they see him as anything different, it’s not in the sense that he’s particularly bad or that he represents a larger tendency, for they often arrogantly dismiss such notions, but that he’s a temporary aberration in style from the dominant liberal bourgeois model of American empire. Many will even say that he’s throwing a wrench in the gears of the imperialists’ hold on power through incompetence or because he isn’t a part of the political class — ultimately parroting Democratic and Republican talking points respectively. And therefore they maintain that the main enemy is essentially American liberal bourgeois Democracy, the ruling class clique centered around the Democratic Party (with some Mitt Romney and GWB thrown in for good measure) these days. In the aftermath of Bob Avakian’s statement calling on people to use all possible non-violent means to oust Trump, including but not relying on voting for Biden, a number of “leftists” made it explicit that they would prefer four more years of Trump to Biden and what they see as a return to deadly normalcy.

But beyond articulated positions from crusty revisionists (which usually go no further than social media comments or posts) this line is most forcefully exerted as a broad political paralysis in the face of fascism — an unwillingness to recognize the possibility of fascism, or that there’s really anything new under the sun at all, and a mode of struggle stuck in the middle: exposing all the things that this system might be doing at this time, yet not wanting to put this on the fascist regime in the white house or the fascist movement and program that have been building for decades lest they give quarter to the “real enemy:” the bourgeois liberals.

Ok…

Bourgeois democracy was never just a bribe to keep sections of people from rising up. It was never just a trick or gimmick. As Bob Avakian has put it: “in a world marked by profound class divisions and social inequality, to talk about “democracy” — without talking about the class nature of that democracy and which class it serves — is meaningless, and worse. So long as society is divided into classes, there can be no “democracy for all”: one class or another will rule, and it will uphold and promote that kind of democracy which serves its interests and goals. The question is: which class will rule and whether its rule, and its system of democracy, will serve the continuation, or the eventual abolition, of class divisions and the corresponding relations of exploitation, oppression and inequality.” Bourgeois democracy at its most fundamental level is a certain form of democracy amongst the ruling capitalist class and dictatorship over the rest of society. Bourgeois democracy has never simply been a good idea to serve the ruling classes’ interests but it corresponds to the level of rights of individuals in capitalist society — and the atomized formal individual rights that capitalist society is based on, most fundamentally the right to own property. As the engines of colonialism, slavery, and eventually imperialism enabled capitalism to make life relatively comfortable for broader privileged sections of people in the oppressor nations, this comfort overlapped with and afforded broader rights within this individualistic framework. Even where they have applied, these formal legal rights have served as cover for deadly unequal relations. But these relationships have fostered a material dependency on the system amongst insulated or privileged sections of the people and a concrete bond between their welfare, relative freedom, and way of life on the one hand and the subjugation of those more brutally oppressed and exploited at home and abroad on the other. Even as their application is limited, and even as they provide only illusory power, they are a key pillar maintaining the legitimacy of the system, and to openly do away with them is something that the rulers undertake at great risk. Therefore the question in America since it’s founding has not often been whether to grant rights to the people but: who counts as a person deserving of rights and who as a pariah? And consequently how do you maintain those relationships materially, socially, and ideologically?

Liberal Democracy

There has been a certain evolving set of answers to those questions that has held this country together from the end of World War 2 until now, even as they’ve gone through changes in that time. This is the status quo that all too many in this country see as simply the way things are, or at least the way they’ll be until the apocalypse or revolution. And that post-WW2 American liberal bourgeois democracy has been a motherfucker. Putting aside genuine liberation — formal, legal, civil rights for oppressed nationalities and women and LGBTQ people haven’t been simply given, nor even entirely won, but they’ve been dangled on the negotiating table to some extent. After all, “we” beat the fascists, right? And for some time the US had to maintain some legitimacy in claiming the mantle of freedom against communists who were actually liberating people, rival imperialists who would opportunistically use their crimes against them, and in the face of heroic struggles of millions of people against oppression, exploitation and injustice. More fundamentally, the favorable position of US imperialism both enabled and compelled them towards exercising (relatively) more soft power at home while demographic changes within the US and economic compulsions arising from the expanding empire began to break and redefine many of the boundaries that had helped to enforce white supremacy and the patriarchy in their previous, codified forms within the borders of the US.

But liberal democracy has not meant a better world. This has been an extremely bloody peace built on nuclear domination and endless war. This was the democracy in which Black communities went from super exploited workhorse to superfluous throwaway population and on which mass incarceration was built — stripping more Black men of their freedom in 2020 than chattel slavery did in 1850. This Pax Americana added the direct capitalist exploitation and atomization as super-exploited wage-earners to the burden women carried while largely maintaining many in traditional, almost feudal positions of servitude as unpaid caregivers and home-makers. Alongside commodifying their labor power, liberal democracy commodified women’s very bodies on a radical new scale, no matter their position in society. And as exemplified most strikingly in Saudi Arabia, this liberal democracy had no hesitation to prop up the most outmoded reactionary patriarchal absolutism in its neo-colonies as long as it served to maintain their power. In fact, the liberal element of this empire gave cover and removed any responsibility for this because ‘the US must respect Saudi culture and self-determination, no?’ Liberalism itself absolved the US of responsibility. No matter the open secret that the house of Saud would not be ‘determining’ anything and would be overthrown without US backing. Meanwhile immigrants and refugees who fled to this country were forced into the shadows at every turn.

The ability for this country to keep its knee planted firmly on the neck of the world while leading the chorus of kumbaya really was something to behold. Both the illusion of equality and power as well as the actual significant level of freedom and rights provided to significant sections of the home population (along with Western Europe by alliance) were impressive forces in maintaining the dictatorship of capital, with the US in ascension and then firmly on top. If they could maintain it, it’s clear they would.

Look at Barack Obama, whose exceptional charisma and insight probably maintained bourgeois democracy longer than it could have lasted otherwise. It didn’t hurt that in Joe Biden’s words, he was a “clean” Black guy. He was able to massively expand the use of military force while winning the Nobel Peace Prize. He was able to deport a record number of immigrants and refugees, maintain the largest incarcerated population in the world, expand the militarization of the police, brutally crackdown on three major uprisings, and more all while maintaining and even strengthening the US’s image as the leader of the free world. He didn’t lift a finger for Gay marriage, even opposed it during his campaign, and still is seen as its guarantor. All this and his popularity remains enormous. He would probably be popularly elected again in a landslide if that didn’t come with its own set of contradictions for the rulers.

And it wasn’t all built on charisma and illusion — in certain ways Obamacare did provide some relief to some people and he did maintain some social programs and environmental regulations that were on their way out and which have been decimated since his departure. He maintained a mainly secular approach to governance. He did all this in ways that didn’t upend or wrench the ruling class; in fact he found ways to make it all quite profitable in the short term. Rabid white supremacy was unleashed against him during his presidency, which did dovetail perfectly into Trump’s fascist program, but it wasn’t unleashed by him (even as he quite explicitly refused to do anything concrete for Black people). Obama committed quite a few heinous acts that would be on level with Donald Trump, and he also did some things that significantly constrained the fascist wing of the ruling class, but in large part his role was to effectively lay the groundwork for the fascists to come. As Bob Avakian wrote in 1998 in a slightly different context about Bill Clinton, “This is not because of the much-discussed “realities of electoral politics.” Nor is it merely because all mainstream politicians are beholden to powerful financial interests. More fundamentally, it is because those who occupy seats of political power must, and can only, serve the economic and social system of which that political power is an extension.”

Built on Shifting Sands

There are some whose whole analysis is built on analyzing subjective forces — does the ruling class have an easier time controlling people through liberalism or fascism, through the carrot or the stick? “Which will the all-controlling illuminati choose?” But Marxism isn’t just a tool to understand how society is in the abstract, it’s a science that can uncover the driving forces of society in specific places and times. So let’s go down deeper. Because regardless (to some degree) of anything Obama did, the contradictions pushing this government in particular as well as many governments worldwide towards fascism kept sharpening all through his tenure. Global Warming accelerated even as he recognized its existence. The global refugee crisis and massive global displacement continued and expanded. Some of this was affected by actions of the Obama administration — like their heinous coup in Honduras and their actions in Syria (which in and of themselves were responses to necessity faced by the US rulers), but as a whole the crisis was and is beyond them. This system still cannot profitably exploit Black people at home while maintaining empire abroad but during Obama’s presidency, mass incarceration and brutal policing increasingly came under fire, to some degree highlighting the tension of raising Black people’s expectations and hopes with empty promises, which will only become sharper and sharper as the US loses its white majority. The contradictions driving the spread of religious fundamentalism across the world, and its increasing militancy, sharpened — as people’s traditional bonds and roles and ways of life continued to be torn up by this system while people remain cutoff from any liberating outlook and/or scientific understanding of the world. This is happening even as the demographics of the US are shifting and non-believers are becoming more outspoken about it, making it much more difficult for that old time religion to dominate.

Both of these factors (the loss of their religious status quo and the loss of whiteness) as well as the capitalist atomization of women, are mobilizing the Christian right into an end-times frenzy. The need for ever greater brute force in maintaining the US empire is clashing evermore with pluralistic and libertarian notions of an all-volunteer army. Meanwhile those all-volunteer armed forces are increasingly made up of oppressed nationalities and women (in large part because it is a poverty draft, and their empire can’t profitably exploit many of those people otherwise) even as many in the ruling structures recognize the need for the military to be the backbone of (or at least not in the way of) their violent reassertion of white supremacy, patriarchy, and xenophobia. All of this is happening as other major powers vie for greater influence or even the chance to topple the US’ top position and as the basic structures and dynamics of imperialism keep churning, concentrating even more wealth in fewer and fewer hands. All of these phenomenon are reshaping a globe that the US dominates, and one that it is compelled to maintain dominance over.

Obama represented, in large part, what has been the mainstream of the ruling class for the last 70 years. He did it very well, and the Democratic Primary that has just passed proved more than any political tract ever could that such a ruling consensus is dead. Joe Biden poorly represents its dying gasps. But the fascists, even with the allegiance of a smaller portion of the population have a coherent program to deal with all of this. And they are on the rise.

This has major implications for our work. Many basic facts about the world would have to be different to come to the conclusion that liberalism was still dominant. But if you believe the main enemy is liberal bourgeois democracy, then it makes sense to somewhat ignore or downplay Trump. If liberalism is more powerful, then our ideological and organizational work mainly needs to go into preparing people against a return to normalcy. If liberalism is more powerful, than we don’t have to focus our energies on defending basic rights like abortion that have already been won. If liberalism is more powerful, this is honestly a pretty great moment to expose people to things they don’t usually see before things calm down and they get their blinders put back on. If liberalism has the initiative marginalized communities should be focussed on keeping our people safe until the more extreme violence blows over. If liberalism has the initiative then that should be our main ideological enemy and object of attack. If liberalism is stronger than we should put almost all of our work explicitly into building the movement for revolution, and only unite people around that explicitly in opposition to liberalism. If liberalism is the main enemy, and you can convince yourself that Trump is just messing that up through incompetence or by being an outsider, then maybe you would even want four more years of Trump.

But if fascism has the initiative, then we have to stop it from getting to a point where dissent is even more restricted and outlawed. If fascism has initiative we have to deal with the fact that the violence and brutality that oppressed people face today is poised to become much worse. If fascism has the initiative, we can’t wait until people get it — we need to disrupt business-as-usual and break people out of their comfort zones before it becomes too late. If fascism is in command, one of the greatest evils of the liberals is their conciliation and collaboration with that fascism, and this needs to be exposed even as we aim to isolate the hardcore of the fascists. If fascism has the initiative, we need to break the glass. If fascism has the initiative we need to unite all who can be united in action to stop it, even as we struggle for a scientific understanding of that reality and for a revolutionary people to emerge and to strengthen the revolutionary vanguard at the heart of both of those movements.

To a significant degree, the post WW2 American ideal itself grew organically out of what came before. This is remarkably different than Europe in Marx’s time and most of the world ever, including today. The power of American exceptionalism — in part based in the stability (and even more so the perceived stability) of the idea of this country holds such sway that most people cannot fathom the contradictions within it. And they are different contradictions than those which exerted themselves in Marx’s day — they aren’t the cotton producers versus the shipping industry vs the industrialists, etc. The development of finance capital, monopoly, and the full integration of imperialism has reorganized that to a great degree so that this does now play out much more directly through the interests of centralized states and integrated blocks of capital, and the competing ruling ideologies have shifted to reflect that. But we have the tools to understand that. In a broad way, starting with Lenin’s imperialism, and moving through Bob Avakian’s Breakthroughs. And specifically in regard to the rise of American fascism and the contradictions propelling it, Bob Avakian’s work has been hitting hard for at least 22 years since “The Truth About Right-Wing Conspiracy…And Why Clinton and the Democrats Are No Answer.”* As he has said elsewhere:

“We have to keep digging down to see even what Marx taught us — even what Marx gave us as a foundation, you have to keep digging down to grasp that and see how it applies today — to understand what is actually at the base of things in society and its ongoing historical development — you have to keep digging down to see how this is actually working itself out at any given time. What are the actual dynamics of the contradictions we are confronted with and seeking to transform, and how are these different contradictions interrelated? This is why it takes continual work. This is hard, it is hard work. Yet it’s about something that’s worth it — and more than just “worth it,” it’s about the emancipation of all humanity from relations of inequality, oppression, and exploitation.”

In the context of the uprisings kicked off after George Floyd’s murder, the line that liberalism is dominant is being expressed when people pose stopping Trump, criticizing Trump, even mentioning Trump in opposition to the slogan that Black Lives Matter. It’s true that stopping Trump won’t end white supremacy. But stopping police brutality, defunding the police, ending mass incarceration, stopping gentrification, etc. won’t in and of themselves end white supremacy either. The difference is that no one is posing them as though they are in opposition to stopping white supremacy. After all, there is not a single expression of white supremacy that has stayed the same throughout the last 400 years. But only Trump is seen as the kind of symptom that we don’t need to address. This is only because he’s seen as a temporary aberration from the dominant liberal mode.

Now, just because the fascists have the initiative in this moment for very significant reasons does not mean that the future is all sewn up. And our recognition of this fact does not give us a crystal ball. Their initiative is not an absolute by any means. To fully consolidate their power means ripping up laws and norms, it means disenfranchising not just sections of the people from nominal power, but even oppositional sections of the ruling class from exerting real power. It means a certain kind of chaos and to a degree it means going against the spontaneous individualism built into capitalist society. Fascism is coming to the fore to help them resolve issues within their system, and they see it as their best treatment, but it’s important to recognize that this treatment is not painless for them. Things can go in many different directions from here.

We can overthrow this whole ruling class and make revolution. The conscious struggle of the people here can knock them off course even short of revolution, which would open up many more divergent paths. And other factors, like major events in other countries, or a giant meteor, or some other event that we can’t predict can throw them off or restrain them to one degree or another, (or accelerate their consolidation). But just because we can’t predict anything with specificity and certainty doesn’t mean that we can’t see dominant trends and tendencies and act accordingly. In fact, it’s impossible not to respond to such trends and tendencies. No matter what program or course of action you choose; you are basing that on one analysis of the situation or another. And if you aren’t consciously, scientifically analyzing it, then do you even know who’s analyzing it for you?

*In discussing the bleak prospects of liberalism in this moment, I am relying heavily on Bob Avakian’s analysis of the rise of Fascism from the aforementioned “Right Wing Conspiracy” to “The Coming Civil War and Repolarization for Revolution,” to “Trump/Pence Must Go” with many articles and other works touching on this in between. The situation is not merely a result of the weakness or insufficiency of the liberal status quo, but that the whole history of this country has provided extremely fertile ground for the rise of a distinctly American fascism and that the previous decades have provided ample trellising for the fascist movement that we see consolidating today.

As the US reigns supreme as the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic, much of what is obscured about the US economy in normal times has been laid bare and new dynamics have been set in motion. Many are legitimately pointing out that minimum wage laborers play a more essential role than they are given credit for, providing much more value than what they are paid for. There is definitely truth to this. With unprecedented numbers of people facing unemployment and ever-shifting definitions of essential workers, millions are being held hostage between exposure to the virus on the one hand, and losing paychecks, homes, benefits, etc, on the other. The precariousness of people’s lives in the wealthiest country on earth is being exposed in a whole new light.

But let’s pull back the lens because there is much more to be seen.

There is enormous wealth in the world today — massive infrastructure, extraordinary luxury and also just mounds and mounds of stuff. And so much of this stuff seems to be floating around the United States even today. Some of that flow has been disrupted, but even that disruption seems to be more a matter of transitioning to a new normal rather than a lack of goods. How is that surplus sustained when so many people are out of work, and not producing anything? Even as people begin to realize that they, or the people around them may not be able to afford what they need now or in the very near future, most of the stuff itself seems to be there. In fact, food is getting destroyed because it can’t be distributed in the same ways, and the price of oil has dropped below zero. Obviously most americans don’t actually manufacture any necessities but… well, if you start thinking about that, then that leads to a whole lot of other questions…

The US is a parasitic society, where even the “essential” workforce is overwhelmingly concentrated in transportation/logistics and service industries, not manufacturing and production. This has a lot of implications. But one important implication is that, while the great majority of people living in this country are dependent on what are being deemed essential workers, the capitalists who comprise the imperialist ruling class are not so dependent on those workers. The foundation of most of their wealth is largely in the third world. As Raymond Lotta has written, “80 percent of world trade flows through, and one in five jobs worldwide is linked to, global supply chains. These vast, interconnected networks of exploitation are the backbone of the imperialist world economy. They cheapen the cost of the raw materials and parts that enter into production carried out in the U.S. The low-priced consumer goods produced by super-exploited workers in the “Global South” cheapens the cost of labor power in the U.S. Out of these production networks surplus value (profit) is siphoned, concentrated, and distributed upward and upward to the imperialist banks, investor groups, and firms like Walmart, GM, and Apple.”

He goes on to say that “These grids of production are also the invisible foundation of the “consumer society” of the rich capitalist countries — so utterly irrational and so utterly wasteful that if everyone in the world lived as Americans do, it would take the resources of four or five Earths.”

Bob Avakian has laid out that “It is important to understand that, contrary to the prevailing notions of bourgeois economics, value is not “added” in the commercial sphere, through the sale of the product; instead, what happens through such commercial transactions is the realization of value that has already been created through the application of variable capital, that is, the exploitation of wage-labor, in the process of production.” The distribution of goods is not incidental — it clearly is necessary in sustaining life. But in terms of the capitalist-imperialist system, this is just the details. Problems here can be worked out with minimal disruption. A most disconcerting fact: as righteous as it is for people working retail in the imperialist cores to demand and receive a living wage, even that money is extracted from the profits of third-world exploitation.

On the other hand, 11% of the GDP of the US is in manufacturing and 1% in agricultural production. A small percentage, but like the lack of production, the content of what America produces is also being exposed by this pandemic. Chemical production far outstips other manufacturing. It’s largely dependent on fossil fuels, employs less than one million people nationwide, and is largely geared towards supporting other industries (like producing fertilizer), not products for consumers. Cattle, soy, and some other agricultural production exists, much of which is overwhelmingly structured on the super-exploitation of migrant and immigrant labor. There is also oil, natural gas and coal production in the US. Each of these industries are heavily subsidized by the state, geared towards export, and propped up to influence global markets and politics in directions favorable to US imperialism. In large part, the agricultural workforce is marginalized and oppressed, ‘without any rights a white man is bound to respect,’ placed in a position where organizing for their economic interests can lead to deportation or worse. The fossil fuel workforce is propped up by the wages of white supremacy, and now consciously organized in pro-industry unions in direct opposition to the interest of humanity as global warming ravishes the earth. Lastly, the Military Industrial Complex employs millions in the production of weapons of imperialist war and the support structure to deploy those weapons. The basic thread that ties together the great majority of production in the US is that it exists not to provide sustenance to the population, but to maintain control over a global empire, while its workers are significantly compromised from any kind of organized proletarian political position.

Simultaneously more exposed than ever, we see how tens of millions of Black and brown people living in this country have been warehoused in penitentiaries and ghettos for decades, deemed less than human because they cannot be profitably exploited by this system. In the prisons under the conditions of the pandemic, every parole violation has turned into a potential death sentence. While for the ”free” population, the virus kills Black and Latino people at significantly higher rates than whites due to the health issues attributed to the harder lives of many oppressed people and medical apartheid.

So we see in the richest of all countries tens of millions cast off as subhuman, tens of millions more part of an ever-more-desperate but never essential legitimate economy, only now realizing how easily they can be cast aside. Another set of tens of millions who make little to nothing in jobs that are so essential to the continued distribution of goods that they are all but forced at gunpoint to maintain regular exposure to the virus. The ranks of medical professionals are now daily fighting a losing battle against a pandemic without the most basic protections, even as the extraordinarily inflated US medical industry is the most profitable in the world. All of this as we drift towards a fascist, globally warmed, future on the flotsam of third world misery.

What does all of this mean for those who see the multiple disasters and crises unfolding in front of our eyes and want to affect real change?

Well, one thing must that be recognized first is that while it may seem that we’re floating along on all of this, capitalism is churning the waters and there are definite currents pushing things in definite directions. It’s not a secret cabal meeting around a table, but through its most basic mechanisms this system recognizes opportunity, and uses every crisis to reorganize itself on higher levels in novel ways. Some blocs of capital may be pushed aside if they cannot compete in any new situation but others are ready and willing to fill the role. And the political representatives of various factions of imperialists are feverishly working to take advantage of this crisis, with the fascists in power seizing the initiative in the halls of power and in the streets with their mass mobilizations. A full analysis of the political platforms shaping up in response to this crisis is beyond the scope of this article. But what this does make clear is that the fascists are not unleashing their hordes because they ‘need the workers to go back to work.’ it is not merely a question of putting profit over people. It is a conscious political battle over the role of science in society, over the expendability of human life, and the further normalization that some categories are much more expendable than others, all the while being able to seize on this crisis to advance the agenda they have been fighting for for the last three years. And the bourgeois democratic agenda, insofar as one is being fought for at all, is more crystal clear than ever. It has nothing to do with producing the necessities of life, and everything to do with redistributing the spoils of a parasitic empire.

And regarding our power? All kinds of ideas about all kinds of strikes have been floated non-stop as forms of exercising some level of control by the people on the bottom of society over the changes that are shaping up. And some small walkouts have been started up, by grocery workers and Amazon workers for example. While action to demand basic protections for workers are absolutely essential, righteous, and should be supported, this is not a means through which we can hope to affect the direction of the massive changes that are coming. Imagine a strike at Walmart, as some have.* Even if it goes company wide, even if it takes that company down, it does not hit the points of production, mostly scattered through the third world. All of those products can go through other outlets in the American market, or to other markets around the world, or that production can be retooled to other purposes with those same super-exploited workers and the US imperialists won’t blink an eye.

There is a very real, and horrifying potential for that epicenter to shift to the third world in the coming months, with devastating, even genocidal results. This is beyond the scope of this article, but must be taken very seriously by anyone who cares about humanity, and it will have devastating effects globally as well.

This is not a system with a single weak point or even a few. It’s not a system wherein the workers in the heart of the empire can bring their rulers down through withholding their labor. It’s a system that wreaks havoc on people’s lives even as it buys them off, that undermines the kind of social structures that could nourish human beings in disaster, and then rains down crisis after crisis. It is a system that creates fragile Rube Goldberg-esque schemes of just-on-time production, and hordes life-saving equipment to auction off to the highest bidder right when everyone needs them. While all of this is reason enough to overthrow it, and seems like it would make their system topple over at the slightest gust of wind, it in fact creates a situation where any simple or small-scale attempt to serve humanity instead of profit brings down quick and mighty punishment. They have created a situation where the only way to play the game is to play by their convoluted rules. As fascism consolidates, the spontaneous rules of the system are ever more ruthlessly and consciously enforced, both by the state and by its increasingly unleashed and unhinged fascist social base.

What this points to is the need to raise people’s sights to the political struggle to upend the whole game, not just break the rules, to overthrow this system, and to recontextualize economic and local struggles within that. It points to the conscious transcendence necessary for people to understand the struggle for survival in a way that serves creating a radically better world. It points to the need to break from the individualism so deeply ingrained across the American political spectrum. Ultimately it points to the central theses of the new communism that “In the relation between being scientific and being partisan, being consistently scientific is principal, and the basis for being, correctly and fully, partisan to the proletarian revolution and its goal of communism,” that “the whole world comes first,” and that “we need to approach everything — evaluate every political program and every organized force in society, every kind of culture, values and ways of treating people — according to how it relates to the revolution we need, to end all oppression. We should unite with people whenever we can, and struggle with them whenever we need to, to advance the revolution.”

Because without these conscious collective scientific transformations, there is no resolution of these contradictions in the interests of humanity.

AKA Liberal Pragmatism: the Respectable Way to Lose Everything

Polka the possum plays dead when she senses danger. This works when a fox approaches, sees it and passes by. But what about when Polka finds herself in front of a car speeding down a highway? Good thing that people aren’t possums — we have more than one trick, we can dream of more than just survival, and through science, work and social struggle we can make that dream a reality.

There has been quote after quote in mainstream media editorials since Super Tuesday about why older black voters are so loyal to Joe Biden. The stories are confined to the crashing wave of “Bernie vs Biden’’ drowning out every other news story and almost everything else going on in the world. While many of the stories mention Biden’s association with Obama, most focus on the “pragmatism” of these voters. These quotes point to a truth about this society and a painful history that runs deeper than any primary election: many older Black folks think voting for Biden, a war criminal who was a key architect of mass incarceration, amongst many other horrible things, is a pragmatic vote because they want to get rid of Trump but don’t think white people or the establishment will actually go for anything that even superficially challenges the status quo in a positive direction. This pragmatism is either stated as one-sided fact, cynically lauded by the Biden people or naively dismissed by the Sanders camp.

“That’s not unlike our day-to-day life,” Candis Smith, an associate professor of political science and African American studies at Penn State, said. “How black folks navigate the world, how we deal with every major feature of our lives must involve some sort of calculation about what white people are going to do, is this safe to do around them, what will the consequences be? How must I smile to ease any fear you may have of me? Which injustice will I protest? That is part of black life in America. Why would voting be any different?”

One voter was quoted in the New York Times saying:

“Black voters know white voters better than white voters know themselves.… So yeah, we’ll back Biden, because we know who white America will vote for in the general election in a way they may not tell a pollster or the media.”

Blair LM Kelly writing in NBC News offered that

“Many of them admired the grit and talent of Warren but had no faith that white men in any significant numbers would support a woman for president, even if she was the best choice.”

These statements all speak to a basic truth about this country. These Black folks aren’t going to vote for what they want, because at least within the electoral arena they see honest political struggle as useless and worse. And it’s based on an assessment that elections under this system do not exist to give Black people a real voice in the affairs of the nation. Which is 100% accurate, as far as it goes.

But there are two courses of action that a person can take leading from this understanding: endorse Biden, or indict the whole damn system. So why choose the former? Especially when there are so many immediate problems with that “pragmatic” solution, the most obvious being: if you don’t think white people are going to vote for Sanders, what makes you think anyone is going to vote for Biden? But all this shows us is that pragmatism in this context isn’t simply about “what works” — which would align with the more common usage of the word. In this context, the term ‘pragmatism’ is about avoiding “politics” and struggle, avoiding challenging people’s ideas and beliefs.

And there is a real history that’s shaped how these questions are posed, what’s seen as political struggle, and what’s seen as off limits. Not just a history of repression and oppression (as real as that is) but a history of contested political battles that have been overwhelmingly won by the wrong damn side. Increasingly, a history where politics and ideology are seen as dirty words, pragmatism acting as an ossified wall of shit preventing even the discussion of real change. In this context, trying to challenge people’s thinking, change people’s minds, is not only seen as a waste of time, but even insulting. And this pragmatism acts as a firebreak,* preventing even the sparks of interest and excitement and joy that could explode into a revolutionary movement.

This kind of pragmatism is not by any means confined to older Black people in this country, nor is it confined to people voting for Biden. A whole history of philosophical and political pragmatism is way beyond this piece, but suffice it to say that it is an essential ingredient in the mix of what makes almost all of American politics particularly repugnant, and the “progressive” and even so-called “socialist” and “communist” movements and leaders throughout US history have been mired in it, often explicitly embracing it.** Nevertheless in this time and place, its worth looking at this immediate uptick with pragmatism in the news in this particular way. And It’s more than worthwhile to take a hard look at the particular history that got us here with a certain generation of Black people, one that is almost entirely ignored by the media most of the time but has somehow become the big story. Because if we are to make a better world, there’s no getting around this firebreak of pragmatism, we’ve got to carry the torch directly through it.

Those who are 75 today were born in 1945, what Gerald Horne called the “high water mark for communist influence among African-Americans.” Very few people alive today remember these days, but many more remember the aftermath. At the beginning of that year, the Soviet Union was the United State’s most precious ally, the main force in winning the war against fascism. By the end of that year, the fascist axis had been decimated and the US had dropped two nuclear bombs on civilian populations declaring to the world its intent on seizing this throne of top imperialist power. The Soviet Union quickly went from ally back to enemy #1. While it was disorienting for many Americans, for Black people this was a whole other thing. It meant the betrayal of many of their greatest champions. Horne says “This was a monumental turning point in African-American history and so personally and politically painful that, like “repressed memory syndrome,” it has been purged from our immediate consciousness though it continues to influence our actions each day.” Folks like W.E.B Du Bois and Paul Robeson were sidelined and blacklisted. They were the lucky ones, maintaining their freedom (if not their passports) and some of us still know their names. Others, like Ben Davis and William Patterson were jailed, and their courage and decades of heroic struggle erased from history.

These were people who essentially*** came to prominence as the fiercest fighters against the system and against white supremacy. and their mass support was taken to the next level with the alliance against Hitler’s fascism. At the same time, in that righteous alliance, they lost sight of the need for a real revolution, they minimized any vision for a better future beyond stopping fascism. Communists were activists, lawyers and representatives, and celebrities. And then suddenly they were less than nothing. While McCarthy and Hoover set the tone, it was made so much worse by the fact that Thurgood Marshall, Walter White, and the entire NAACP leadership worked with the FBI to make it all happen. Integration and liberalism are political and ideological programs, but especially as they were presented in the 50’s, they were the pragmatic, the non-political, the non-divisive road forward vs communism. The path where the “respectable” black leadership could keep their organization, their funding, their freedom. And suddenly they were the only game in town.

The 60’s didn’t start much better, when in October of 1960 “SNCC disinvited Bayard Rustin–an openly gay Black activist with former communist ties–from its fall conference after the AFL-CIO threatened to withdraw its funding for the organization.”

Simultaneously the Communist Party USA itself embraced pragmatism and “Americanism” even more openly than before, betraying any relationship to revolution, and working to neutralize and ameliorate what became the struggles of the 60s. The next decade saw less open state censorship of ideas, but much more underhanded wreckage and, as the decade went on, extremely violent repression.

The murders of Martin Luther King Jr, Fred Hampton, Robert Kennedy, and many others through the 60s all taught different lessons, but for the great majority the murders spoke louder than the leaders themselves ever did — saying don’t lead people to rebel, don’t lead people to unite with the people of the world, don’t even think about it, don’t even pretend.

While MLK, Fred Hampton and Medgar Evers were murdered by white racists, including cops and Feds, it’s worthwhile to separately consider the murders of Malcolm X and Bunchy Carter. Because for these folks, their killers’ legacies have been just as much if not more honored through the years in the Black community. And both of these legacies are directly tied to the depoliticization of Black survival.

The Nation of Islam, who murdered Malcolm (probably with the help of the FBI) is everything Malcolm accused them of being in his last days and more. Most importantly they maintain their stances on the reasons Malcolm left — they are an organization to contain Black people, not liberate them. One of the men who pulled the trigger lived out his days as a redeemed member of the community, as though opening a gym in a Black neighborhood and mentoring some kids is equivalent to what Malcolm X could have accomplished if he was not cut down in his prime. Meanwhile Kwanzaa is still celebrated every December by growing numbers of Black people even while the four Black Panthers murdered by its founder, Ron Karenga, rot in their graves and the revolutionary legacy of the BPP evaporates and is covered over.

It is not the case that the Nation of Islam and Karenga’s whole shtick have never done anyone any good. But it is the case that they have both actively replaced meaningful political engagement and struggle with charity, entrepreneurialism and an empty spirituality that contains the masses of Black people rather than compelling them to take action towards liberation.

And after the ebb of these movements, then came the sanitizers. MLK Day was turned into a congress-sponsored non-profit “Day of Service,” leading people to paint over graffiti, but much more importantly paint over any meaningful legacy of MLK or the civil rights struggle in general. Not only has the wrong side won the battles, but they wrote and rewrote the history.

Meanwhile the Black middle class that arose out of the struggles of the 60s and 70’s was predicated on its assimilation and removal from “the ghetto” and black culture, stripping black communities of generalized community assets and leaving increasingly reactionary religious institutions and the illicit economy as the only nominally black wealth in crumbling shells of neighborhoods. Internationally, the communist revolution suffered major defeats, stripping people of models for a better society and base areas for revolution, and opening up an ideological mess on a whole new level. All the while Reagan and now Trump’s transactional crass capitalism allowed people to minimize and compartmentalize the white supremacy of these war criminals and fascists as simply part of their brand, something that could be competed with in the market. Clinton’s pluralism advocated black entrepreneurialism and individualism in the place of any kind of liberation. And Obama told the world that the oppression of Black people was over, branding his program for Black people with his betrayal of the Rev Jeremiah Wright before he even took office. And now LBJ’s very Biden-like old school racist legacy is being revived and rejuvenated because after all, the story goes, he implemented all the changes that the civil rights movement pushed for, as though he wasn’t just the guy in power who was forced to concede.

These were not just things that happened. They sure as hell were not bound to happen. These were struggles between opposing forces, opposing worldviews, and opposing programs of action. And the consensus that exists does not have to remain intact. But to break through this consensus, and the wrong lessons learned, we need real revolutionary leadership, with science and a strategy to go up against the whole rotten and vicious system. And for the first time in the history of this country we really have that. We need to take seriously the correct lessons learned through deep pain and long suffering expressed in that quote from the beginning: “we know who white America will vote for,” (which the Sanders camp fundamentally dismisses). But we must not accommodate that backward bullshit, which is what this “pragmatic” support for Biden is about, and instead directly confront it, as part of a strategy that can emancipate all of humanity. Real revolution unleashes, leads, and backs up the advanced forces in society to uproot the widespread backwardness and ideological parasitism of white supremacy in particular (as well as American chauvinism and patriarchy) that maintains the loyalty of so many exploited and oppressed people to this imperialist system. Those who ‘know white people better than white people know themselves’ will not be put in a situation of constantly conciliating to that, but will be put in a position of power (including power relative to those white people ignorant of themselves) to lead society forward towards collective liberation.

This must be a revolution that puts humanity first. And that means challenging everyone living in this country, the top imperialist power in the world, to uproot the material parasitism of this country — the wealth and comfort leached off the backs of oppressed people here and around the world. This is a time for revolution unvarnished — a time for the new communism that Bob Avakian has brought forward to be put in front of people broadly and powerfully.

This is the exact opposite of pragmatism. This will be political. This will be ideological. This will be a struggle. This will both liberate people and expand everyone’s boundaries. And whether it works, is up to all of us.

This kind of pragmatism’s deepest shortcoming is that knowing “what works” doesn’t help as the world hurtles forward and new situations arise. Especially if it’s “what works” or “what worked at one point” for the most basic and debased survival of only some sections of oppressed people. We are facing fascism. It’s deeply informed by the past, but it’s a whole new layer of horror. And the same things that helped some folks survive in the past won’t help anyone even do that in the future, let alone make a brighter tomorrow. Let it go.

*A firebreak is a gap in vegetation or other combustible material that acts as a barrier to slow or stop the progress of a bushfire or wildfire. A firebreak may occur naturally where there is a lack of vegetation or “fuel”, such as a river, lake or canyon. Firebreaks may also be man-made, and many of these also serve as roads, such as a logging road, four-wheel drive trail, secondary road, or a highway.

**Look no further than the Sanders camp where many so-called communists and socialists are willing to pragmatically trade in their dreams and even their most basic analysis or stance of anti-imperialism to get behind Sanders because for a moment he looks like he almost might get somewhere.

***The Communist Party USA, to which these folks belonged or supported, at that time had one foot in revolution and the other in rank reformism, but the point still stands.

The particular genius of Kasi Lemmons’ Harriet lies in its demystification of slavery and freedom, and showcasing the agency of individuals within the constraints, compulsions and clashes of capitalism and the slave system.

The conversation surrounding Harriet has largely been dominated by false and bad faith accusations of white savior narratives, complaints about casting a Black British actor in the starring role, and whether the plot was formulaic and uninspired (which considering the lack of similar films, seems quite difficult to pull off). Those conversations are worse than useless. Let’s get real.

Even many of the most well-known great Black figures of history have been systemically pushed into the shadows of popular culture and knowledge. Sanitized, mythologized, and hollowed out. Just consider the lack of major motion pictures about the lives of people ranging from Frederick Douglas to Zora Neal Hurston, from Langston Hughes to Paul Robeson to Huey Newton, from Denmark Vesey to Du Bois to Richard Wright to Ella Baker. Not only are these people deserving of films, not only would their enormous presence be fascinating and beautiful to see on the big screen, but to see history through the stories of their lives would add enormously to (and deeply challenge) people’s understanding of how we got to where we are today.

Harriet Tubman herself has been mythologized and decontextualized. As Lemmons told the New York Times, many books that do exist about her have “defanged her, declawed her, to make her more palatable…”

This movie not only restores her militancy, but it brings to life the contradictions ripping the United States apart in the years before the civil war. Without this context, it is impossible to understand Tubman’s courage and compulsion to take action in the way she did, and the resounding effect her actions had in the moment and down to today. Because revolutionary militance is not simply courage in the abstract. It’s the wherewithal and willingness to dive into the swirling current of history and change the course of society towards liberation. As we sit on the verge of a second civil war, it’s imperative to understand the forces at work pushing and pulling the various sides into shape, and looking at the first US civil war can give deep insight into that. As Bob Avakian has said, there is a direct line from the confederacy to the fascists of today.

Harriet the movie is not a documentary and it takes liberties with the timeline of events and many details. But these liberties enable the storyteller to pull together the big picture in a way that is, if anything, more accurate than a strict observance of facts could ever be.

In one scene Tubman returns to Philadelphia to sounds of panic and fear after one of many journeys liberating slaves. Guns are everywhere. There is the look of unleashed entitlement in the eyes of armed whites. It reminded me of what I saw firsthand in Charlottesville in 2017 and pictures of the Richmond Boogaloo earlier this year. It’s explained in this scene that the Fugitive Slave Act has been passed. Vigilantes, slavecatchers, and even US Marshals have essentially been given the green light to kidnap any Black people they can find for a profit. Tubman’s own former master comes to retrieve his runaway ‘property’ and is only repelled by force.

Almost every detail of this scene is false. But it draws together many events that did happen and the developments that were compelling change. First off, the Fugitive Slave Act was passed in September of 1850, before Harriet’s first rescue mission. Secondly, while it’s passage emboldened white supremacists across the north, the outbreak of violence most similar to that shown in the streets of Philadelphia actually took place in Christiana, Pennsylvania memorialized as the Christiana riot where US marshals acting on behalf of slave owners attacked a home full of people who had escaped slavery. But more important than these factual discrepancies, it provides an essential understanding of the larger reality and it disrupts the dominant (false) narrative of ‘Slavery’ with a capital ‘S’ as simply a bad thing that the North eventually decided to abolish nationwide.

The slaveocracy’s voracious appetite for western expansion to serve the maintenance of their political power and their super-exploitive economic role in the development of capitalism was exceeded only by that of the embryonic formations of capitalism-imperialism: the north’s monopolies, large corporations, financial speculation, vertical integration, and technological development. Even as these two forces were battling it out, they had fed each others’ development and were dependent on each other. For the rulers, the question was not about the abolition of slavery or the end of industrial capitalism, it was about which faction would be dominant and which subordinate, and what kind of state, what kind of society, what kind of democracy would enable that. And this struggle was about what kind of ideas and relations would be restricted to enforce that. This battle was raging in the halls of power, and in the years before the civil war, with cotton booming (future confederate states accounting for over 70% of exports from the US by dollar value) the passing of the fugitive slave act and then the election of James Buchanan, it seemed that the slaveocracy was winning. But the contradictions were only sharpening, and this set the stage for the real life Harriet Tubman.

Slavery in Maryland and Virginia had been losing profitability for decades. Tideland tobacco growers were losing out to the cotton growers of the deep South who had an even more depraved ruling consensus around slavery, creating a situation where in the mid-Atlantic region it was more profitable to sell enslaved people than to work them. Increased urbanization was developing a class of wage laborers and the proximity to free states was enabling runaways. Even as slaves were being sold from this area down to Texas, Mississippi, Georgia and the like, the political might of the slaveocracy remained centralized in the DC area, as an important center of commerce and industry, but more importantly as it was home to the only slaveowning political force that could maintain an alliance between the interests of the Deep South, Appalachia, New Orleans and the developing far west. The battle over whether the westward expansion of the US would be comprised of slave states or free states was roiling. The fabric of society, the ruling norms, the compromises and alliances that held the US together, which enabled its founding, were being torn apart.

Slavery was bad enough, and enslaved people had risen up in various ways throughout its history. But these contradictions of slaves being sold south; the financial struggles of slaveowners across the area; proximity to free states; the threat of secession and/or civil war looming; multiple challenges to the moral legitimacy of slavery from the north and from Europe, from Mexico and even from sections of southern whites who no longer directly benefitted from slavery and bristled at the tyrannical limits imposed on their own speech and thought:* these were the conditions that compelled, enabled, and contextualized Harriet Tubman’s actions. Whether or not Tubman stowed away in a hay wagon whose white driver knowingly but passively enabled her escape, we do know that non-slaveowning whites in that area were much less dependent by that time on the slave economy than were their deep south counterpart, loosening the political loyalty of many in various directions. And while Frederick Douglas most likely did not tell Harriet that her raids were becoming too dangerous, we do know that there was contention between those who wanted to pressure and rely on the Federal Government (whose main goal was maintaining the union) and others whose goal was liberating slaves by any means necessary.

Today, the challenges before the US empire are different than those which confronted the slaveocracy (and the rulers of the US as a whole) in the 1850s. The various sections of the ruling class today are not tied as directly to particular regions or industries as they were then, but they are tied to competing forms of political rule and legitimacy. Today, instead of an engine for the development and expansion of capitalism, the US holds the top-dog position in a fully globalized capitalist-imperialist system. The ruling class’ efforts to maintain, legitimize, and solidify that position today are facing the challenges of global warming, the aspiration of subservient states for their best possible position, and massive global migration instead of the 1850s’ westward expansion, political machinations of dominant European powers, the full-steam genocide of the indigenous people, and rapid developments in agriculture. This is all compelling the modern ruling classes towards fascism, just as it pushed the antebellum ruling classes towards the nationwide empowerment of the slaveocracy. The fabric of society is being ripped up, ruling norms eviscerated.

Our options are different but in some ways parallel to the abolitionists of that time. Will we try to pressure the US government into doing the right thing? Will we put all our energies into maintaining an unsustainable status quo, trying to go back to the way things were? Or will we go all in for the emancipation of humanity?

The civil war resolved the major contradictions of its day in a way that liberated Black people and also served the interests of the northern capitalist ruling class. Even that victory was only achieved through revolutionary means, namely the emancipation of southern slaves and enlisting them (even if in subordinate positions) in the Union war effort. The Combahee river raids (shown at the end of the film) were a prime example of this, and they were not the preferred methods of the Union state or army until they became the only possible solution. Most importantly, they were only possible through the sustained advocacy for liberation and against the subordination of that agenda to the maintenance of the Union. Today it is still possible to defeat fascism even short of revolution, averting much greater horrors while also in effect empowering the non-fascist elements of the ruling class. This would be worth it. And it can be done, but only through immense struggle, unleashing the people outside of the normal channels of politics-as-usual.

As it happened, even though slavery was ended, reconstruction was defeated, most of the immediate gains towards Black peoples’ full citizenship and empowerment were thwarted, and the United States reconstituted with different forms of white supremacy in command. But the revolutionary elements of the civil war opened up the possibilities of something radically better. Different futures were in fierce contention and what ended up happening was not preordained. Today through breaking people out of the political straightjackets of bourgeois politics and ideology, we can not only defeat fascism but open up the possibility for a radically better future. One key difference between then and now is imperative in making that happen. Whereas religious passion, like Tubman’s perceived direct connection to god, can still compel people to play a very positive role, today we have a science of human liberation, the New Communism, that can chart a path beyond the end of chattel slavery, beyond the integration of oppressed nations, beyond lifting the boot off our neck just high enough to breath, beyond the horizon of bourgeois right, beyond all exploitation and oppression.

This must be widely studied, grasped, popularized and most importantly, wielded.

Harriet Tubman should be an enormous inspiration to many. The history of this country, its crimes and compulsions should be studied and discussed broadly. And the movie “Harriet” should be used as part of making that happen. It is a powerful tool in the hands of the people.

*its popular these days to place historic struggles in the realm of good and evil, abstracted from the contradictions and compulsions of the time. While many enslaved people were against slavery because they righteously desired the rights of full human beings, and some non-Black people were on board with that, most of the moral and ideological challenges that the slaveocracy faced had nothing to do with the humanity of the enslaved, but to do with competing economic forms, different kinds of white supremacy and often a desire to be rid of Black people altogether. The most important question is not whether these people should be morally condemned from afar, but how they related to and impacted those who were fighting for liberation, and what we can learn from that experience.

Last week, Trump visited Narendra Modi in India, spoke in front of 100,000 Hindu supremacists, and visited Delhi amidst a pogrom which murdered 40 Muslims, injured hundreds more and burned down a mosque. The Indian police were overwhelmingly complicit, and the stage was set for that by the recent stripping of citizenship of potentially millions of Muslims across India. Upon Trump’s return he set up a “Denaturalization Section” within the Justice Department with a wide mandate. He’s been promising to do this since before he even took office, initially threatening to strip the citizenship of flagburners. When that happened in November of 2016, a few of us went viral making a scene about it. And we learned a lot, including about the delusions that the “opposition” was filling their heads with and the challenges that we would face in stopping this.

In light of this I’m publishing something that I should have published last April when Iwrote it. Here it is:

Reflections on the #FlagBurningChallenge two years later and the relationship between defeating fascism and making revolution.

Parvez Manzoor Khan is a Truck driver who has lived in Florida as a US citizen for the last 20 years, building a home and supporting his family. Because of a minor discrepancy in his citizenship paperwork, and because Mr. Khan is not from one of those “places like Norway” that Trump wants immigrants from, the Trump administration is aggressively pursuing denaturalization proceedings against him. They have already denaturalized 3 other South Asian men. The only thing that has set Khan apart is that he is fighting it.

According to Maryam Saleh writing in the Intercept, focusing on Mr. Khan’s case: “The Trump administration’s tactics bring the United States into an era of stripping citizenship not seen in at least five decades. In the early- to mid-1900s, the federal government pursued denaturalization for racist and political reasons, even targeting U.S.-born citizens.” Donald Trump has been threatening to strip people’s citizenship for “racist and political reasons” since before his inauguration, specifically tweeting as president-elect about stripping citizenship from flag burners. Those threats are what started the #FlagBurningChallenge that myself, a few folks from Revolution Clubs across the country, and a handful of others participated in on social media. The fallout from that experience wiped away any illusions I had that the broader self-proclaimed “left” could or would play a significantly positive role in defeating American fascism. And in light of the attacks on Mr. Khan and the consolidation of fascism over the last 2 years this is as good a time as any to reflect — in a constructive way — on how and why that is.

At 7:55am in November 29th, 2016, Trump tweeted “Nobody should be allowed to burn the American flag — if they do, there must be consequences — perhaps loss of citizenship or year in jail!” By that night the first flag burning videos were posted and started to be shared. Like the #IceBucketChallenge or the #MannequinChallenge that was still going strong at that time, the #flagburningchallenge consisted of people posting videos to social media explaining what we were doing, doing the deed, and challenging others to take this up along with a very to-the-point hashtag. Unlike those others, this challenge could have really impacted the polarization in society at a critical juncture, and as quickly became clear, the more participation we had, the safer the participants would be. But that isn’t how it played out.

While our real target audience was the broad masses of people, I at least initially thought that people who I had known over the previous years and even as recently as the DNC just 4 months prior to burn flags or who had supported or promoted that would help get it started, especially considering many of these folks generally saw burning the imperialist rag as a rebellious, joyous or even glib act. But in reaching out to people and challenging them we were met with such ignorant and oblivious dismissiveness regarding the real fascist threat that Trump and Pence posed. We were told we needed to focus on bread and butter issues and organize around people’s immediate needs (and at that time, immigration wasn’t even broadly considered a major one of those as the republicans were supposedly coming to the negotiating table on immigration reform). And we were left out to dry as I was doxxed for burning an American flag, bringing thousands of death threats, including a significant number that included personal information like address, employment, etc. It was clear that even as many minimized what Trump represented, there was a conscious decision for many people to avoid this risk precisely because it mattered so much in that moment.

And we’ve continued to see much of the so-called left normalize fascism, at best taking on one aspect or another, often explicitly instead of (or even in opposition to) driving out the fascists in the White House over the course of the last 2+ years.

It’s not fundamentally about cowardice or incompetence. It’s that the worldviews and theories about the world that have wide currency amongst ‘progressives,’ liberals and the left in the United States are ultimately bullshit. The identity politics and intersectionalism keep people in their own lane and train people to avoid seeing the systems and deep contradictions at work, let alone what might be developing. The handwringing reformism keeps folks trying to appeal to the fascists’ social base (or even the fascists themselves) by not challenging their backward and reactionary ideas. We’ve seen widespread militant reformism of disruptive protests and occupations, direct action, vandalism and even calls for isolated violence, and assimilating the tactics and aesthetics of revolution all with the limited goals of passing city council resolutions or getting body cameras on cops or racial sensitivity training for major corporations. The Great Tautological Fallacy that America is a force for good in the world and therefore America couldn’t become a fascist state because America is a force for good in the world. The economism and pragmatism of constantly sacrificing the larger vision of a better world for illusory immediate gains, as opposed to having immediate and limited victories serve the larger struggle. Amongst oppressed peoples we’ve seen the righteous hatred for bourgeois democracy and the Democratic Party and politicians generally getting misdirected into becoming a cover for accomodation to fascism, saying that Trump is at least up front about what he’s trying to do — and all the while these same folks still seems to always either miss the point of what Trump is doing or even support what Trump is doing. The pseudo-scientific conspiracy theory bullshit keeps people looking for symbols of something “deeper” and maintains a worldview where everything happens because some shady characters want it to happen that way, where folks are more suspicious of people trying to actually change things than they are of those maintaining the status quo, and none of these wild theories ever have to do with any production relations or real-world power relations. The extraordinarily low bar for what passes as scientific analysis, or any kind of analysis leaves us in a situation where people don’t ask questions in the first place, don’t ask the questions that matter in the second place, and settle for non-answers in the third place: Where maybe Trump is a wannabe fascist but that couldn’t happen here, and we’re not even going to really investigate why we believe it couldn’t happen here. We saw all of this in 2016 and we’ve seen it only get worse since.

These mental shackles and the people who maintain them are largely responsible for the fact that the fascists have been able to maintain and vastly consolidate power. In a million ways they have lowered people’s sights and kept folks politically paralyzed, diverted their outrage, waiting for saviors, waiting for change to just happen, or locked into thinking that the system will get itself back on course, especially with a little nudge here and there. But the system is on course — it is functioning and adapting the way that it has developed to do. The question is whether we — humanity — will allow that to continue or whether we will break the emergency glass and set out on the alternate course. As BA put it: “…we have two choices: either, live with all this — and condemn future generations to the same, or worse, if they have a future at all — or, make revolution!”

Conversely to all this self-serving and self-reinforcing bullshit, the new synthesis of communism and the application of this theory to understand the major dynamics in the world today provided a deep and solid theoretical foundation to act even in those first days after the election. Works that were already available in 2016 like “The Coming Civil War and Repolarization for Revolution” and “Why We’re in the Situation We’re in Today… And What to Do About It: A Thoroughly Rotten System and the Need for Revolution” spelled out the dynamics at play in the rise of American Fascism over the course of the last few decades. And now with the works that have come out since 2016, the science, strategy and leadership are there for everyone, if those who see their importance are able to meaningfully connect them with people. This contrast between the mental shackles of the left and the mental liberation of the New Communism should clarify the positive relationship necessary between the solid core of a movement for communist revolution with a scientific vision for the emancipation of all humanity on the one hand and the struggle to defeat fascism through sustained non-violent mass protest on the other.

This experience has brought to life for me what BA has said about this relationship: “It is crucial to unite and mobilize people, from different perspectives, very broadly, around the demand that this regime must go, but it will be much more difficult to do this on the scale and with the determination that is required to meet this objective if there are not, at the same time, greater and greater numbers of people who have been brought forward around the understanding that it is necessary to put an end not only to this regime but to the system out of whose deep and defining contradictions this regime has arisen, a system which by its very nature has imposed, and will continue to impose, horrific and completely unnecessary suffering on the masses of humanity, until this system itself is abolished.

And the more that people are brought forward to be consciously, actively working for revolution, the growing strength and “moral authority” of this revolutionary force will in turn strengthen the resolve of growing numbers of people to drive out this fascist regime now in power, even as many will not be (and some will perhaps never be) won to revolution.

So, both to meet the immediate challenge of creating a political situation in which this regime will be removed from power — and in which the political initiative has been seized to a great degree by those who are determined to turn back the assault on humanity that is being carried out by this regime and to strive for a better world, however they understand that — and to advance toward the fundamental goal of revolution, it is vitally important that all those who have come to understand the need for revolution actively contribute to building the movement to drive out this regime, and do so from the perspective and in the overall framework of building for revolution.… [emphasis in original, paragraph breaks inserted]

–Bob Avakian in Why We Need An Actual Revolution And How We Can Really Make Revolution

How is it that we see through the bullshit? It’s through science — that’s what communist theory is. And how do we lead broader sections of people to stand and fight on the right side of history, including people who aren’t communists and who may never become communists? It’s through propagating that same science and through wielding it — taking action on that basis that inspires broader forces, organizing and leading mass mobilization working from our deepest understanding of what’s driving this and what it will take to stop this. And organizing and mobilizing people to fight to uproot the very system that gives rise to fascism — so that we don’t have to keep fighting these battles for generations to come — isn’t some off-to-the-side part of that.

The denaturalization of Parvez Manzoor Khan is a horrible crime and a test of what these fascists can get away with. It’s the kind of crime that people in the United States keep allowing and the kind of test that these same people keep failing. But we have the 3 tools necessary to change that — the people who have the potential to break out of their mental shackles, the broad sentiment that Trump and what he’s doing is no good, and the basic scientific understanding of how we got here and that it doesn’t have to be this way.

“I watch America. I watch its motives. We are a force for good in the world, not a force for evil,” Mr. Pompeo said.

“Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” Romans 12:21

“Anarchism’s strength and potential stems from conflict with the state by black, brown, and indigenous populations, and our ethics.” — Revolutionary Abolitionist Movement

“Many people seem to think it foolish, even superstitious, to believe that the world could still change for the better. And it is true that in winter it is sometimes so bitingly cold that one is tempted to say, ‘What do I care if there is a summer; its warmth is no help to me now.’ Yes, evil often seems to surpass good. But then, in spite of us, and without our permission, there comes at last an end to the bitter frosts. One morning the wind turns, and there is a thaw. And so I must still have hope.” — Vincent van Gogh

Our Sweat, Blood, and Tears

The development of capitalism doesn’t actually run on children’s tears. Children across the world are devastated by common cruelty and neglect, by the separation of loving families due to economic need or incarceration or forced migration, the destruction of war, and so much more. Many of these tears are produced by this system, but they are a byproduct of how the system works. This system has not yet found a way to literally turn these tears into fuel, and even if it could, that alone would not steer its progression. This might seem obvious, or semantic, but if you want to end this nightmare, understanding this difference is much more important than it might seem.

Why? Because the fight we’re in for the future of humanity is not just any fight. And to win, we need to understand how the system works. Look at a boxing match. There are two fighters in the ring. Each one of them is consumed by a singular focus towards a similar but opposite goal — to keep their feet on the ground while they knock the other person down. One gets hit, they try to defend themselves, keep their head on straight and fight back. Meanwhile, when a person’s eyes are first opened to the massive oppression and exploitation all over the world, or even just a fraction of it, if they’ve got any soul in them, their first instinct is to fight back. As it should be! And there is so much to be done. A person can easily become consumed by that fight, however they see it, whether it’s between the capitalists and the workers, the 1% vs the 99%, men vs women, American empire vs the world, white settlers vs colonized people, the billionaire class vs the rest of us, etc. Some will fight any way they can, and others will fight in ways that put into practice some aspects of the better world they want to see. But essentially most see this as a fight between two opposing interests squaring off against eachother: roughly good vs evil, with good meaning the interests of the majority or of the oppressed or both (interests being either immediate or long term, either individual or collective) and evil meaning whatever force is in the way of that. But the fight to overthrow this system is different from a boxing match. Not just in scale, but in type. And mixing the two up leads to all kinds of dead-ends and defeat. Most often it leads to people giving up. If you think that good just needs to beat evil, where the fuck are the forces for good? You might know some good people personally, and one of them might show up in the news here or there, but they clearly don’t have power anywhere.

People have every right to believe that the rulers are merely some villain whose goal is to torment everyone else — that is what often pops out the most in people’s dealings with the ruling class. But if you reduce it to that, then someone just has to heroically stop them, and the world will be a better place. A Hero who changes everything without challenging anyone. Maybe you could become one of them somehow. With this conception of the world, you can see every news story, every development in the world as an expression of this fight — good vs. evil — and you can begin to see every person, organization, government simply through their position in that fight. Like two armies facing each other across a field. If that’s all that there is to it, then some of these people in the news, someone with some kind of power somewhere has to be good or at least good-ish, or it’s totally hopeless.

This might seem too simple, and it is. So why would people believe it? Because for many real change seems hopeless, and in that case then why even think about it? For others, we just have to do good and then god or “History” with a capital H or some other metaphysical force will bring us to victory. And for many people who cling to hope, the weakness and flaws in their theories warn them: don’t overthink it.

Whenever the claim arises that ‘we don’t need theory’ or we don’t need leadership’ — or that an oppressed person’s lived experience is enough of a guiding light for the struggle, that anyone who’s oppressed is in the right, that Black people just need to take control of the police, or that the workers just need to take control of their factories, this good vs evil notion is an underlying assumption. Sadly, there are also some complex theories that exist just to serve this misconception, which I’ll come back to.

But if you understand that what’s driving imperialism is the contradiction between the anarchy of production and the organization of production, inherent in the capitalist system, then you can see the role of all the various blocs of capital in competition with each other and the spontaneous pull on all other forces (including the people, even those with the most revolutionary potential) to gain or manipulate capital. On that basis you can begin to understand the enormous obstacles obstructing revolutionary change, and the basis for overcoming them. You can recognize how capitalism-imperialism lays the foundation for a radically better system, and also see that such a better society will not spontaneously or organically arise out of this one. You can recognize the need for scientific leadership of a real revolutionary vanguard, fighting the power and transforming the people for communist revolution, no matter how unpopular at any given time. With this understanding you can see in what way the ruling class is positioned in opposition to the proletariat, and ultimately in opposition to the interests of humanity as a whole — that people’s exploited labor does fuel this system, but it doesn’t steer it. Pretty soon you can begin to see how we can really win.

Strategies for Resistance, Strategies for Life

This simple misunderstanding of capitalism — that this is all a struggle between good guys and bad guys, the exploited and the exploiters — crops up in all kinds of ways. It’s taught in sunday school in a wide range of somewhat unvarnished forms. But especially once people begin to rebel or resist, or even when they first feel palpably that the system is unjust, this is often the first thought that comes to mind, so basic that many believe in it without ever articulating it. It informs all kinds of strategies for life — from possibly the most generalized of “the bad guys are just too powerful, I might as well stop resisting” to convincing yourself “maybe the bad guys aren’t really that bad after all.” And it informs many strategies for resistance: “there’s more of us than there are of them, so we just gotta get organized.” Others determine that solutions come down to the identities of the rulers, or their individual character, all in relation to some a priori “good” or “bad.” Most people in most times are content with trying to find a hero or leader within this system that seems to buck the trend, who promises something, anything, better. They relegate the problem to corruption or “crony capitalism,” or some foreign influence (Putin or Israel or Saudi Arabia), or old white men, or what have you. This is all undergirded by notions of just good guys vs bad guys, unmoored from the actual dynamics that create and define these various and opposed interests.

For a few who are a little more committed, this gets overthought very quickly into the very useful postulation that capitalism is on its way out, that the third world, or “the masses,” or “the workers” are on our side — notions which unite everyone from the Party for Socialism and Liberation to various self-proclaimed Maoists and anarchists to various trotskyites, and more. All of which use abstract ideas to paper over (or theorize over) some glaring errors in this conception.

The simplistic good vs evil notion is deeply challenged very quickly when you attempt to change things. After all, most of the people who should be “the good guys” happen to think like “the bad guys” in one way or another or support them and most of the time we can’t escape supporting evil in certain ways. After all, we all have to make a living. Meanwhile almost all of human history up until this point has consisted of a minority (the ruling class) ruling over a much larger majority.

In light of these basic facts, the question becomes “who are you going to believe, theories that the people are on your side and we’re bound to win, or your lying eyes?” You can either use abstract ideas as a salve, to help you keep working towards something better, to give yourself an optimistic outlook, or you can recognize reality, dig deeper and understand the real dynamics.

As Bob Avakian has laid out “class struggle, and the overall struggle against oppression, is a driving force in society and its transformation. But the question is: What is this rooted in, what does it arise out of? What are the material conditions that give rise to, and influence and shape, this struggle, and toward what ends can this struggle be directed, on the basis of the actual contradictions that it’s rooted in? In other words, this is a question of materialism and materialist dialectics vs. idealism (cooking up ideas in your head which don’t have any real relationship to reality) and metaphysics (the notion of absolutes that are unchanging). According to certain so-called communists, you always have to say that the key thing is the class struggle, the struggle against oppression, in a way that divorces this from any material foundation. Once again, it’s not that the class struggle (broadly understood) is unimportant or is not a driving force in the transformation of society; but if that is treated as a thing unto itself, without a material foundation, then it once again becomes a matter of religion (an outlook and approach that is tantamount to a religious dogma) rather than a scientific approach to actually leading that struggle toward the abolition of class oppression and all other forms of oppression.”

Times Have Changed, But Some Theories Have Always Been Wrong

As fascism advances in country after country and capitalism-imperialism holds an essentially unchallenged monopoly on political power across the globe, the “class struggle” often seems less like a battle and more like a massacre. Capitalists continue to push the boundaries of how hard and how much they can exploit laborers, in a race to the bottom. But if the oppressed and exploited are barely even fighting, then how can the fight between them and those who rule over them shape how things develop? When you begin to examine this in that context, the whole question seems moot — of course there must be other factors shaping things.

However, there was a time when this was not so obvious, or so grim. In the mid-twentieth century, as the Communist revolution in Russia gained steam, followed by the revolution in China, inspiring and allying with a wave of national liberation struggles across 5 continents, the imperialist powers were horrified by the prospect of their system’s demise. V.I. Lenin had played a crucial role in setting off this chain of events, but died very shortly after they began. Before he passed he laid the groundwork for understanding the developments that changed the capitalism of the 1800s in Europe into the global capitalism-imperialism of the 1900’s. After his death, the international communist movement, with Stalin’s leadership, attempted to flesh out that understanding, and develop it in light of a major new development on the ground: a growing socialist bloc in direct opposition to the capitalist-imperialist system. Amidst enormous struggle and huge strides in liberating people, as well as strategic errors and political shortcomings, they developed a conception of imperialism hurtling towards, and increasingly engulfed in “General Crisis.” This replaced an overall accurate understanding (even if incomplete) of the dynamism of the Capitalist-imperialist system, where wars and other international fissures, global economic crises and recessions and depressions were a continuation in a new way of the crises that Marx had examined at the dawn of Capitalism. Marx and Lenin both correctly determined that these crises disrupt capitalism and it’s legitimacy but they also provide capitalists with an opportunity, and the necessity, to reorganize on a higher level. These crises were cyclical, like on a bike, where the tires revolve propelling the bike in one direction or another.* The new, incorrect understanding posited a vision of socialism rising, and the old order consumed by the defense of their decrepit system and the prevention of their overthrow, with decreasing returns on all of their investments, and the unsustainability of capitalism tearing it apart from within. Economic theories to buttress this position were developed, it became a major ‘selling point’ to get those who wanted to see a better future to join in the struggle, and inspired a lot of righteous action. After World War 2 and the survival of capitalism post-fascism, the notion of the imminent demise of capitalism and it’s irreversible trend toward extremes was brought into question. But modifications were made and the theory kept being resuscitated. To believe such a thing at that time made some sense; it was plausible. But it wasn’t true.

These days, with the complete dissolution of the Soviet Union, following its betrayal of the revolution and rise as an imperialist power, and the capitalist transformation of China, to believe that capitalism is crumbling and socialism is advancing is clearly nonsense. But this notion sustains many of the surviving “socialist” and “communist” formations and theoreticians, and much worse than that, it comes together with liberal illusions about a long arc of justice and inherent progress all to color and constrain the great majority of radical, progressive and liberal thinking. The ghost of this theory lives on largely unexamined (and sometimes comically explicit, as in Gonzalo’s theory that the world revolution is in the strategic offensive, the final stage before victory) preventing the kind of thinking that could actually take this dismal situation and transform it. After all, if we don’t have the people on our side, if we don’t have the third world on our side, if capitalism isn’t just going to collapse under its own contradictions, if socialism isn’t spontaneously rising, what hope do we have?

Is it even possible to go up against this system? Where does the potential or possibility of ending this nightmare come from?

Starting with the right questions

To answer these questions, as Marx first found out, means that you have to ask some different questions. In particular, we need to ask: how is this current system structured? How does this system maintain itself?

“Imperialism means huge monopolies and financial institutions controlling the economies and the political systems — and the lives of people — not just in one country but all over the world. Imperialism means parasitic exploiters who oppress hundreds of millions of people and condemn them to untold misery; parasitic financiers who can cause millions to starve just by pressing a computer key and thereby shifting vast amounts of wealth from one place to another. Imperialism means war — war to put down the resistance and rebellion of the oppressed, and war between rival imperialist states — it means the leaders of these states can condemn humanity to unbelievable devastation, perhaps even total annihilation, with the push of a button.” — Bob Avakian

The apparatus of the state functions to maintain the conditions these monopolies and financial institutions function within in a profitable manner domestically and maintain and control access to international markets, in a manner most favorable to the blocs of capital tied to their given country, in competition with other states and other blocs of capital. As part of that, those states repress, suppress, and oppress the masses of people and maintain the social relations that correlate to these production relations. But clearly if you zoom in on any part of that state apparatus, overwhelmingly at this time in history but throughout this whole epoch, the great majority of that effort is not directly linked to ‘fighting the good guys,’ but to imposing that given states’ economic, political, and ideological interests, vis a vis its capitalist competitors and market fluctuations and shepherding the masses of people towards fulfilling those particular interests.

Repression, the use of force specifically to suppress dissent and revolt, clearly exists. These imperialists, and smaller capitalists as well are willing, often gleefully so, to turn their enormous instruments of violence — the military, the police, sanctions, etc — against those who challenge their rule, and even those who challenge particular injustices. Their willingness to do so, and the level of repression they are able to enforce, even the level of liberal “openness” they are able to maintain, all exist in relation to and are in large part determined by their needs and their ability to enforce capitalist order on capitalist anarchy. Even these determinations about their freedom to repress their people are often predicated on whether and how their rivals, underlings, and masters could use these heinous acts against them. Even a superficial look at the history of repression against the Kurds by Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria shows how closely such repression against movements for Kurdish rights and autonomy is tied directly to fluctuating alliances of these various states with the US and other powers. Meanwhile apartheid in South Africa served US interests as a bulwark against Soviet Imperialist influence in a geostrategic location. But once the Soviet competition evaporated, that particularly repressive form of rule proved to be too much of a liability to both South Africa and the US and it was transformed. But simplistic notions of good and evil would demand a belief that this repression, or the exploitation the repression enforces, is the principal concern of the imperialists. It’s not too far of a leap from here to notions of the Illuminati, and a wide range of similar conspiracy theories, where every development in the world is part of a conscious effort to keep the oppressed in their place. This may seem ridiculous, but its merely an exaggeration of the essential folly of the good and evil fallacy.

Even looking directly at the criminalization of Black people, wherein this system often does incarcerate, harass, maim, and murder people fighting for justice, the overall dynamic is shaped by the needs of US imperialism to subdue and corral a population made unprofitable by the workings of this very system. The oppression of Black people is one of the foundational pillars of this system due to a whole history of slavery and segregation, lynching and sharecropping with all the social relations and ideas that correspond to that.

The liberation of, or even total integration of, Black people would tear this country apart. And yet in today’s world they cannot be profitably super-exploited due in large part to the imperialists’ dominant position in the world economy, exploiting people in whole different ways in Thailand, Haiti, the Congo, etc. There are limited ways that Black people have been integrated into the dominant economy but the ‘organization’ that has been developed to contain this circumstance — a circumstance wrought ultimately by the anarchy of production — in a way to maintain the legitimacy of this system is the ‘organization’ of the penitentiary, the military, the illicit economy.

This is what has developed, and these are the forces which drove that development. But none of that was preordained. Millions of people have fought and sacrificed for the rights and the liberation of Black people. The state has murdered the leading internationalist lights of this struggle, and coerced, jailed, threatened, and exiled many more. They have disrupted, provoked, undermined this struggle, and at times drowned it in blood. Different structures to deal with these developments could very well have been implemented if that fight was not as fierce as it has been, or if it went in other directions. But the needs of American imperialism are the dynamic ground upon which that struggle has been fought, even as that struggle shook some of that ground.

Doing all that work to maintain their empire, to organize anarchy, is not a choice on their part: this system is compulsively in flux, straining each bloc to their limits against each other, and to their limits in relation to the natural world. Even as their system as a whole strains against the limits imposed by impending global warming, their alliances and “strategies” for dealing with this are dependent on each bloc’s assessment of its own survival in competition with others. When faced with threats to their whole system, the only tools available to them are the tools defined by their absolute necessity for some level of strategic profitability. The same way that we can’t just find some land and grow food to feed people, they can’t just fight global warming. They need a business plan. They can only fight their way and this is why crises are inherent to the system, regular yet unpredictable, destabilizing the system and its enforcers for acute periods, exacerbating the system’s chronic weaknesses. Disrupting profitability, alliances, and the legitimacy of the capitalists’ rule. Meanwhile, we have the potential to unite and fight explicitly for humanity.

Today as global warming accelerates and the global refugee crisis swells, as the US pursues an unchallengable position on top of the heap and all kinds of nations tighten ship to preserve their fiefdoms and relative autonomy and influence within that (even while some hope to challenge US hegemony), fascism presents itself to many ruling classes as a very desirable form of rule, if they can normalize and maintain it. The benefits of an iron grip on the populace, and the ability to force changes upon them, is beginning to outweigh the cost of losing the veneer of a popular and pluralist mandate, even in places where that math didn’t add up a decade ago. Compared to views of an eternal struggle between good and evil, the scientific communist understanding can explain what’s driving these changes happening before our eyes.

Bob Avakian has laid out the foundations of an accurate understanding of all this in a succinct yet clarifying way:

“It is the anarchy of capitalist production which is, in fact, the driving or motive force of this process [of capitalist production], even though the contradiction between the bourgeoisie and proletariat is an integral part of the contradiction between socialized production and private appropriation. While the exploitation of labor-power is the form by and through which surplus value is created and appropriated, it is the anarchic relations between capitalist producers, and not the mere existence of propertyless proletarians or the class contradiction as such, that drives these producers to exploit the working class on an historically more intensive and extensive scale. This motive force of anarchy is an expression of the fact that the capitalist mode of production represents the full development of commodity production and the law of value.” He continues: “Were it not the case that these capitalist commodity producers are separated from each other and yet linked by the operation of the law of value they would not face the same compulsion to exploit the proletariat — the class contradiction between bourgeoisie and proletariat could be mitigated. It is the inner compulsion of capital to expand which accounts for the historically unprecedented dynamism of this mode of production, a process which continually transforms value relations and which leads to crisis.”

This is also inherent to the contradictions within the ruling class in the US right now between the fascist camp and the liberal camp. While overall the Democratic Party’s role has been conciliation and collaboration, and leading others to do the same, there is real contention between the ruling consensus that they want and the fascist consensus that has the initiative. These are two distinct notions of political and economic organization attempting to deal with all the anarchy in the real (imperialist) world. This is continually forcing them into tight spots economically and politically, most notably the impeachment proceedings. Within the logic of this system, the bourgeois democrats could not NOT impeach, as their very ability to contest the fascists through bourgeois Democratic means (elections) and their legitimacy as an opposition was at stake with this illegal investigation of Biden. But also within the logic of their system, they cannot possibly win the impeachment because they don’t have the votes and they have tied themselves to the rules and norms. They can only fight their way, while again we have the potential to unite and fight explicitly for humanity.

Gradual growth or dynamic leadership?

An understanding that simply flows from the notion that the epoch of capitalism is simply a battle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie leads one to believe that these contentions among the rulers are inconsequential. ‘We just need to build our power over here, while they do their thing over there.’ Especially in these times, when the bourgeoisie seems all-powerful, this provides a static view of the world. In the face of fascism, many feel that “it’s always been bad.” You can even hear it when people say (full of hope) that Trump will make their system look so bad that people will be more likely to rise up. The strategy leading from that conception is that we just have to build our movements, patiently working towards some kind of time that we’re strong enough to beat them. Registering voters in oppressed communities, patient education, community organizing and charity work ‘brought to you by’ some ideology or organization, “base building,” idealist reformism, the fetishization of local developments and local organizing and local authenticity, cancel culture, even absurd formulaic notions of “protracted people’s war,” all stem from these notions. But the same contradictions that provide the potential for real revolution led by a conscious vanguard, also limit what disruptions and spontaneous uprisings can do. All of these things listed above can disrupt profitability. So can natural disasters or technological failures or changing alliances. Some of these disruptions can even be good for the revolution in the right context. But Capitalism will not be overthrown by an accumulation of disruptions. No force can end the generalization of commodity relations without consciously leading the masses to uproot that. Oppression will breed resistance, corporations will go bankrupt, governments will be overthrown, empires will crash, but until the law of value is consciously uprooted through socialized ownership and the political system to enforce that (the dictatorship of the proletariat), this system will remain, recruiting and literally empowering new actors to reinforce its power.

Saying that “People aren’t ready for revolution” in order to push something less than that is based in a belief that we are just trying to move a dot down a line, from bad to good. In a one-dimensional world, that would be literally the only thing you could do. Luckily we don’t live in that world, and we need a strategy based in this reality.

At various times over the past centuries movements for justice have gained momentum and grown while at other times they have been eviscerated. Many upward trends have met even more downward trends. If there is no overall growth or progress, how can people maintain this belief in gradually building our forces to victory? Often the excuse is that for some reason we know better than people in the past, that now we can see their blindspots, or that their leaders had deep character flaws. For many, this question is best left ignored

If we are to be scientific about this, we need to recognize that the movements of the past have had all of these flaws and more. But that is not the reason for their failures. Likewise, we may have all these shortcomings today and more, but that is not the fundamental reason that we have not yet seized power. We must situate all of this history in the context of the development of this dynamic system of capitalism-imperialism, the enormity of the transformation we are attempting to create, the quality and kind of ideological leadership, and the simple role of chance.

Forcing the path vs Using the whole map

History holds many lessons but none of the victories and losses we have suffered were bound to happen. The communist revolutions of the 20th century could have been turned back at many junctures. And to a certain degree, they could have succeeded where they did in fact fail. That history is an extraordinary source to advance our understanding but there has been a tendency to read too much into what worked and what didn’t, the logistics, the particularity of what developed in what circumstances, attempting to build those various experiences into larger theories, as opposed to understanding the development of global society and situating those experiences into that. Focusing on the what, and negating the how and why. We cannot predict exactly where the next “bubble” might burst, or how the contention between Iran and the US may escalate or de-escalate in the same way that it was impossible to predict who would win the second world war, or that Russia would be the site of the first real communist revolution. Everything may seem obvious, once you know how it actually worked out, but the future is unwritten and dialectical materialism is not a crystal ball. We cannot predict many things, but we can know three things:

1. There is plenty new under the sun, but nothing has contradicted the foundational truths that Marx first discovered and that have been developed since then leading to the New Communism. All of these developments have sharpened our understanding. We can continue to analyze and understand the developments that set the stage for what is to come. The foundation and development of this science continues to be a source of understanding the fundamental answers to overthrowing this system and
2. People broadly are capable of grasping this. There is no metaphysical or external barrier to this, but it will continue to be a struggle as long as this system is in power, and then in a different way until this system is totally dismantled across the globe.
3. Crises will develop and the 5 stops will continue to lay the basis for disruption and rebellion. These will continue to compel people into new terrain on which to live their life, and in those moments in particular different ways of life and different worldviews will take hold, one way or another. Affecting which way that goes is where much of our freedom lies.

Here we see the profound influence of the seemingly esoteric and abstract concept of the principal form of motion of the fundamental contradiction of capitalism. We see the way that such a theory can drive the everyday actions of a vanguard party, its members and supporters. We can see the need for emancipators of humanity to lead people to overthrow this system, not merely trade union secretaries to be a thorn in its side. We can see the reality that theory is the dynamic factor in the dialectic between theory and practice. We can see how to change the world.

Fascism has another important effect on this whole equation. With the imposition of fascism, there is a conscious effort on the part of the rulers to destroy any challenge, even any potential challenge to their rule. And that does include violently going after even nascent protest, rebellion, or revolutionary leadership and exterminating oppressed populations. This remains in the service of imposing capitalist organization on the anarchy of capitalist production, but it creates a whole other level of challenge for the revolutionary leadership. We exist in a moment of fascism consolidating. This is a moment full of potential for enormous suffering, but also the potential to bust through the heightened tensions within the ruling class. In this scenario, fascism has time on its side. Our window of opportunity will close when the fascists put their foot down on even their ruling class opposition. In some ways this means they use the tactics that have been used against oppressed communities against everyone. And we have seen some folks who take a narrow view of the struggle, a non-materialist view of good subjugated people vs the evil of the dominant race, and dismiss fascism, saying that marginalized groups already face all that. But fascism also means a threat to even the continued existence of those very same oppressed communities. Now is the time for us all to act.

Good and bad do exist in this society. But that isn’t imposed by god, and it doesn’t exist outside the confines of the relations that people are enmeshed in today. Good and bad are relative to that. It’s “good for what?” and “bad for what?” If you want to maintain this current system, then good is defined by how to resolve the variety of contradictions in society in a way that maintains your rule over others: to continue to impose capitalist organization onto capitalist anarchy, with yourself or your bloc on top of course. If you want to get humanity free, then good is defined in relation to resolving the fundamental contradiction of capitalism-imperialism — of socialized labor versus private accumulation — in the interests of all humanity: ending all oppression and exploitation.

*many of the modern adherents of this general crisis theory do recognize these cyclical crises that occur but they often treat them as though we’re just peddling away on a stationary bike, or as though they are just some interesting features of the general crisis that might provide us some opportunities to educate people as to how bad capitalism is or that these crises are building up to the big one, in a way reminiscent of apocalyptic churches who set dates for the end of time, and then nothing happens, and then they set new dates, and then new ones.

New Amsterdam was the first European colony on what is now Manhattan. Even as the Dutch and their diverse subjects stole land from the Lenape, they built a remarkably tolerant and cosmopolitan colony. It became a commercial hub with immigrants from all over Europe as well as from parts of Asia and Africa, mixing and competing together on a relatively even playing field. As it grew and changed hands and eventually, reluctantly, became a part of the United States, this area retained this culture and this economic role to a significant degree, even through demographic changes and major developments nationally and globally. After all, continually incorporating outside elements is one of the pillars of this culture. And the necessity and value of commerce hubs has only grown over the centuries, even if what that entails has transitioned. Sounds quite idyllic, doesn’t it?

But from the start, one thing the folks in this diverse and tolerant community were competing over was shares in the enslavement of Africans, and the trade in enslaved human flesh. And while all were welcome to live and trade, those in power concentrated an extreme amount of authority over the rules of the game. People brought their different cultures, and they were welcomed to a significant degree, and there were beautiful elements of that. But as part of the tolerance, people also brought relations of power from their different backgrounds. Even though agriculture and industry were quickly replaced by trade and speculation as the main source of revenue in the area, they needed buildings to speculate in, and food to eat as they invested. While slavery wasn’t the most profitable form of labor to serve those interests, it was welcomed and accepted. You could even say it was “tolerated.”

When you think of racism, this is not the picture that first comes to mind. It’s not deep southern crackers blissful in their arrogant ignorance. It’s not the missionary mindset to ‘save the souls of the heathens’ exercised by the Spanish conquistadors, or in a very different way by the New England puritans. It’s not the hardscrabble ‘me and my kind first,’ anti-urban populism of Appalachia. It’s not even the classically educated, freedom-for-all-but-my-slaves “enlightenment” of Washington, Jefferson and the rest of the tidewater founding fathers. All of these versions of White supremacy have survived, and maintained their regional strongholds over the centuries, even as they have evolved. And at various times each has had more or less power in shaping the US as a whole, and it’s role in the world.

But it is this transactional ‘New Amsterdam’ (or New York) white supremacy, imperfectly embodied by Donald Trump, that has become the magic bullet to unite the rest, to unite the US in general behind rising American Fascism, and even to unite fascist movements around the world. One of the most horrifying elements of this is it’s universal applicability — where White supremacists can unite with Hindu Fundamentalists and Latin American Fascists, and where people from every heritage inside the US can barter with the wages of white supremacy. It’s part of Trump’s historical role as someone whose alleged business acumen, and more importantly his living caricature of a business personality, has been very widely looked up to in large swaths of immigrant and Black communities, even though his white supremacy has been on display ever since he made his name, and was even a factor in how he made his name.

Driving the push to fascism are the enormous challenges US imperialism faces in maintaining a unipolar world order in the face of global warming and massive global migrations. And while most of the Democrats have been working to keep their (and our) heads in the sand and maintain an unsustainable status quo, the republicans generally have been trying, mostly unsuccessfully, to turn over the post WW2 ruling consensus and impose something much more draconian. To accomplish this, all kinds of figureheads, styles, compromises and policies have been proposed and tried. And yet until Trump (alongside Christian theocrat Mike Pence) came along, in this historic moment, the fascists had only been able to gain ground incrementally against their ruling class rivals.

To understand how this situation has come about, and to start to get a grasp on how to resolve it in the interests of the people, we need to recognize a few key things:

1. White supremacy is not eternal or metaphysical. Neither it’s ideology or its power relations are built into our DNA.
2. As Bob Avakian’s has pointed out: “There would be no United States as we now know it today without slavery. That is a simple and basic truth.”
3. Different regions of this country had vastly different relationships with slavery, with the genocide of Native Amercians, and with the subordination of Latin America, beginning well before the United States was even a notion on the horizon of history. Different cultures developed and they involved vastly different white supremacies.
4. In the context of the rise of global capitalism-imperialism, shifting political, ideological, military and material alliances between different regions in the US have been key to the development of this country as the world’s sole superpower, and especially to it’s ruling consensi and ability to legitimize its rule over the centuries. These alliances, and these rifts, were most stark during the civil war, but they have been in constant tension since the 1600’s.
5. Many reformist efforts for social justice have played these various white supremacies off of eachother and set them against one another, but those struggles have also been distorted and manipulated by the power struggles between these different blocs.

So how does this all point to a solution? Do we just stop Trump and then this new, fascism-enriched remix falls apart? To some degree, yes. And this is urgently needed. It is a battle which must be waged by everyone who hates what Trump is doing and what he represents. We are facing fascism and people must take up this fight way beyond, and in opposition to the normal channels of impeachment, elections, court battles. It can only be stopped by a sustained movement in the millions, becoming ungovernable and creating a political crisis until this regime is removed. And while all that won’t end white supremacy, it could knock this fascist juggernaut off the tracks. This is the defining struggle of our time.

But what then? Are our only options finding different kinds of alliances between the various white supremacies (and their corresponding regions, cultures, etc) that could ameliorate this situation? If there are really all these different kind of white supremacies, do we have to patiently go down the line and uproot them one by one?

Beneath it all, these white supremacies and their corresponding regional interests, cultures, and ideas all stem from ways that the ruling classes have aimed to organize people to meet the needs of capital. And as long as we maintain this capitalist-imperialist system, these various interests will be battling it out for influence and control as the people, and especially those targeted by white supremacy, bear the violence of these struggles.

But if we stop maintaining this system, if we replace this with a different system based on the needs of humanity and the planet, then we could resolve the fundamental structures giving rise to all of this and wage a substantial assault white supremacy from every angle. We could even use some of this lopsidedness and fissures as engines for change.

Bob Avakian has said: “We hear from masses of people — and I’ve seen this in reports recently — statements or sentiments along the following lines: “I know revolution is needed,” or “I know revolution is what’s gotta happen at some point,” but “what do we do now, what do we do in the meantime?”

Answer? Make revolution. Fight the Power, and Transform the People, for Revolution. Prepare minds and organize forces for the time when a revolutionary situation and a revolutionary people, in the millions and millions, emerges. Work actively and consciously to bring this time closer and to bring things to where we are in the best position to act decisively when this does come about. Devote your life, energy, daring and creativity to confronting, fighting through and overcoming the obstacles to making this happen, and to winning more and more people to doing the same.”

A force basing itself in the emancipation of all of humanity can radically change the whole equation of power, even as that force must address (not pander to) these regional variations. This might seem almost too simple, but it’s directness — directly aimed at the fundamental contradictions of this system — are part of its beauty and part of why this path is possible. Actually accomplishing this will be an enormous and complex struggle. It will take conscious struggle in every realm, in every region, and around the world. But that doesn’t negate its basic simplicity. This is what the communist revolution sets out to do. There is a very important universal element to this strategy and for the sake of clarity, it’s worth contrasting this communist strategy, and its potential ability to unite millions across this country with the ‘universality’ of Trump’s White supremacy.

Trump’s transactionality, based in the “New York state of mind,” that we’ve discussed here provides his worldview with a certain perceived universality. And this is a key element of its strength. Even as it eviscerates communities of color and destroys the lives of untold millions of Black and Brown people, it reinforces a delusional aspiration where anyone can conceivably gain power, and anyone with power can chart the course. Historically this conception has been useful in opposition to some of the more blatant forms of white supremacy: promoting Black entrepreneurship, elements of cultural nationalism, and ‘tolerance’ even as Black people in the South were tied to the land, buried under the debt of sharecropping and lynched for any reason a white man could conceive. But those differences don’t erase the white supremacy that prevails in both systems of thought, the interdependence of these two white supremacies, nor the categorical subjugation of Black people which both serve.

Meanwhile the “left” version of this transactionality has gained enormous traction, with detrimental effects. With only an implicit embrace of crude capitalism, people are being led to celebrate the commodification of identities and individual human beings, and even turn oppression itself into a commodity to be traded for economic or political capital. Not only does this funhouse mirror of Trump’s mindset provide a horrifying vision of one possible future should it somehow become dominant, but it serves to divide and paralyze people who should be acting together to create a radically better future.

Bob Avakian’s New Communism provides a radically different universality. One where we are all in this together and where we can create a radically better world, building vibrant and diverse cultures, traditions and communities on the basis of a shared humanity, a shared planet, and the emancipation of humanity from all oppression and exploitation.