​In 1890 the polymath W. E. B. Du Bois, arguably the greatest mind America has given birth to, delivered his Harvard University Commencement address on the subject of “Jefferson Davis as a Representative of Civilization.” With the succession of the South, Davis, who had been a Representative, Senator, and Secretary of War throughout his career, would now ascend as the President of the Confederacy. For decades after his death and the fall of the “rebels,” Davis would be celebrated as a hero, a great man of history. Till this day, various states of the U.S. South continue to celebrate June 3rd, his birthday, as an official holiday.
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Speaking in the last decade of the 19th century, the allure of Davis was still alive and well, and in this context Du Bois would reflect on what Davis’s persona, his figure, means for civilization. Du Bois tells us that “there is something noble in the figure of Jefferson Davis: and judged by every canon of human justice, there is something fundamentally incomplete about that standard.” Here was a figure that by the dominant standards of the time was a “success.” He rose to the highest halls of power, and inspired millions of faithful believers in the process. But the values that he fought for along the way, the values that earned him the positions he acquired, would be worrisome by anyone committed to a sense of rational and just civilization.

Davis was, for Du Bois, a representative of a different type of civilization: Teutonic Civilization, where “individualism is coupled with the rule of might,” and governance is carried out with “the cool logic of the Club.” Teuton here, for Du Bois, is not the anthropological category used for early Germanic tribes. Instead, it is a civilizational paradigm. This paradigm, this civilizational model, writes Du Bois, “has made the logic of modern history.” Teutonic Civilization is premised on “the advance of a part of the world at the expense of the whole; the overweening sense of the I, and the consequent forgetting of the Thou.” Davis was an archetype, at the level of the individual, of the sort of men Teutonic civilization produces and exalts. For a civilization where “people fight to be free in order that another people should not be free,” Du Bois holds, Davis stands as a heroic representative. At the youthful age of 22, Du Bois provided his audience with a dialectical analysis of the different types of individuals various societies and civilizational models produce and uphold as idols.

Civilization enriches humanity culturally, intellectually, and materially. Teutonic civilization does the contrary, it takes from humanity, retards development, and makes the goods which have been universally produced for all to enjoy the privileged property of a select few. Since 1890, Teutonic civilization – which can perhaps be more accurately labeled anti-civilization – has dug its claws deeper into the American trajectory. In the minds of many people around the world, today American civilization is par excellence Teutonic civilization. American life doesn’t seem to be able to exist without waging hybrid war on most of humanity. This is a very unfortunate predicament that has befallen my country, considering how it was, in fact, the American revolution which was the first anti-colonial struggle in the hemisphere, a struggle that affirmed the right of every nation to make their own revolution. In doing so, it would inspire all of the subsequent anti-colonial struggles of the period, from the French Revolution of 1789 to the Haitian Revolution of 1804. It is one of the great tragedies of history that the country born out of affirming the right to revolution has been the keenest on preventing others around the world from affirming that right. Just as the values that have predominated have not been those of the American civilizational paradigm – the democratic creed of Jefferson, Paine, etc. – the individuals that are upheld – in most instances – as examples of success are, like Jefferson Davis, archetypes of Teutonic anti-civilization.

Mike Pompeo, the bastard child of Deep State institutions and institutionalized Calvinist insanity, is one of today’s many representatives of Teutonic anti-civilization. His career, whether in Congress (2010-17), as CIA Director (2017-18), or Secretary of State (2018-21), is marked by his bellicosity against any country which dares to stand up for itself and affirm its sovereignty from U.S. meddling. While pretending to be a “Christian,” his work is dominated by the most un-Christ-like activities, from lying to wage hybrid war on countries to complicity in crimes against humanity – there has not been one regime change operation in the last decade he has not loved. His life’s project is captured nicely in a statement he made at Texas A&M University, describing his time as CIA director: “I was the CIA director. We lied, we cheated, we stole. We had entire training courses. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment.” I must have missed those sections of Exodus 20:2-17 and Deuteronomy 5:6-21 in the Bible, where cheating, stealing, and lying for the interests of the financial elite is presented as the Christian way of life.

There is something very interesting about the last sentence of his statement, which implies that lying, cheating, and stealing are part and parcel of the “glory of the American experiment.” The question to be asked here is the one that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. posed for us long ago – which America? The America of the poor working majority? Or, the America of the few owners of big capital. Like Jefferson Davis, who was a representative of the Southern Planter (i.e., slave-owning) class, the champions of Teutonic anti-civilization, Pompeo is the champion of the parasitic elite that goes around plundering and debt trapping for its financial interest – something it does to both foreign lands and to the American people and resources. He is a champion of the Teutonic civilization which has occupied America since the counterrevolution of property in 1876, when the northern forces betrayed the promise of radical, abolition democracy given to the enslaved black working class of the U.S. south.

Over the last decade, Teutonic Pompeo has been complicit, supportive, and instrumental in the following crimes of U.S. imperialism: spearheading the “maximum pressure” policy against Iran, which included imposing criminal unilateral coercive measures (sanctions), assassinating the heroic terrorist slayer, General Qasem Soleimani, and unilaterally withdrawing from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (the Iran Nuclear Deal), which put humanity on the precipice of WW3; he supported and spearheaded efforts to sanction and overthrow sovereign governments in Latin America, from Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Bolivia, which was successfully overthrown in 2019 (the coup government would be defeated within a year); he gave, like most AIPAC-bought American politicians, unwavering support for Israel’s crimes against Palestinians, both in Gaza and the West Bank, where he was the first U.S. Secretary of State to visit an illegal settlement; against China, he has waged a comprehensive effort to intensify the New Cold War under the guise of combatting “communist authoritarianism,” arguing that “if we bend a knee now, our children’s children may be at the mercy of the Chinese Communist Party.” This attitude has been central to his support for provocations in the South China Sea, his criminal promotion of Separatism, and his proliferating of the Sinophobic “China Virus” rhetoric during the Covid Pandemic. This is just the tip of the iceberg of a life committed to being a “swamp monster,” a shill for the parasitic American deep state.

How such a figure was able to attach himself to the Make America Great Again movement (MAGA) remains a mystery to some. How could the MAGA base, which is animated by discontented working class people seeking to end the “forever wars,” dismantle the deep state, and reindustrialize the country to usher in a new era of prosperity for American workers, support a shill like Pompeo, who is a representative of everything they hate? Simple, they never did. Even back when Pompeo was a part of the first Trump government, him and other Warhawks like John Bolton and Elliott Abrams were despised by the working class MAGA base. In fact, in these sectors the dominant narrative for why Trump failed to substantially follow through on the promises of dismantling the deep state in the first term is credited to Pompeo and the other cohort of Warhawks, who duped innocent Mr. Trump into supporting policies contrary to the narrative that won his popular base over to him. 

The simultaneous presence of swamp monsters like Pompeo with a campaign and movement aimed at “draining the swamp” is not to be scoffed at simply as an inconsistency in Trump’s judgment. We should not dismiss this contradiction by simply attributing its source to subjective factors such as these. Instead, this contradiction – that between a movement aiming to “drain the swamp and the swamp monsters within its highest quarters – is objective in character. This contradiction is the basic dynamic that is animating both Trump and the MAGA movement. It is the “principal contradiction,” as Mao would say, which is structuring the internal movement of this political process. The MAGA phenomenon is a microcosm that reflects the larger tensions within the American trajectory. It is a process wherein the two Americas of Dr. King can be found. It is a true unity of opposites, and the struggle of these opposites steers its trajectory.

In 2016, this MAGA microcosm of the larger contradiction of the American trajectory was still quite embryonic in character. The contradictions seemed manageable. For any process pervaded by such tensions, the first few moments always give the illusion of a reconcilability on the horizon. It is this youthful mirage which always emerges at the beginning of similar processes which led to the tradition of modern utopian socialists in Europe and America. The utopians, working at the time when the contradictions of industrial capitalism had just started manifesting themselves, held that these could be escaped from and harmonized. Their idea was not – as Marx and Engels would later postulate – to identify the basic contradiction, understand its fundamentally antagonistic character, and side with the principal aspect embodying the potential for a new world (the working class). Instead, they fell for the mirage, and held that the basic contradictions could be undone, not dialectically overcome. It took time for the mirage to be pierced, and for the fundamentally antagonistic character of the contradiction to become evident to serious observers. Only with time, with the development of the object of study itself, was the transition able to be made from this utopian framework to scientific socialism.

Today we are in a similar period of transition for the MAGA movement. The mirage of the potential harmonization of its basic contradiction is pierced by the reality of its development. In other words, the contradiction is demonstrating its fundamentally antagonistic character. The objectivity of the tension between the progressive MAGA working class base (which stands against war, the deep state, and for economic prosperity) with the Teutonic elements in its leadership (while Pompeo is no longer in the government, other Pompeos have taken his place – Marco Rubio, Pete Hegseth, Mike Huckabee, Mike Waltz, et. al.) is showing itself to be untenable. The antagonistic character of the contradiction is heading towards a rupture – toward the eventual divorcing of the progressive MAGA working class elements from the swamp monsters and Warhawks that occupy leading positions in Trump’s government. 

Plastered across X (Twitter), the most politicized social media platform in the West, are post from working class MAGA people expressing their discontent with Trump’s regime. The phrase, “Trump has betrayed MAGA,” has become popular in some of these spaces, especially after the recent bombings of Yemen. MAGA commentators have noticed how, back in May of 2024, Trump critiqued the Biden administration for bombing the courageous Yemeni resistance, stating the following:

“It's crazy. You can solve problems over the telephone. Instead, they start dropping bombs. I see, recently, they're dropping bombs all over Yemen. You don't have to do that. You can talk in such a way where they respect you and they listen to you.”

Where did this diplomacy style go? Were Biden’s bombs any less destructive than Trump’s?

While he has taken steps to end the proxy war against Russia, the campaign promise of ending the war on day one is still waiting to be materialized after three months. Additionally, figures like Colonel Doug Macgregor have explicitly criticized the performative de-escalation of Trump on this issue, which hasn’t significantly addressed, in concrete material terms, the bellicosity of the Zelensky regime.

Other sectors of MAGA have criticized Trump’s willingness to follow Israel’s lead in military affairs, particularly in the Middle East. Many take issue with his readiness to escalate tensions with Iran, including his threats to bomb its nuclear facilities. Such an action, they argue, would not only destabilize the region but could trigger global chaos with unpredictable consequences. Journalists like Tucker Carlson, who are bit more consistent with popular MAGA sentiments than those in the government, have even gone as far as criticizing the sanctions regime the U.S. applies to nations across the world. In a recent interview with the Prime Minister of Qatar, Tucker expressed his confusion at how such a policy, which has never achieved anything but making people suffer, continues to be used. While commentators like Carlson and Macgregor continue to be supportive of Trump, the popular MAGA base is estranging itself more and more from Trump.

These discontent workers have not only taken note of Trump’s continued bellicosity (after he promised to be an “anti-war” president) and his failure to dismantle the deep state in any significant and not merely symbolic capacity, but also, how in the country itself no serious policies are being taken or proposed to improve the dire living situation of the working masses, who are growing more impoverished and drowning deeper in debt as time passes. This situation led the prominent working-class X influencer, “Texas Trucker,” to tweet at Trump, Secretary of the Department of Transportation Sean Duffy, and Vice President J.D. Vance the following: “It's sad. Is all truckers in America going to have to join the American Communist Party to get justice in America. They seem to be the only ones standing with us and for us.” The melancholy in this statement demonstrates the awareness of Trump’s betrayal of MAGA, and the realization that the essential demands of the MAGA working class base can only be realized through another political project.

America is in a similar turning point as it was at the time of the Civil War (the second American Revolution). At that time, two routes were presented to the American trajectory. One path led deeper toward Teutonic anti-civilization. The other toward the construction of a fully American civilization, premised on a radical, abolition democracy. For a period of time, America affirmed the later path. It ensured, for a small but not insignificant period of time, that the interests of human beings and civilization were primary. It was this period of social upheaval and revolution that led Du Bois to compare the Civil War and Reconstruction to the Bolshevik, Chinese, and French Revolutions. In 1876 this hope collapses. The northern capitalist class (which could’ve very well played a role akin to the one played by the national, patriotic bourgeoisie in China) betrayed black and white workers in the South, who were building their own dictatorship of labor. Du Bois described this poetically when he said that “The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.”

In the aftermath of this betrayal, those who were betrayed didn’t simply give up on their ideals. On the contrary, as Du Bois writes in The Souls of Black Folk, “there are to-day no truer exponents of the pure human spirit of the Declaration of Independence than the American Negroes.” In the face of the betrayal of the ideal by the ruling class, the popular base, the black workers, affirmed that it was only through their emancipation that the ideals could be realized. Today the working class MAGA base is faced with the same predicament the black proletariat, as Du Bois called it, was in. Its leaders have betrayed its ideals. Neither Trump nor his government of Warhawks will seriously dismantle the deep state, end the “forever wars,” or uplift the lives of the American worker. The MAGA worker is coming to realize this, and with this realization comes another one – only they can save themselves. These ideals, which affirm a rupture from the path of Teutonic anti-civilization, and toward a genuine American civilizational project, will not be enacted by the whims of billionaires like Trump, but through the struggle of the discontented worker affirming his power.

If the tendencies we have outlined continue, it is likely that in the coming years we will be seeing the clear divorce of MAGA from Trump. The American worker will, in time, come to realize that only socialism – a society of, by, and for the people, can actually Make America Great Again. Seismic shifts, not just in the country’s trajectory, but in geopolitics as a whole, will occur when this realization emerges and is acted upon. 

White Skin,BIPOC-LGBTQ2SCIAFBI+ Mask

As I make my rounds here on God's green earth, making my contributions to socialist organizing, I've been subject to a phenomena, so grossly racist, so unintelligibly incoherent, so shockingly impotent, that I can only describe it is as being confronted by a Cronenberg-esq cosmic horror. It is no exaggeration that dealing with the modern left has been such a nightmare.

The left in the US is a funhouse mirror of communist movements around the world, a chimera made of parts strewn together from contradictory ideologies that deem themselves Marxist. There is no better example than the “decolonial”, “anti settler” variety of leftist that makes a mockery of revolutionary anti-colonial practice.

Speaking for a moment anecdotally, I’ve seen this school of thought manifested in many ways. I have had the personal displeasure of having a white women accuse me of being a colonizer--an affront as confusing as it is offensive as I myself am a Puerto Rican man, in an organization led by colonized people. REAL has been subjected to a lot of ire for disagreeing with many popular assertions among the "decolonial" left, such as ideas that Karl Marx is Eurocentric, Lenin is antiquated, and that embracing revolution in this country is a chauvinist position.
We are chastised for holding the view that Marxism-Leninism remains important, and are told that it is a theory from which we should “advance”. Could you believe that in engaging in this discourse we have been recommended to read, without the slightest hint of self awareness; literal Zionists, academics from EUROPEAN universities, advocates for beastiality, and political punk rock musicians.

I can deal with these theoretical disagreements even though I find them inconsistent, but the privileging of decolonial theory can take the most grotesque forms; ones that make the words of the great Italian communist Antonio Gramsci ring very true: “These are the times of monsters”. In a vulgar sexualization of the bloody struggle of liberation for colonized nations, these monsters promote “polycules” as a means to “fight against fascism”, and deem it the “decolonization” of their sex life. This sexual fixation echoes into prominent organizations that use resources to throw singles mixers as the country spirals into WWIII, not to mention the lack of emphasis these same organizations have on the current genocide against the Palestinian people. When leftists put such high importance on the spectacle of sex in organizing, is it any wonder why sex pests are such a plague on the left?

I am not writing this in the exercise of theoretical or moral purity; I cut my teeth on the anti colonial struggle and have a real appreciation for Pan-Africanism and national liberation. It is for that reason I’m indignant at this caricature of struggle by the left. So I find it necessary to interrogate this line, and in my examination I find that regardless of what form it takes, this “Settler” sort of political line is rooted in the very colonial institutions it derides. I insist that its pervasiveness is the result of an intellectual product financed by the elites in efforts to erect a bulwark against communist organizing and safeguarding bourgeois interests. It is a tactic that was long since expounded on by a founding figure of the true anti colonialism: “Osegyafu” Dr. Kwame Nkrumah. In his notion of Neo-Colonialism he saliently points out the modern condition of colonialism being maintained under an anti-colonial veneer.

Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor (Why Theory is important)

To Nkrumah, Kwame Ture, Cabral, and all the revolutionaries that shed blood for the actual decolonial project, this is not your legacy. This article is not an effort to denigrate the heroic struggle of the indigenous people of the world. It is also not a polemic against any political program for national autonomy of any indigenous nation.
What this article aims to do is clearly demarcate the historically instantiated anti colonial struggle from a body of bourgeois academic work that tries to lay claim to this revolutionary lineage.
“First as history then as farce” to paraphrase Karl Marx, this form of anti colonialism popular among radicals today is a disgusting reboot, unfaithful to the source material. Anti-colonialism was a tangible struggle for the sovereignty of colonized people against foreign invaders with countless heroes who fought and died for liberation.
It is true that the concrete experience of colonialism gave rise to the capitalist mode of production, and contrary to what detractors say, we’d never deny that and we would also never deny that it has real echoes in the modern day that absolutely have to be reconciled with. What we insist upon is this “theory” is not up to that task, due to the undermining or revision of class analysis. If we understand class and how it manifests, we see that is that the same institutions that rapaciously gnawed at the lands of the third world who delivered us the slop that is “Decolonial Theory” or more accurately, "Post Colonial Studies". Nkrumah, himself using class analysis, gives us insight into this phenomena through his work: Neocolonialism the Highest Stage of Imperialism.

It's Pure Ideology

Many of these “Decolonial Theorists” describe themselves as “Decolonial Marxists”. A term that is implied to mean that while they adhere to Marxism, they have done away with the Eurocentric baggage that comes with the ideological framework of “Marxism” or “Scientific Socialism”. Again speaking from my own experience, in the discussion before it devolves into hurls of insults, these theorists never really point to any concrete example where Marxism falls short or identify where these insurmountable European biases lie. Even when engaging with more scholarly works from this camp, we find criticisms that are just flat out refutations of the Marxist method. Criticisms of an imperfect Soviet Union, interrogations of the cultural sphere; these ideologists find the USSR narrow in its scope with its aid to mostly European countries and lacking in its treatment of minorities. Some go so far as to call it the entire Socialist experiment racist. And so they insist that Marxism should be revised and deride modern Marxism and all its adherents as “class reductionists”. These vapid accusations of inherent “racism” fall flat, especially since it was Vladimir Lenin, who used the Marxist method as it was meant to be applied and situated it in the age of Imperialism. Lenin and Stalin outlined the “national question”--an unprecedented program for cohesion and unity between previously antagonistic nationalities in countries. It was this Marxist-Leninist canon that established the Soviet Union, that concretely ushered in the age associated with decolonization, making it the ultimate weapon for liberation from colonial powers.

To further ignore contributing to real practice, these theorists do not provide concretely what “decolonial theory” proposes as an alternative to replace this shortcoming. I am simply to take it on their word -- on the authority of their social standing that comes with the self-branding as a marginalized subject. ("You're not listening to X voices!") Without any evidence, we are to succumb to their dictates. Under the slightest pressure to defend their position through a simple civil discourse, it is common to just be immediately derided as a “racist” or “chauvinist” or anti x-identity. As though the communist political program is no different than a Klansmen or a Nazi.

It is here I find the principal issue with these ideologists. Communism concretely embodied in China, the USSR and other real world political bodies, has been proven time and time again to be the most successful means of overthrowing the all powerful rule of the monied class, the very inheritors of colonial rule these theorists claim to oppose. No other program has proven to be such an existential threat to the dynastic oligarchs. While the “anti settler” theorist centers the cosmetic and outward relations of oppression, Marxism uncovers the underlying dynamic relations of class, insisting on the waging of class struggle that propels society forward. Marxism is an alternative model to the capitalist arrangement and has liberated the broad masses, including the “wretched of the earth”-- the colonized people of the world. It was communists in the United States and abroad that were most ardent defenders of racial solidarity the fighters of the oppressed. William Z Foster and his comrades were all so called “settlers” who stood by their brothers on class grounds. So when the decolonial theorists villainize communists in such a way as to equate them with the most evil forces of fascism and chauvinism, these theorists should have to admit that they stand shoulder to shoulder with the ruling elite in enmity against the communists.
What is pernicious about these radicals is that they hide behind a smokescreen of “advancing Marxism” when in fact they are revising marxism, blunting its revolutionary edge. Marxism, “the ruthless criticism of all that exists”, quickly turns into submission to an infallible dogma of this or that individual. When we unmask them of their Marxist jargon like a cartoonish Scooby Doo villain, this theoretical framework is revealed to be Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw’s theory of “intersectionality”, the flagship ideology of progressive democrats.

It is our responsibility to chart a clear course through this political crisis we are in to lead us to a revolutionary conclusion. In any war, especially one as obfuscated as a class war, we must ask: “Who are our friends? Who are our Enemies?” It is through our ideological lens that we understand these fundamental questions and navigate the world according to our conclusions. So it is important that we unpack our metaphysical tool kit, and recognize the trappings of bourgeois ideologies that are sure to orient us in the wrong direction and sabotage the movement for their overthrowing.

From birth we are indoctrinated with bourgeois propaganda that undergirds our very thought. Liberalism is the ideological default of our society and justifies the rule of the bourgeoisie based on abstraction of private property and individual merit. Marxism in contrast, by insisting that ideas are a reflection of the material reality and not the other way around, begs the question: Where did these ideas come from? How did this brand of “decolonial Marxism” find itself here, in the zeitgeist of the West? What class do these ideas benefit?

The tool of Marxism explains the scientific laws governing the development of societies, and the dynamic elements that lead to a revolutionary change--namely class. The dialectical materialist outlook is the medium that reveals the historic trajectory of ideas, allowing us to identify them and ultimately to uproot them if they do not serve the project of liberation.

No one knew this better than the great genuinely anti colonial figure Kwame Nkrumah, the liberator of Ghana and figurehead of the Marxist application to colonialism, who reveals to us the mechanism of true anti-colonial liberation.

The REAL Decolonial Theory

Nkrumah’s Magnus opus, Neocolonialism: The Highest Stage of Imperialism, builds on VI Lenin’s Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. Lenin correctly describes Imperialism as Monopoly Capitalism. True to the Dialectical Materialist method, Lenin traces the development of free market capital and how, by its own logic, it developed into concentrated centers of power. No longer a free economic competition, capitalist economies are instead commanded from the heights of the monopolist's towers. Instead of pointing to abstract oppressive social structures as liberals do, Lenin outright names the bourgeois camp, and the figures and enterprises who embody them. The Rockefeller's oil company, the Morgan’s bank, Ford’s factories and more. These bigger businesses crushed or absorbed smaller ones, controlled supply chains, and merged with their competitors. Banking and government alliances cemented their political dominance using the means of economic tactics such as “the revolving door” phenomena where government officials and corporate board members interchange and overlap their positions. This mob like “business” of those who conquer by means of the monopolist ultimately resulted in ww1, where they fought one another to redivide an already conquered world for a larger piece of the pie.

Despite being a “Eurocentric” ideology of the white man, Osagyefo Dr.' Nkrumah found great use of the Marxist method to correctly assess the economic circumstances in his time and pick up where Lenin left off. It is the same Rockefellers, the same Rothschilds, and although they change their name, it is the same banks that embodied imperialism in Nkrumah’s day as well. He observed the movement of the ruling class, through their financial dictates. Recognizing that African countries achieved a superficial national independence, but were still beholden to imperialists through their financial ties, a phenomena that he famously categorized as Neocolonialism. To Nkrumah, neocolonialism is the condition of countries maintaining formal independence (a native government, native statesmen, native flag) but whose economy is controlled by the historically determined ruling class.

“The International Monetary Fund, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (known as the World Bank), the International Finance Corporation, and the International Development Association are examples, all, significantly, having U.S. capital as their major backing. These agencies have the habit of forcing would-be borrowers to submit to various offensive conditions, such as supplying information about their economies, submitting their policy and plans to review by the World Bank and accepting agency supervision of their use of loans.”
-Kwame Nkrumah

As exemplified by this quote he describes how Neocolonialism is a consequence of the imperialist powers tendency to absorb and monopolize, which by his time had already culminated primarily in the USA’s bourgeois state. By then the ruling class had instituted the world bank and the IMF as a means of taming inter-imperialist conflict by means of establishing the US on top. The US remained financially solvent, being largely untouched by the world wars, and provided funding for the “rebuilding” of Europe and Allied powers. Post-war reconstruction efforts like the DODGE and Marshal plan’s issued loans by the billions capturing countries in a net of debt. Europe was forced into playing second fiddle to the US imperialist, although they maintained the ability to extract capital from their colonies in Africa and South America. Japan and South Korea also received a huge influx of these finances for reasons that will become clear later in this article. What is important now is to understand this arrangement is an undeniable encroachment upon these nation's own sovereignty, regardless of their appearance as independent countries, a condition that echos into the territories that they are in possession of. Institutions, Financial, Political and even military formations like NATO, The Quad and AUKUS functionally occupy these countries, keeping them at the whim of Wall Street. No doubt this is a continuity of the Monopolist trend of economic absorption through the manipulation of finance or fictitious capital, but in a new distinct form for a new age.

A notable development, was replacing the gold standard with the dollar. With the complex interlacing of lines of capital and debt overseen by the world bank, it was easier just to organize the world economy around the maintenance of the US and its Dollar. This unprecedented largely abstract world reserve currency was backed by nothing but “the vibes” based US economy. Clearly physical occupation became a primitive unsophisticated means of domination. The US could facilitate their economic extraction through a simple means financial rearrangement. Albiet on faulty ground, the US stood as the worlds first super power, and the economic standing of the countries of the entire world hinge on with complacency with the US as the imperialist hegemon.

The work of these two great revolutionaries, Nkrumah and Lenin provide insight of a single phenomena and how it evolved to become two very different forms on the political landscape. The most substantial difference is that Nkrumah lived in the time where communism had presented a model of alternative development to the world.

Red Herring For the Red Scare

“Development in the new countries along non-capitalist lines must be frustrated in the interests of Western imperialism. A series of articles which appeared in The [London] Times in April 1964 outlines the pattern and made no secret of its reasons: ‘The two great objects of Britain’s foreign policy must be to prevent the non-communist world from being penetrated by Communism ... and secondly, to prevent her own access to trade and investment in any part of the world from being barred or limited.’ Naturally enough, as the articles conclude, ‘both these objects lead straight into the “neo-colonial” issue – the struggle for influence, commercial and political, over the non-communist countries outside Europe and North America’. Thus succinctly does the writer in The Times expose the true character of the ideological struggle between monopolies. Leading the ideological struggle, because she leads the inter-imperialist struggle, is the U.S.A.”
-Kwame Nkrumah

The tangible success of Communism, embodied by the USSR and then China, became the basis of bifurcation of the world. Having wrestled away its territories from the grasp of the oligarchs and into the hands of the people, the communist bloc and the resources it controlled became the new frontier that the imperialists set their sights on. The communist superpowers had both become nuclear powers, making direct confrontation out of the question as mutual destruction was assured. Monopoly financiers were, for the first time, forced into a defensive position against an opposing ideology. With brute force being an unwise recourse, what is now key to the dominion of the imperialist, is that targeted governments fail to adopt the ideological precepts of communism. Such mandates as putting resources under the “dictatorship of the proletariat” and adopting a developmental model or “advancing the productive forces” as described as the first and foremost task of a communist party in Marx’s “Communist Manifesto” were the principle defense against this domination. So long as a government accepts an ideological framework that allows foreign incursion into their economies, the imperialist secures a monopoly of their resources. In this overarching super-structure, along with the advancement of communications technologies, information control became the principal weapon against the unaligned and communist countries. In this battlefield of ideological struggle the common jar head is unequal to the challenge, new bodies of war were crafted for this combat, namely the Central Intelligence Agency.

"One function of the Agency is to create an international anticommunist ideology."
-CIA whistleblower Ralph McGhee

Hollywood movies would lead us to believe that the CIA daily task is sneaking into lavish parties, being equipped with deadly pens and engaging super villains in hand-to-hand combat. The reality is much more boring, yet infinitely more nefarious. We know for a fact through whistleblowers and declassified documents, that the primary task of the CIA is the organization and training of human assets to orient them towards the US’s Political aims. In the book “Who Paid the Piper” Francis Stonor Saunders uncovers how the CIA covertly funded and influenced intellectuals, artists, and cultural institutions to propagate anti-Communist ideologies, often without the knowledge of the individuals involved. Institutions installed at the whim of global financial capital are the means which facilitate the CIA’s penetration. The media, multilateral “aid”, universities and even labor unions all over the world functioned as tools for imperial aims.

We can go into the greater context of how they cultivate activists and extremists and how this leads into the commonly known the phenomena of color revolutions, which should be at least to some degree familiar to us today. Operations like Cyclone which trained the Mujahadeen against the Soviet Union, or the proliferation of Banderism in Ukraine, the contras in Nicaragua, and the list goes on. These examples are the key indicators of success for the agency. The violence and destruction these cutouts played came to its logical end: the overthrow of the targeted government. However this article is more so premised on the ideological training of the west, and the agencies interest would rather be to prevent revolution, but it is through the same institutions that they achieve this goal on the ideological front. The institution most effective in this context is Academia.

It should come as no surprise that universities would be utilized to the ends of counter revolution. In fact I’m more surprised at how uncritically leftist uphold academic thinkers. Academic institutions have never been impartial and objective arbitors of higher learning. Universities have always been an apparatus of the ruling class for producing a work force in fields most relevant to the maintenance of their class dominance. For example, the first universities in America were founded to teach religious education with an emphasis in theology, and colonial administration to train clergymen and ministers for their “civilizing mission”. In that time spreading Christianity justified the underlying economic aims of the colonizers; the displacement and enslavement of the indigenous people. In the later era, when liberal governments came to be the norm, in the midst of the industrial revolution, colleges were instead secularized and made more widely available outside a religious aristocracy, to train a workforce in the maintenance and workings of new sophisticated machinery and instruction in the new forms of liberal governance. As Marx and Engels professed in their work the German Ideology…

"The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force."

These programs were not funded for the sake of impartial scientific inquiry, but rather to fulfill the objective needs for a workforce to labor in the interest of the ruling class. As we continue to trace the bourgeois motion into the development to the times of Nkrumah and extending it into our own, we see modern academia push International collaboration and exchange with a newly found concern for cultural studies, coinciding with the age of information war against the Communist bloc. Scholarly Institutions formed partnerships with foreign universities with the aims of preparing students for the globalized economy and foster international cooperation in their ideological campaign. This is just one of the manifestations of a kind of occupation imposed by the international financial cartel. In his book, Saunders describes how the intelligence agencies cultivated Art, Journalism and an elite intellectual class that would help sustain the legitimacy of American policy against the communist bloc. Conservative ideologues need no help fomenting jingoistic positions against the enemies of the US, what the CIA needed is a new non communist left. Connected globally by funding from the Ford Foundation and The Rockefeller Foundations they bolstered the works in progressive fields like social justice movements, climate change, systemic racism, and gender equity. Ironically, the entities responsible for institutionalizing these social issues, fund their supposed opposition.

What specific ideology to be propagated is unimportant. Be it Free Market Liberalism, Anarchism, Cultural Critiques or what have you, what matters is that they are what Michael Parenti Calls “ABC” theorists: Anything But Class. The Seeds of these left anti-communist thinkers stem from the bodies of work of the opposition to Stalinist USSR, thus enmity to Stalin is a sure sign that one’s ideology is a product of the CIA cultivated “left”. People like Leon Trotsky launched formally Marxist criticisms of the USSR, deeming it to be a failed socialist state governed by a new ruling class. It is the opinion of modern Trotskyists that he represents the true model of what Socialism should be and that Stalin represents an authoritarian revision of Marx. But Trotsky’s legacy is actually being the progenitor of anti communist sentiment in the west. The notion that the communist party of the USSR constitutes a new oppressor class has the underlying logic that is the basis of the new left division from orthodox Marxism Leninism. The ruling class or the bourgeoisie, described by Marx then Lenin then Nkrumah, developed concretely into the financial monopoly we know today. So if the ruling party of the Soviet constitutes a new class, based on this Trotskyist redefinition, then class becomes something subjective, dictated by ones own personal whims and not a description of a real historic body. And if class oppression is predicated on one’s personal view, then you can describe Men as an oppressor class, heterosexual’s as an oppressor class and as the “Decolonial Theorist” assert, Whites as a whole are an oppressive “settler class”. **Disclaimer** (I know, this will be misconstrued to make it seem as though I believe patriarchy, Racism or homophobia are inconsequential. I want to clearly state, that I do believe they are real social issue’s that rob people of their dignity and that it merits effort to overcome them. I am simply making the case these social denominations are not the same thing as class and they are purposefully substituted for one another to undermine Marx’s scientific conception of revolutionary transformation from one society to another.) Dissatisfied socialists, appalled by Stalinist Russia came into great repute once they disavowed the centrality of class. Michel Foucalt is such a figure, trailblazing the advent of the postmodernist framework. Gloria Steinem, a nationally recognized leader of second-wave feminism and self admitted CIA asset, is indispensable to todays gendered studies.

“Friendly co-operation is offered in the educational, cultural and social domains, aimed at subverting the desirable patterns of indigenous progress to the imperialist objectives of the financial monopolists.”
-Kwame Nkrumah

The Congress for Cultural Freedom was officially disbanded in 1967 under mounting pressure, but Foundation money coming from oligarchs still continues to fund so-called "left" causes till this day, as does the operations of Intelligence agencies. Academia is a terrarium built by the CIA and their financiers, all they have to do is set the stage and plant the seeds and the ecosystem takes on a life of its own. A whole pedigree of academics emerge from this environment, building off the same revisionist framework and influencing each other's works.

Post Colonial = Neocolonial

The period between 1945-1970’s was a time of monumental change for the third world. Liberation movements of all stripes sprang up with a contesting vision of a new world free from colonial domination. On the ideological battlefield the monopolist answer to the raising tide of colonization goes hand in hand with their answer to communism. Here we take our final insights from Dr.Nkrumah as he has reached the mortal confines of his analysis. We pick up the torch, and use his teachings to continue the observation of the Citadel of Imperialism.

“The aim of neo-colonialists is economic domination, they do not confine their operations to the economic sphere. They use the old colonialist methods of religious, educational and cultural infiltration. For example, in the independent States, many expatriate teachers and ‘cultural ambassadors’ influence the minds of the young against their own country and people.”

Expatriats are commonly understood to be someone who lives outside their native country, in this context they function as “ambassadors” of colonized nations so long as they are in service to Neocolonialism. They depart from their domains and are steeped in the sesspool of academia. Nkrumah did not live to see the advance utility of “expatriates” especially in the age of social media. Ghandi, though, now out of favor, once perfectly encapsulated a figure who sought independence from their colonial plight who was lauded as a role model in the west, no doubt due to his ideological commitments. But there is a host of Prolific “representatives” of colonized nations that play the role of ideological ambassadors to a largely western audience on the academic stage provided for them by the elites. The field of Postcolonial studies is the marriage between the institutionalized critical theory body of work and the advocates of neocolonial arrangements in the third world just coming into formal independence.

The result is an academic milieu of 3rd world people whose work is fixated at the sight of individual subjectivity. With Jacques Derrida we are taught to be deconstructionist and must concern ourselves to think beyond binaries so as not to replicate western hierarchies in our language. The great cultural critic, Edward Said delineates the Occidantal and the Oriental and now one is prescribed on how to personally adhere to the non western cultures. Even with Franz Fanon, what’s important is not that he fought to free Algeria, his teachings are propagated for their use in freeing our psyche from colonial baggage.

Just as the countries who adhere to a formal independence without addressing the underlying class rule, so do individual adherents to post colonial theory only achieve the appearance of independence. They go through the motions of independence, we give the impression of independence but we never achieve independence. The capitalist system that materially environs us remains unscathed. But in the age of social media, impressions take on a primary role. I'm reminded of a lecture from a decolonial academic I was recommend by an “anti colonial theorist” whose primary thesis was on the liberatory value in practicing “non-human” sexual relationships. It is appears to me, that in the age of social media, in which novelty is rewarded with fame and even fortune, the so-called ambassadors of colonized people have become caricatures of them.

The purpose of a program is simply what it practically does. Having understood the objective of this social programing, we see how it objectively plays out in real life. If liberation is found, in the construct of behaviors then it stands to reason that one should fight one another according to behavior. We are led to believe that the more you deconstruct social norms, the more decolonized you’ve become, thus those who embody social norms must necessarily be colonizers. From the citadel of academia, a social body of intellegencia, is waged an invasion against the common sensibilities of the general population outside of the periphery of the towers of the monopolist. And the imperialists watch from their ivory towers.

Neocolonialism entrusts the administration of the capitalist extortion to a puppet who formally belongs to the oppressed nation, that looks like them, speaks like them, but serves to maintain the system of class dominance. By means of the obfuscation of class, Decolonial theorists embody this arrangement, orienting young radicals against their neighbors instead of the common class enemy of world. I can think of no greater gift to the hungry, displaced and dismembered people of the third world, than an American working class that has wrestled power from the Imperialist. An America that has ended the 100 year reign of The Rockefellers, The Rothschilds and The Morgans and seized their assets for communist construction, would usher in an unprecedented era where there would be an economic incentive peace. To deter from this goal, to adopt ideologies based on marginalization, or that insist a revolution simply cannot be done, is to doom Palestine, Sudan, Haiti and the planet as a whole to limitless colonial exploitation.

“[Neocolonialism] is to achieve colonialism in fact while preaching independence.”
-Kwame Nkrumah

The Unhappy Class Consciousness

The class position of those most susceptible to this political line is key to understanding the relationship to the grander structure of class dominance. Often coming from a well to do background, these are generally younger people coming into college age to older millennials. Having grown in the internet age, no doubt groomed by Tumblr.

This is typically the base of recruitment for the established left orgs. New adults who are coming into their independence. It is an age where you’re looking for new answers to supersede your parents and make them proud. A time in life where you find your calling, blessed with the free time to pursue activism, on this pilgrimage of self discovery and self realization. This is all perfectly natural and is a tale as old as time. But to be a suburbanites in any coastal city, is to live in the metropole. And we must be aware of the social imprint that comes from being in such proximity to the institutions of capital which constitute cities. These cities are, of course, the reciprocals of capital, the nerve centers that embody the financiers.

Colleges are the literal centers where the bourgeois pay academics to reproduce bourgeois thoughts. Work offices, sectors of intellectual labor where thinking or saying the wrong thing “is not aligned with company values”, gets you the pink slip. Consider the modern Restaurants, whose atmosphere is selectively procured to produce a social association, be it high end elegance, or punk rock rebelliousness. In these type of establishments frequented by this kind of middle class, the product is first and foremost not the food; the worker must produce the “vibe”, aesthetics that consumers can share on their social media and establish a collective identity.

These institutions instill and reinforce the pathology required to go up the economic scale typically into a Professional Managerial class (PMC) position, be it a self styled intellectual, an organizer, or an influencer. The PMC is a curator of thought, ideas and ultimately behaviors. In their social conditioning they are deputized by the ruling class. They are the teacher's pet in a grander social scale, tattle tales of any perceived misgiving, seeing to it that the culprits face the consequences. They are Watchdogs of ideology… reporting, reprimanding and reproaching…earning the scratches behind their ear.

This class position underpins a pathological phenomenon that is patently evident in this new Decolonial radicalism so popular among young city folk. Their ideological framework undergirds a psychosis, no doubt MKUltra’d into their minds, and creates a detachment from reality so pronounced, so pervasive…. it warrants its OWN ARTICLE. But before establishing the material origins of this ideology, I first want to lay the psychological foundations of why they latch onto it so strongly in the first place, despite being an affront to their very institutional, very well financed, very WESTERN material reality.

The dissonance sustained by these young PMC western academics, who genuinely believe themselves to be waging a revolutionary “Anti-colonial” struggle against settler colonialism, in the same vein as Kwame Nkrumah, Gironomo or Sitting Bull, can only be maintained by a disassociation into an arrested state of adolescence. An angsty teen trapped in the body of an increasingly aging millennial, who never stopped playing pretend. Jaded and bitter, going to any length to escape the authority of their parents. The archetypes of a patriarchal father and/or a prudish mother, their conservative values are crystalized in their minds and politicized as “settler colonialism”, the stand-in for their parental figures for them to rebel against.

Far from a concrete effort to tangibly resist the agenda of the ruling class, what passes for the left is a pandemic of psychosis. A psychic defense mechanism in the form a political ideology. To overcome the childhood trauma of alienation for those who have yet to grow from being an insufferable loser.

These individuals seek validation in leftist circles. In these “counter cultural socius”, Anti social behaviors are reframed as radical virtues. Virtues that finally award these estranged nerds a sense of self worth and the social capital needed to access to the social standing they always felt are owed to them. In their mind they are Harry Potter, who always knew better than those pesky adult authority figures telling them what to do. “See mom! I'm not a fuck up! I'm not responsible for my own shortcomings! You're just ascribed to colonial values!”

Their “cutting edge theory” serves as an epistemological projection on politics. In this hellish inversion of reality, oppressed people are blank slates to project their own short comings, in a political narrative. Replacing the misunderstood underdog nerd, with the historical oppression of the indigenous peoples of the world. A colonization of trauma posing as anti colonialism. This political framework that functions as a psychological mask allows these westerners to live out their repressed libidinal desires, freely and unaccountably as acts of liberation.

Hence their obsession with sex and violence, the markings of an impulsive and insecure youth. Evident in the vitriolic tantrum’s in surrounding discourse like our POST ON SEX WORK, evident in the subtweets and pestering in our DM’s. The political assessment of an impersonal reality is unimportant to them. What is important is that we listen to their individual voices, revealing that it is actually their personal comfort they want us to prioritize, as we seemingly undermined the basis of their own self worth and placement in the social order.

The result of the post modernist studies is that the site of revolution for this left is at the individual level. So, their praxis, a 1 to 1 outgrowth of the PMC aesthetic and ideological rebranding, consists of replacing their identity, in favor of a more radical veneer that can better absolve them of being a “settler”.

So, Kaitlyn, as though they are Cassius Clay becoming Mohammed Ali, “decolonizes” their name and is now Sock. The asymmetric Karen bob is unsuitable for a revolutionary of her stature, so she shaves her head in the style of the “mohawk tribe”. Gauged ears, nose piercings, tattoos, all appropriations from indigenous people, signal their refusal to live life according to any precept they deem to be colonial. Free from their parents, uh...I mean rigid colonial values, "anti colonial, anti fascist polycules” become the pinnacle of liberation. An echo chamber for validation, their lifestyle brand is anti capitalist praxis and their sense of self worth and self image is contingent on this narrative.

If my haters could read, they would be very upset by the views expressed in this article. Decolonization has been adopted by these Bohemian PMCs as a means to exonerate themselves of their personal hang ups and shortcomings, using a caricature of indigineity to craft a narrative, where they are the virturous and everyone else is a reactionary. The indisputable truth is that they are the privileged westerner they hate so much and belong to a reactionary class, perpetuating their propaganda machine that seeks to uphold imperialist dominance over the world.

The most unsettling problem with being in the history of ontology is that it cannot account for itself. Being represents the very thing which it rejects, and is grasped only insofar as it is misplaced and misidentified. In a similar way, the issue with Žižek is unusually similar to the issue of being itself: Žižek seems unable to account for his own implication. Whatever Žižek’s intervention in the history of philosophy is intended to imply, it is an intervention which is infinitely divorced from itself. It would be disingenuous to argue that Žižek contributed nothing to philosophy. He has not produced any great systems, nor has can his project be characterised as a type of ‘critique’, in the Kantian sense, whereby a critique furnishes the possibility for a new frame for the transcendental subject. He does not set any great new coordinates for philosophical inquiry, but the originality of Žižek’s work is instead the fact of rejecting either of these alternatives.

Zizek’s principal innovation occurs in the form of repetition: repetition is not mere insistence, a simple compulsion, for Žižek, it is rather the act through which a thing comes to define itself. The obvious objection to this perspective is that Žižek was not the originator of this method. Marx’s historical materialism had already argued that the the meaning of a thing is only evident once it had repeated itself. In order to constitute the determinate implication of a single instance, it needs to have occurred twice. Similarly, Laplanche had argued in the 80s that the fundamental insight of psychoanalysis is that a subjectively defining event occurs only by repeating itself. Whatever happens must, by the contingency of its internal logic, occur twice in order to retroactively justify the spectral appearance of its first instance.

So what differs in Žižek’s understanding of repetition? For Žižek, repetition is not merely the case of vindicating (in a second occurrence) whatever was latent in the first occurrence, but rather of constructing what was never present in the first place, to construct the thing that was definitively ‘missing from itself’ in its first occurrence. To repeat, for Žižek, is not merely to confirm or constitute something, but rather to alienate it from itself. By being repeated, something reveals to itself the very idea that it initially and necessarily excluded. Repeating Hegel (and repeating him as a defence of Marx’s legacy), as Žižek claims is his life’s project, is therefore to reveal in Hegel the very thing which was missing from Hegel. To repeat an idea is, for Žižek, to disjunctively reconcile it to itself by showing that it was never in fact the idea it believed itself to be.

Žižek thereby intends to show that the identity of a thing to itself occurs only insofar as it differs from itself, yet that the moment separating identity and difference is a moment of repetition. Here, however, we stumble upon the first problem with Žižek’s thought: this form of repetition existed long before Žižek’s appearance. What Žižek revives is not the logic of repetition itself, but a formally Derridean task of framing any identity as a specific moment of difference. If it is true that the repetition of something simply installs within it the very thing that it initially rejected from itself, then the Žižekian insistence is to suggest that something totally foreign to an idea can be ascribed to this idea only insofar as we repeat it. Unlike his post-structural predecessors, Žižek differs only insofar as he picks a privileged figure to subject to this repetition: Hegel. To repeat Hegel is to construct the absent originality that was latent in the old Hegel - to find in the identity of the past Hegel the moment whereby he differs from himself, the moment where Hegel’s identity can no longer account for itself, and thus re-emerges as a totally new figure in the history of philosophy.

Žižek’s specific historiography of philosophy had undoubtable benefits: his reading of Hegel, alongside for example the Ljubljana School, Alain Badiou, and Todd McGowan, discerned a rigorously argued alternative to the classical view of Hegel’s dialectics as an endless overcoming of contradiction, as a simple process of thesis-antithesis-synthesis. And yet something about his method falls flat. The perspective on Hegel gained by Žižek is obscured by his incomplete formulation of the consequences of this method, and by his faulty approach to the related themes - including Events, Lacan, or politics - of his reading of Hegel.

The Event that Rejects Itself

As mentioned, it was not the creation of a system, but rather a selective, and often highly effective, deployment of various (often opposed) strands of philosophy which inevitably defined Žižek’s position. Except for Hegel and Lacan, however, one of Žižek’s great accomplices was (and continues to be, despite their supposed disagreements) Alain Badiou. And yet it is on the topic of his reliance and simultaneous divergence from Badiou that Žižek’s incomplete position slowly begins to reveal itself.

Both Badiou and Žižek have positioned themselves as thinkers of ‘Events’, of radically destabilising occurrences which introduce an irreconcilable disparity into the world as it is. Badiou’s Event, however, is furnished by a mathematical formulation of ontological multiplicities that ‘reach beyond themselves’ (that are organised by an uncountable axiom of infinity), and thus refuse to be contained by any preconceived logical structure. On the other hand, Žižek’s Event falls victim to the self-referential openness of the Lacanian Symbolic in which an Event would emerge, and thus cannot frame the type of ontological contradiction from which a true Event is possible. Žižek’s Event, as I argue, is constitutively closed off to itself.

For Badiou, the Event is a trace of an ontological multiple (an inconsistent infinity) which is always in excess of the situation in which it emerges. In the case of love, for example, the love-Event cannot be reduced to the everyday relations which preceded it: whatever the disorienting experience of love is, the only subjective certainty is that it is constitutively unlike any personal priorities (career, self-preservation, hobbies etc.) that we were familiar before falling in love. Whilst similar to Žižek’s understanding of love, Badiou makes a fundamental distinction: Love is not an empty gap, a purely negative discontinuity. It is rather grounded in an ontological multiplicity, a reality more real than the logical, everyday structures against which it is opposed.

Žižek does not base his theory of the subject or his ontology in formally infinite mathematical sets. Instead, he uses a strictly Lacanian frame: the subject is the supplement of its own impossibility. The subject is, in other words, a spectral implication within an impersonal system of language, and thus is only incompletely related to itself as the product of an internally dysfunctional linguistic system. Love would therefore signify nothing more than the ‘openness’ of the Symbolic, the possibility of an existential discrepancy within the world as it is, and in turn the subject’s irreconcilable non-identity to itself. Žižek’s ontology is nothing other than its own absence, the being of Love is merely the obfuscation of being produced by language.

Unlike Badiou, Žižek’s view of an Event can never truly be called an Event (despite Žižek having written an entire book on the subject), since it lacks the inherently formal excesses, the destabilising multiplicity, of an ontological ground which constitutes the truly oppositional, and thus disorienting, quality of an Event. Badiou’s fundamental insistence is that, by its mathematico-ontological ground, the Event retroactively justifies itself from the new logical series that it creates. The Event inscribes its position as logically necessary by appeal to an ontological tension which logic (i.e. language, the Symbolic) by itself does not initially account for. It is precisely this form of a rigorous ontology of self-justification that Žižek’s Event lacks, since whatever Event he describes is the supplement to an auto-conditioned irregularity not between the Symbolic and ontology, but between the Symbolic and itself. This is, more precisely, why Žižek’s Event cannot truly be labelled an Event.

There is, of course, no inherent need to side with Badiou over Žižek, nor is there a need to defend Badiou’s ‘mathematical ontology’, in which a definitive ontological ground is formulated according to the axioms of infinite sets. There may, indeed, be no such self-articulating ontological ground. Schelling, Heidegger, Lacan, and Derrida all insist that, in one way or another, ontology is coloured by a disconcerting impossibility. ‘The history of ontology (or the history of being) is at the same time the exclusion and elision of being.’ There is no being as such which can be spoken of, even if it is only spoken of negatively. There is no ontological formation that expresses itself in clear opposition to everyday life. There is instead a contradiction in the very coordinates of our methods of understanding, expression, or articulation - a contradiction (or even a gap) which is at the same time covered up by these very methods of understanding. Behind these everyday modes of knowledge, we see only their entanglement with our very capacity to question them. Being would in this case not be neatly opposed to the everyday, but an enigma that is always-even misplaced by the understanding we approach it with. Whatever being there may be, it seems to constitutively reject itself.

The problem, however, is that Žižek is not faithful to the implications of this auto-referential, logical-linguistic discrepancy of a Symbolic pseudo-Event. It may be true that the subject is nothing more than the remedy to its own non-existence, but the questions which Žižek entertains (the revolutionary possibility of love, art, politics, and science; the experience of Events; a defence of Hegel’s ontology) are the same questions that are most at home with Badiou, and which require a manipulable difference between an ontological ground and its distorted, subjective expression. This is not to say that Žižek’s philosophy is confused, nor that it is ‘experimental’, but rather that it misrecognises its own intention. In one and the same move, Žižek both defends and rejects ontology, he speaks of Events where there are only continuities, and even more enigmatically defends the Hegelian method only by abandoning the (Hegelian) ontological ground (reworked but nevertheless retained by Badiou in the form of the Concept) upon which a subjective experience would be possible.

The Political Ontology of Objects

With this, we return (or repeat) the issue of Žižek’s historiography of philosophy. Žižek seems to fall prey to the same disparity which he locates in the philosophies he repeats: he is mostly unaware of his own implication. Žižek’s repetition does not merely alienate from a philosopher their relation to themselves, but rather serves as a method of self-justification, and as a perpetuation of the very problems of philosophy that Žižek attempts to bypass.

That any philosophy of repetition immediately short-circuits itself, reveals itself as impossible, can be seen where Deleuze and Žižek (who places himself in the opposite camp to Deleuze) are opposed. Deleuze’s philosophy of repetition was, if nothing else, an attack on Hegel, on dialectical categories, and on psychoanalytic structuralism. Difference-in-itself - the metaphysical insistence that difference precedes identity - is for Deleuze the term which marks his absolute rupture with the forms of identity-philosophy which Žižek so strongly defends. Yet by an uncanny reversal, Žižek’s return to the philosophy that Deleuze rejected inevitably reproduces the very discrepancy that Deleuze himself articulated.

Less Than Nothing is Žižek’s greatest statement on the necessity of these classical figures of a so-called philosophy of identity: by ‘repeating Marx through Hegel, and Hegel, through Lacan’, a vision of an anti-teleological Hegel who avows the primacy of contradiction and the self-discrepancy between being and itself emerges. The ultimate statement is for Žižek that epistemology is merely a special case of ontology, that knowing is an effect of being, or more specifically that “epistemological insufficiency is ontological incompleteness”. In other words, our inability to know a thing down to its purest detail, the insufficiency of our attempts at getting a complete picture of a thing, is not simply due to a problem in our methods of observation, but rather reflects the lack of sufficient detail in the being of the thing itself. Our lack of complete knowledge reflects the gap, the imperfection, in ontological structures themselves, the problematic or irregular status of the object’s internal being. Being is incomplete, and this ontological discrepancy will only ever produce our imperfect modes of knowing it.

But this formula, the great conclusion of having repeated Hegel in modern times, is suspiciously similar to Deleuze’s description of ‘problematic being’. For Deleuze, the ‘difference-in-itself’, i.e. the a priori formal difference with which ontology begins, has an inevitably subjective, even scientific, implication. As he writes in Difference and Repetition, the moment of our subjective questioning is distributed between the subject and the object: the “being of the object is that of a question”, it is ontologically incomplete. This ‘problematic being’ of the object itself is reflected in our miscomprehension of it. Thus when we fail to ‘truly’ grasp an object, or to completely resolve a question, it is because this discrepancy, this questioning, is internal to the object itself. The object ad its being are internally open-ended, they exist in the form of an unanswerable question.

Žižek’s problem is therefore that he ironically reproduces the philosophy of his greatest philosophical enemy. This is not simply the case with Deleuze’s relatively early work, but with his later embrace of an experimental, perpetually re-structuring description of rhizomes in Capitalism and Schizophrenia, where the emphasis on a de-centred becoming of infinite modes of desiring-production and variations on partial, deterritorialised expressions find a certain mirror in Žižek’s insistence on the interminably paradoxical and dynamically self-reversing logic of modern ideology.

It would of course be absurd to suggest that Deleuze and Žižek have identical (or even bridgeable) philosophical positions. The truth is more unpleasant than this: they are not identical, because they cannot even be opposed to each other. There is an inherent asymmetry between the two, between Deleuze’s perspective and Žižek’s anti-perspective. Žižek’s position is radically malleable, it does not constitute one of two (or multiple) poles of opposition, but rather an internal indeterminacy which lends him to any possible reading, to any possible pole.

It is true, as most Hegelian scholars are coming to realise, that Hegel indeed avows a certain internal contradiction to being itself, its self-negating formula. It is therefore likely that it is Deleuze who is most clearly mistaken on the topic of Hegel (which is fathomable considering that he barely cites Hegel, and that his knowledge of Hegelian philosophy would be plagued by the excessive oversimplification of Kojève’s version of Hegel). Yet Žižek does not acknowledge this discrepancy, but rather remains duped as the the meaning of his own reading of Hegel, or to the fact that Žižek’s Hegel could be nearly anyone else’s philosophy (suggested by his endless tendency to performatively agree with his opponents, even the most reactionary ones, in debates). This is undoubtedly one of the greatest problems with Žižek: he seems to misunderstand the very essence of the repetition he deploys, or more precisely to deprive this deployment of any essential internal logic.

The answer to resolving the impasse of contemporary philosophy is, for Žižek, to repeat it, to re-found Hegel and thereby furnish a new version of Hegel which serves modern times. But this method seems to only re-frame the impasse of philosophy, to reproduce it only in a new light. My answer, regarding what is to be done with philosophy, tends towards disappointment, towards an I don’t know. But this is an I don’t know, a radical disappointment with current possibilities, which should be tactically deployed. Disappointment, as I have argued elsewhere, has an ontological force - it should be embraced as a critical function, instead of merely attempting to construct new histories of philosophy with the optimistic hope that a new direction will be found. This is the disappointment of an I don’t know that Žižek never dared to utter. It is the unknowing which recognises that even repetition itself has already been repeated.

Ontological Politics of the End Times

Žižek perhaps necessarily insists that, more than ever, now is the time not to act, but to think (‘Don’t do, just think!’): when the End of Times is so rapidly approaching, acting quickly can sometimes only enhance the disaster. And yet Žižek does not recognise the irony of his discourse on the End: that this End is itself capitalised, it is permeated with an ideological weight, and furnished as an internal reference point to the global capitalist system which is propelling us towards this very End, and which can continue not despite this End, but as a consequence of this very End.

The function of the Doomsday clock reveals this very paradox: each year, ‘experts’ from The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' Science and Security Board gather to decide on how far from ‘midnight’, or the End, we currently are. And yet any frame or understanding of this End of our capitalist world is nevertheless dictated by those international experts which global capitalist structures erected to serve its interests. Nobody seems to realise the irony of an international organisation of experts, gathering on a structured yearly schedule to discuss the speculative possibility of the absolute end of any form of civil organisation or structure. On several occasions, the doomsday clock has been moved back from midnight, not because we have managed to ‘avert crisis’, but because it a temporarily bad investment to manufacture worry about an ‘End’ which can be made profitable. Whatever this end is that we so easily speak of, it is an End not external to, but internally thinkable by, today’s global market, and despite his efforts, Žižek seems to inevitably speak of this virtual-Symbolic End that only obscures the real meaning of an Ending.

The true End, the End of all previous monetised, ideological Ends, is the one which would break with any notion of experts, any notion of a Doomsday clock. Capitalism fetishises its own limits: it conceals its problem precisely by revealing it, by obscuring the Real with the Real itself. Žižek is rightly sceptical of any thinking which posits possible alternatives, for fear of ‘alternatives’ merely being a thin veil of ideological distortion, and yet he cannot consider the consequences of an ‘End of Times’, of an end of any alternatives, that would nevertheless act as its own ideological distortion. Once again, Žižek is incapable of confronting the ideological distortion that inadvertently colours his own critique of ideology. 

This article is an extended version of the one that appeared in The China Academy last month. The month of hindsight has, in my view, confirmed the concerns that I had expressed about the Trump administration’s apparent “dismantling” of the institutions of U.S. imperialism. Far from seeing any genuine attack on the institutions of empire, what we are seeing is a restructuring – empire taking on a new form to sustain a dwindling hegemony. For this ‘new form,’ the institutions of woke, humanitarian imperialism of the past (USAID, NED, etc.) are of little use.

History teaches us that empires can never explicitly affirm the real reasons for their imperial pursuits. It is impossible to get a population of dispossessed people to support sending their children to war when you are open about which class of people is ultimately benefiting from it. It was Plato in his Republic who had already noted that states whose economic foundation is grounded on the “endless acquisition of money,” find it that they must “seize some of [their] neighbor’s land.” This economic drive inevitably leads to war. And “when the rich wage war,” as Jean Paul Sartre said, “it is the poor who die.” This is true of any of the societies that have been fractured by class. There is always a class of people that does the profiting, and a class that does the dying, in times of war.

The ruling elites of the warring states have never been able to explicitly announce the economic reasons behind war. The legitimation for war has always had to include a deception of the general public. Aeschylus was correct to say that “in war, truth is the first casualty.” Upholding war always required a narrative that can be spun to manufacture the consent of the governed.

The ancient Greeks and the British empire justified war efforts and colonization through noble, almost humanitarian-like, appeals to civilizing the barbarians. Those that were of their ilk were always the ones that were fully human. And those that weren’t carried the stench of barbaric otherness on them. From Hellenization to the empire where the sun never set, colonial war was itself presented as an act of charity and goodwill. You should be thankful that we have expended our valuable resources “civilizing” you.

Paradoxically, expansionist wars have also often taken the form of a defensive enterprise. The Roman Empire frequently resorted to the need to protect oneself from barbarian external threats to justify expansion. Offense is often presented as the best form of defense. It is by conquering that we can keep our people at home safe. During the Punic Wars, for example, colonial expansion was legitimized as an attempt to counter the Carthaginian threat.

The ideological legitimation of the not-so-Cold War in the 20th century took the same form. It was imperial looting and conquests justified by presenting these as defensive measures of preventing the spread of communism. Offense was once again masqueraded as defense.

In the modern era we have seen a consistent combination of both by the U.S. empire, although at any given moment it could be either the “offense-as-defense” or the “humanitarian conquest” which could take dominance over the other.

For instance, during the Iraq War “offense-as-defense” was the model that proved most effective. Yes, we still had a contingent of the “humanitarian conquest” justification model that appealed to the need to “help oppressed women” or bring “democracy” to the region. But this played ultimately a secondary role to the fear of the brown, Muslim “other” that the ruling class was able to fabricate in the population, especially after 9/11. This fear was pivotal for the offense-as-defense model of legitimation. As Bush said in the West Point speech June 1st, 2002, “If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long. We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge.”

The dominance of the offense-as-defense model left a bad taste on the mouths of Americans, who came in time to unanimously oppose the Iraq war, realizing it was a war for oil and the control of oil markets, not to defend us from the fabricated dangers of Weapons of Mass Destruction.

This allowed the ruling class to pivot toward the humanitarian model as the key form the legitimation for war will take. Assad had to be toppled because he was “gassing his people.” Cuba had to be overthrown because it was repressing the “black artists” of the Miami-funded San Isidro movement. Venezuela had to be overthrown because Maduro was a brutal dictator that was oppressing the LGBTQ, the same with Iran, Russia, etc. China had to be toppled because they were carrying forth a “genocide” of the Muslim Uyghur minority. Real evidence of any of the accusations, like the “evidence” of the Weapons of Mass Destruction, were of course never provided.

More and more, the specific form that the humanitarian conquest model took was wokeism. The political theorist Marius Trotter put it nicely some years ago when he said that:

“Facing a rising China and a resurgent Russia, the American ruling class needs a moralizing crusade to motivate its counter offensive against its enemies, both at home and abroad. Under the banners of Black Lives Matter, multi-colored Pride flags and trumpets announcing the correct gender pronouns, the guns of the American Empire will spread the creed of Woke Imperialism.”

But as wokeism itself was extended to such absurd extremes that no sane person could accept, it became quickly hallow as a model for war legitimation. No one cares about going to war for trans rights fought for by the USAID in Eastern countries. No one really buys into the baseless narrative that the U.S., which spent the first 20 years of the century bombing Muslims, killing millions of them, now cares about them in Xinjiang. And where was the proof that anything was going on in the first place? As the Cuban philosopher Ruben Zardoya has argued, when the machinations of domination become transparent, domination itself is weakened. This is what has occurred to the woke form of imperial legitimation, and to avoid the further weakening of imperial power and domination, the ruling class has had to switch course.

When the consciousness of the people outmodes the woke model of imperialism, the ruling class needs a clean slate. Trump and his cohorts of fake dissident rightists, carrying out an anti-woke crusade, was the perfect alternative. At a time when the American people want to be dissident and anti-establishment, give them the same status quo but in the form of dissidence. Give them people who fight against the form imperialist ideology has taken in the last few years, but not against imperialism itself – not against the system that produced it in the first place.

As Jackson Hinkle and Haz Al-Din have previously noted, we should not be surprised if the intensification of the absurdities of wokeism were intentionally designed to prop up a “dissident right” that is “dissident” only with regard to the most superficial and depthless components of the ruling order.

I’ve argued previously that this is an age, in the U.S., marked by the necessity of hegemony presenting itself as counterhegemonic. The rulers must, at all times, manipulate the public into seeing them as subaltern, as powerless and waging a crusade against the elites themselves. From conservatives, to liberals, to the various Trotskyite “leftists” and “democratic socialists,” all American politics is coming more and more to take the form of dissidence. It is an aristocracy of capital that survives through the conceit of continuously struggling against itself for power. Like in Kafka’s The Trial, where the court bureaucracy is reproduced precisely by presenting itself as powerless subjects subjugated by the system, the dialectic of American political authority today also takes the form of this feigning of impotence to sustain their systemic omnipotence. Power sustains itself through the pretense of powerlessness.

And now we are here. In a Trump presidency that is dismantling USAID – one of the wretched henchmen of “humanitarian imperialism” – and that is moving towards possibly doing the same with the National Endowment for Democracy and many other institutions tied to the modern form of legitimizing, and carrying out, imperialist assaults.

I would like to think this is a revolution against a parasitical Deep state sucking the host republic dry, as Scott Ritter has suggested. I really hope it could be that, and that the debt jubilee that Ritter claims is possible with this “revolution” pans out.[1]

But my Marxist common sense, my understanding of the ever-evolving forms of ideologically justifying U.S. imperialism tells me that, perhaps, something else is going on: A switch back to a previous form of legitimation.[2]

Perhaps a turnback to the dominance of the offense-as-defense model that we saw in the Cold War and in the first decades of this century. This one certainly seems to be dominant in the discourse around China, which is presented as an “existential threat” to the U.S.’s security and geopolitical standing. Trump’s National Security Advisor, Michael Waltz, has said that “we are in a Cold War with the Chinese Communist Party” and that China is an "existential threat to the US with the most rapid military build-up since the 1930s." This discourse on China as an existential threat, which is very common in the foreign policy establishment, is foundational for the offense-as-defense model of legitimizing imperialism.

Some analysts have suggested a return to a Monroe Doctrine style imperialism, where one is more open about the aims of conquest for conquest’s sake, veiled thinly with an appeal to a divine mandate. This is another form we have seen in the history of empires. It is clear that this model of discourse is employed in the rhetoric used for U.S. foreign policy in the Western Hemisphere.

The truth, however, is that we don’t know. We’ll have to wait and see what actually happens.

This indeterminacy isn’t simply in our knowledge of the existing state of affairs. I do not think that the problem, at the moment, is one that is located in our knowledge of the world, of how U.S. imperialism will develop in the coming years. The indeterminacy is in the world itself. The U.S. regime is itself scrapping to figure out its next moves, to see what it can do to sustain at least a semblance of hegemony in a world where the Weltgeist is moving eastward.

We can say today about this indeterminacy the same thing that Hegel responded to Kant’s dilemma regarding the “gap” between our phenomenal knowledge and the thing-in-itself (Ding an sich): there is no thing-in-itself that is not already a thing-for-us. The gap is not between my knowledge and the world; the gap is in the world itself. It is the “ontological incompleteness of reality,” as Slavoj Žižek calls it, that we are dealing with here, not simply an incompleteness in our knowledge. To suspect otherwise — that is, to cling to the idea that world events are already determined, that the problem is epistemological in nature — is to follow the same abstraction that Hegel criticized in Kant. Just as the “thing-in-itself,” which is not always-already (as Heidegger would say) a thing-for-us, is for Hegel nothing more than a Kantian “empty abstraction,” maintaining that today’s imperialists have a clearly determined and mapped-out agenda, and that what prevents us from knowing it definitively is a limitation in our understanding, is to move at the same level of abstraction… to postulate, through a mental operation divorced from the world itself, a concealed determination in the world to which we have no access.

This grants these institutions a mystical power that is not necessarily there, one that more closely resembles Hollywood movies about the CIA than the actual state of affairs. They too, in the face of the present crisis, are trying to orient themselves in the world, attempting to devise new ways through which their plundering of the planet can continue without being challenged.

What I think we could be the surest of is the following: this isn’t an anti-imperialist revolution occurring within the belly of the beast via the hand of the billionaires themselves. When some of the leading billionaires, NGO’s, think tanks, and financial investment firms are perfectly fine, or even supportive, of the Trump administration, that does not inspire confidence in the thesis that he is carrying out a great assault against the system. After all, if anyone personifies the system best, it is those profiteers who have continued making money hand-over-fist irrespective of who’s been in the White House. They compose the unelected body of rulers that stays the same with every change in administration. Together with the intelligence agency who serve their interests, they make up the famous “Deep State.” When BlackRock CEO Larry Fink tells us, as he did during the presidential campaigns, that he is “tired of hearing that this is the biggest election in your lifetime,” and that “the reality is over time, it doesn't matter,” perhaps we should listen.

Instead of an assault on the imperialist system and the Deep State, it is much more likely that this is a pivot toward a new form of imperialist governance and legitimation. Just like American capitalism needed to take on a new form after the great depression to survive, in this great crisis of Empire, the U.S. needs to do the same. Trump is here, then, a figure homologous to Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR). FDR broke with the orthodoxies of free market ideologues to save capitalism. He broke with the form the system had up to then taken in order to keep it alive. Perhaps Trump, similarly, is a figure that aspires to help save American imperialism through the assault on the orthodoxy and institutions that have brought it to the brink of collapse.

It is what bright statesmanship, aimed at sustaining U.S. hegemony in the long run, would do to try to save the empire from this decline. After all, as Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa wrote in his novel, The Leopard, things need to change so that they can stay the same.

While I hope I am wrong, I think this is the type of change we are seeing. A change to a new form of legitimation, necessary to sustain the essential basis of U.S. imperialism.

Author
Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American philosophy professor. He is the director of the Midwestern Marx Institute and the Secretary of Education of the American Communist Party. He has authored many books, including The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Why We Need American Marxism (2024), Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), and the forthcoming On Losurdo's Western Marxism (2025) and Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (2025). He has written for dozens of scholarly and popular publications around the world and runs various live broadcast shows for the Midwestern Marx Institute YouTube. You can subscribe to his Philosophy in Crisis Substack HERE. Carlos’ just made a public Instagram, which you can follow HERE.

Introduction

For decades, Western media and politicians have told us that China is an authoritarian dictatorship, a menace to the free world. But what if everything we’ve been told about China is a lie? What if China’s development is not the story of authoritarianism, but rather a case study in socialism’s ability to lift hundreds of millions out of poverty, defy imperialist domination, and create an alternative path to Western neoliberal decay?

China’s trajectory is one of the most misunderstood—and deliberately misrepresented—stories of our time. The U.S. ruling class fears China, not because it is authoritarian, but because it represents a model of socialist development that challenges Western capitalism. This essay will break down China’s revolutionary history, its socialist construction, and the lessons we can apply to our own struggle for socialism in the United States.

From Humiliation to Revolution: China’s Anti-Colonial Struggle

Before 1949, China was a semi-feudal, agrarian society devastated by foreign imperialism. The British Opium Wars (1839-1860s) forced China into submission, flooding its people with narcotics and extracting wealth through exploitative trade policies. The country was carved up by Western powers and Japan, forced into humiliating treaties that stripped away its sovereignty. Meanwhile, local Chinese warlords ruled over a fractured nation, keeping peasants in extreme poverty.

Revolution was inevitable. The Communist Party of China (CPC), founded in 1921, organized the working class and peasantry, leading a decades-long struggle against both feudalism and foreign domination. In 1949, under Mao Zedong’s leadership, the People’s Republic of China was proclaimed, ending over a century of humiliation and beginning the socialist transformation of the country.

Mao Zedong’s Socialist Construction

Mao’s government immediately took radical steps to build socialism. Landlords and capitalists were expropriated, industry was nationalized, and collectivization of agriculture ensured that the peasantry—who made up the majority of the population—could finally control their own destinies. Massive infrastructure projects propelled China from a feudal backwater into an emerging industrial power.

However, socialist construction was not without challenges. The Great Leap Forward, a push for rapid industrialization, faced serious obstacles, including food shortages and economic mismanagement. The Cultural Revolution, meant to prevent capitalist restoration, unleashed intense political struggle and instability. Despite these setbacks, Mao’s leadership laid the foundation for China’s rise, proving that a poor, colonized nation could defy imperialism and take its fate into its own hands.

Deng Xiaoping’s Market Reforms: Socialism Adapts

After Mao’s death, China faced a choice: stagnate in economic isolation like the Soviet Union, or find a way to modernize while maintaining socialism. Deng Xiaoping introduced Reform and Opening-Up, allowing controlled market mechanisms while keeping state control over key industries. This was not a surrender to capitalism, but rather a tactical adaptation of socialism to China’s specific historical characteristics, rather than surrendering to the neoliberal model of the West.

Unlike in the West, where the market is a tool for private capitalists to extract profit at the expense of the working class, China’s market economy remains firmly under the control of the Communist Party. The CPC subordinates market forces to socialist planning, ensuring that economic growth benefits the majority rather than a handful of oligarchs. Private enterprise exists, but it is constrained by strict state oversight and must serve the broader socialist development goals of the nation. In China, the market is a tool to meet human needs; in the U.S., it is a mechanism for private tyranny.

China’s Greatest Achievement: The Elimination of Extreme Poverty

Marxism teaches that poverty eradication and material prosperity are core socialist goals. Under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, China has eliminated extreme poverty, lifting 800 million people out of destitution—the greatest anti-poverty campaign in history.

Compare this to the U.S., where homelessness, medical bankruptcies, and wage stagnation worsen every year under capitalism. While China invests in infrastructure, social welfare, and economic planning, the U.S. pours its wealth into endless wars, corporate bailouts, and tax cuts for billionaires. The contrast could not be clearer: socialism delivers material results while capitalism falters.

Xi Jinping: Leading China to Common Prosperity

President Xi Jinping represents a new era of socialist leadership. Under his governance, China has:

• Reined in excessive wealth accumulation, cracking down on billionaires.
• Expanded social welfare, pushing for Common Prosperity—a policy that ensures economic fairness.
• Strengthened anti-corruption efforts, purging over 1.5 million corrupt officials to maintain party discipline.
• Challenged Western imperialism with the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), building infrastructure worldwide without resorting to colonial exploitation.

Xi’s leadership demonstrates that China is not simply "riding the wave" of past success—it continues to refine and adapt socialism for the 21st century.

Why the U.S. Fears China: The New Cold War

The U.S. ruling class sees China’s rise as an existential threat—not to democracy, but to U.S. hegemony. China challenges the global dominance of Western finance capital, proving that an alternative to neoliberalism is possible.

To manufacture consent for conflict, U.S. media bombards the public with propaganda, demonizing China over Hong Kong, Xinjiang, and Taiwan. In reality:

• Hong Kong’s protests were fueled by Western-backed separatists.
• Xinjiang’s “genocide” claims are baseless fabrications meant to justify economic warfare.
• The U.S. arms Taiwan separatists to provoke war, just as it does in Ukraine.

This Cold War is different from the last. China is not economically isolated like the USSR was — it is a global trade powerhouse with cutting-edge technology. Sanctions and economic blackmail will not break China, and the U.S. empire is panicking.

Lessons for U.S. Socialists: Building Socialism with American Characteristics

China’s experience offers concrete lessons for socialist organizing in the United States:

1. Economic Planning Works – Infrastructure, jobs, and technology must be publicly owned and oriented towards shared human needs, rather than private corporate profit.
2. A Socialist Movement Must Address Material Needs – The U.S. working class will not be won over by abstract ideology alone. They need concrete solutions—healthcare, housing, jobs, wages.
3. Reject Bourgeois Electoralism – The Democratic Party will never bring socialism. Real change comes from mass movements and working-class power.
4. Adapt Socialism to American Conditions – China’s model cannot simply be copied, but state planning, economic prosperity, and anti-imperialism are universal socialist principles.

Conclusion: The Struggle Ahead

China’s rise proves that socialism is not a relic of the past—it is the future. From Mao’s revolutionary leadership to Xi Jinping’s modernization efforts, the People’s Republic of China has shown that a working-class state can break free from imperialism and thrive.

​The challenge for us is to take these lessons and apply them to our struggle in America. The U.S. empire is crumbling under its own contradictions—our task is to organize a socialist movement that prioritizes economic prosperity, working-class leadership, and anti-imperialism.

The world is shifting. The future belongs to socialism. It’s time to fight for it.

Alfred North Whitehead said that “dogmatism is the anti-Christ of learning.”[1] In a world that is ever-changing, constantly developing, to hold onto any ideas as purely fixed is a grave mistake. I have called this mistake, in the past, a purity fetish.[2] Dogmatism is a clear iteration of it.

History teaches us that dogmatism not only stifles your ability to understand the world, but often turns into its opposite. Throughout history it has been the most fervent dogmatists, the most excessive proponents of a stale and fixed worldview, who often become the most heretical.
​
We need only to recall the figure of Tatian the Syrian, the second century Christian theologian. He was a student of the great martyr, Flavius Justinus, also known as St. Justin (A. D. 100 – 164). St. Justin was a cultured convert who traversed through various philosophical schools of thought, from Stoicism, Pythagoreanism, and finally, Platonism, before arriving at Christianity.

He was the first, that I know of, to draw out the homologies between Socrates and Jesus. As Frederick Copleston writes, for St. Justin, just as “Socrates, in the power of logos, or as its instrument, tried to lead men away from falsehood into truth, evil men put him to death as an impious atheist; so Christians, who follow and obey the incarnate Logos itself and who denounce the false gods, are termed atheists.”[3] For St. Justin, “the work of Socrates was a service of truth… a preparation for the complete work of Christ.”[4] His condemnation, therefore, was a “rehearsal or anticipation of the condemnation of Christ and his followers.”[5]

There was, in St. Justin, a great gratitude to the pagan philosophers, whom he saw as divining the truth “in the power of logos,” whereas “Christ, however, is the Logos itself, incarnate.”[6] The philosophers, then, prepared humanity for the truth which was to be revealed, or embodied, in Christ. Greek philosophy was not a desecration of the truth of the Christians. It’s inability to fully live up to the Christian worldview is not cause for condemnation. There is no purity fetish in St. Justin’s understanding of the relation of philosophy to Christianity. Instead, there is a deep appreciation for the “rational kernels,” from the standpoint of his Christian worldview, which the philosophers anticipated.

​His student, Tatian the Syrian, is a renegade to this more advanced, procedural understanding of development. Instead of seeing how Christianity is in a process of carrying forward fundamental insights, most of which have been ingenuously anticipated by the pagan philosophers, Tatian looks back at the philosophical precursors as perverters and falsifiers of the truth of Christianity. For him, “Greek philosophers had taken from the Scriptures whatever truth they possessed and whatever they added thereto was nothing but falsity and perversion.”[7] There is then, for Tatian, “little use for Greek learning and Greek thought.”[8] Insofar as it fails to live up to his pure and dogmatic conception of Christianity, it is to be condemned as a desecration.

Interestingly, Tatian, who urged against the desecration of the Christian worldview by the impurity of Pagan philosophy, would himself develop into a heretic who “fell away from the Church into Valentinian Gnosticism, subsequently founding the sect of the Encratites.” Here we see a clear case of quantity turning into quality. His excessive commitment to the purity of the Christian worldview would, at a nodal point, leap into its own form of desecration, into hereticism.

For any intellectual tradition, dogmatism means the inability to carry forth the outlook into a new world. It is, quite literally, intellectual death. A call to stay stationed in the past, in a moment where the dogma was correct. But time is a silly thing. From one moment to another, what is right turns wrong, what is wrong turns right. Conditions are always changing. Like G. W. F. Hegel said of motion, time too is “existent contradiction itself.”[9] Time is becoming, a coming and ceasing to be. And while there is certainly continuity, it is a continuity that is itself sustained through changing. Like Lampedusa writes in The Leopard, “if we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”[10] Continuity can ever only be sustained through changing. This is what the Hegelian category of sublation teaches us, one advances through simultaneously cancelling and preserving into something new. This dialectical insight was already understood by Aristotle, who held that change itself implied something stayed the same, either the substance or its accidental properties.

The virtue of the Marxist worldview, of dialectical materialism, is that it has this appreciation for the ever-transforming character of the world as its basic premises. It is rooted, as I have argued before, in a dialectical ontology of becoming.[11] It is, in a sense, quite literally the opposite of dogmatism. Whereas dogmatism, as an iteration of the purity fetish, seeks to hold steadfast onto pure ideas, Marxism understands that our knowledge of the world evolves out of, and with, the world itself. There can be no ideas which are true irrespective of context. Universal truths, for Marxism as for Hegel, are always concrete; they obtain their universality through their ability to be re-embodied in a variety of particulars.[12]
​
Nonetheless, Marxism has had its fair share of Tatians. In all traditions within the canon there have been those who follow the letter, and not the spirit, of the texts. Those who hold steadfast onto the conclusions of Marx, Engels, Lenin, etc., and not the worldview which mediated the arrival at those conclusions. In various ways, when such dogmatism develops, it always corresponds to either a stifling of the class struggle, or an explicit turn to the thought of the class enemies.

Kautsky’s dogmatism, his inability to see the plurality of forms the class struggle could take, leads him to become a renegade. He lacked dialectics and therefore operated, especially at the end, with a mechanical caricature of Marxism. This excessive commitment to orthodoxy in a changed world turned his “Marxism” into its opposite, into social chauvinism and right opportunism, in short, into a collaboration with the ruling order he once so vehemently fought against. As Lenin tells us, Kautsky fully appreciated the need for flexible tactics; learned and taught Marxian dialectics; but in the application of this dialectic, he committed such a mistake, or proved in practice to be so undialectical, so incapable of taking into account the rapid change of forms and the rapid acquiring of new content by the old forms… The main reason for [his] bankruptcy was that he was “enchanted” by one definite form of growth of the working class movement and of socialism, he forgot all about the one-sidedness of this form, [and] was afraid of seeing the sharp break which objective conditions made inevitable, and continued to repeat simple, routine, and at first glance, incontestable truths, such as: ‘three is more than two.’ But politics is more like algebra than arithmetic; it is more like higher mathematics than lower mathematics. In reality, all old forms of the socialist movement have acquired new content, and, consequently, a new sign, the ‘minus’ sign, has appeared in front of all the figures; but our wiseacres stubbornly continued (and still continue) to persuade themselves and others that ‘minus three’ is more than ‘minus two.’[13]

Kautsky would not be the last in our tradition who traversed from revolutionary to renegade thanks to dogmatism, i.e., the absence of a proper dialectical materialist worldview. In the U.S., for instance, there is a whole “Trotskyist to neocon” pipeline. These supposed “Marxists,” like Kautsky, had such a deeply entrenched purity fetish dogmatism, that they rejected how conditions had changed, how socialism, especially in its earliest stages, would look nothing like the highest, or even lowest, stages of communism developed by Marx in his Critique of the Gotha Program. This would lead them, as they are famous for, to condemn various socialist states for not living up to their pure idea of socialism. None of the socialist states, for them, “were real socialism.” Only the pure idea in their heads was.
Like Tatian, whose dogmatic Christianity turned into its opposite, into hereticism, these dogmatic “Marxists” turned into their apparent opposite, to neoconservatives. While most remained only implicitly supporting the imperialist order through their condemnations of actually existing socialism, a great deal of them would explicitly join the ranks of the most ferocious imperialists.

From Tatian to the Trotskyite neocons, history teaches us that a dogmatic commitment to a worldview often turns into its opposite, into hereticism or the worldview of our class enemies. It is easy to be a dogmatist. It requires only memorizing conclusions and stale formulas. It certainly is much simpler than consistently reevaluating the concrete concretely. But what it adds in simplicity it takes away in accuracy and efficiency. It is simple precisely because it is untrue, because it seeks to foist on an ever-changing world a map of conclusions from a previous moment in the world’s development.

We avoid dogmatism by consistently refining the dialectical materialist worldview. We avoid dogmatism by being radically open to self-criticism. We avoid dogmatism by having the intellectual courage to creatively and critically approach the novel problems of our day.[14]

Today technology affords us the capacity to do this together, to study collectively the classics of our tradition to prevent slippages into dogmatism. This is what my seminar on Marxism-Leninism will be doing. You can sign up for that HERE.

[1] Alfred North Whitehead, Modes of Thought (New York: Free Press, 1968), 58.
[2] Carlos L. Garrido, The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (Dubuque: Midwestern Marx Publishing Press, 2023).
[3] Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy Vol. 2 Medieval Philosophy Part 1., (New York: image Books, 1962), 31.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid., 32.
[7] Ibid., 33.
[8] Ibid., 32.
[9] G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic, Trans. A.V. Miller (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press International, 1993), 440.
[10] Guiseppe Di Lampedusa, The Leopard (1960): Accessed via: https://books-library.net/files/books-library.online-01090019At2Q0.pdf
[11] Carlos L. Garrido, “Introduction” to Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (Dubuque: Midwestern Marx Publishing Press, 2022).
[12] Garrido, The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism, 99.
[13] V. I. Lenin, Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder (New York: International Publishers, 2016), 82-3.
[14] For more on this, see: Carlos L. Garrido, “Marxism-Leninism, The Communist Party, and Education,” Red America 002 (December 2024) pp. 17-22. https://redamerica.acp.us/

Author
​
Youhanna Haddad is a North American Marxist of the Arab diaspora. Through his writing he seeks to combat the Western liberal dogmas that uphold racial capitalism. You can contact him at [email protected]. ​

NEW YORK, March 6 (RTSG) – The Federal Reserve in Atlanta is estimating a GDP shrinkage of -2.5 percent in the first quarter of 2025. While most outlets, including the Blue Chip Consensus, say that growth will remain relatively stable this quarter, Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow has given an ominous estimation of the health of the economy that has shocked both investors and consumers.

New indicators reported that consumers spent less than expected during the uncomfortable January weather and that exports were weak, which led to the downgrade. Prior to last week’s consumer spending report, GDPNow had been indicating growth of 2.3% for the quarter. This coincides with many other variables that might suggest that the economy is entering a slowdown.

The Commerce Department released a report saying that personal spending fell 0.2% in January, falling just below the Dow Jones estimate for a 0.1% increase. However, fully adjusted for inflation, spending fell 0.5%. As a result, that managed to remove a full percentage point off the expected contribution to GDP, down to 1.3%, according to the GDPNow calculation.

More concerning, however, were numbers coming out of the labor market as unemployment claims rose to 242,000, matching early October 2024’s numbers, causing concern among some investors.

Among the major drivers of GDP growth, including consumption, investment, government spending, and net exports, only government spending is remaining relatively stable, despite Elon Musk’s new “Department of Government Efficiency” promising to cut jobs and tighten spending. The U.S. House recently signed off on Trump’s proposed tax cuts and budgetary cuts bill which, if implemented, would sharply decrease government spending by $2 Trillion and loosen tax regulations by $4.5 Trillion.

​The topic of election interference remains contentious from every side of the fence. However in the case of Sarkozy, the allegations do indeed seem to carry weight. For almost two decades, Sarkozy has been battling allegations and court cases dealing with this very issue. The case of January 2025 is the latest in these. Sarkozy is charged with accepting millions of Euros from the Libyan government. An unspecified amount, starting as low as 5 Million, to as high as 50 million euros. The charge suggests that the funding was meant to incentivize France to assist Libya in it’s reproachment with the west. However according to the son of Muammar Gaddafi, the reasons indeed go much deeper. 

In a secretly recorded meeting, former professor Danny Shaw admitted that his public claims that journalists Dan Cohen and Kim Ives as well as American Communist Party (ACP) executive committee members Haz Al-Din and Kyle Pettis plotted to traffic weapons to Haiti were “not 100% truthful” and were intended to harm their reputations.
​
“I was definitely trying to take them out, I just fucked up. I just didn’t do it artfully and 100% truthful, and that looked very bad,” Shaw said.

​ACP member Zachariah Primiano recorded the meeting under the direction of the party’s Director of Personnel Kyle Pettis. It not only fully debunks Shaw’s slanderous allegations against Cohen, Ives, Al-Din, and Pettis but is clear evidence of the disgraced former professor’s deceit and intent to defame them in a COINTELPRO-style smear campaign aimed at destroying the ACP from within. The meeting was held at former ACP and Midwestern Marx member Daniel Gutierrez’s apartment in Queens, NY on January 21, and was also attended by Christopher Prewitt and Shuvu Bhattarai.

On January 17, Shaw published on X (formerly known as Twitter), Instagram, and his personal website a series of written articles and a video resigning from the ACP. While Shaw spends the majority of the 43-minute video denouncing Haz Al-Din and doxxing him by revealing his true identity (Ali Hammoud), he alleges that he witnessed, on a Zoom call, his then-comrades Al-Din and Pettis with his former colleagues Cohen and Ives, discussing plans to traffic weapons to armed groups in Haiti, particularly to Jimmy “Barbecue” Cherizier, leader of the Viv Ansanm Political Party, whom Cohen and Ives have repeatedly interviewed and profiled in their written and video reports and in their documentary series Another Vision: Inside Haiti’s Uprising.

“Ali, Kyle, Dan Cohen, and Kim Ives began to coordinate arms trafficking with sketchy foreign actors and oligarchs to the paramilitary factions in Haiti,” Shaw said.

In another post titled “On the Cultishness and Liberalism of Ali “Haz” Hammoud & the ACP Executive Board”, Shaw alleges that “On November 1st, I was tricked into coming to a sit-down with Dan Cohen and Kim Ives so they could send more guns to Haiti through Haz.”

Far from being ambushed, Shaw had been pressuring Cohen for a public debate while rebuffing numerous requests from his ACP comrades to participate in a private meeting with Cohen and Ives to clarify and resolve his political differences with them.

Shaw speculates that Hammoud and Pettis are working on behalf of the U.S. government. “I felt deceived and trapped. The question that went through my head was: Are these federal agents or just ultra leftists who do the bidding of the federal government?” Shaw wrote.

Shaw also falsely claims that Cohen, Ives, Al-Din, and Pettis disparaged the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) and the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) and that he repeatedly objected to such deprecation, but that the four men just ridiculed him.

“I raised every objection. They laughed and laughed at me, at the PSL, at Black Alliance For Peace & other groups who they said were ‘liberals’ and ‘humanitarians’ like me and actually cared about the masses. Why would Cohen and Ives take advantage of someone like Ali Hammoud, who has zero experience as a leader? I was forced to contact my lawyers and submit a sworn affidavit of this reckless adventurism that put me and the entire party at risk,” he wrote.

As he gorged himself on mango chicken and banana fritters, washed down by beet and celery juice, Shaw vacillated between overconfidence, bitterness, and spinning out more lies to his fellow plotters. By the end, he was audibly worried that his plot against his former comrades and colleagues had failed and there would be fallout.

Shaw’s allegations were an attempt to mount a coup against the ACP leadership.

The smear job was coordinated with Brianna “Bree” Barry, who resigned from the party on December 7, and John Molera, who was the party’s official attorney until he publicly resigned on the same day as Shaw. Shaw confesses that Molera helped co-write his articles, in which he doxxed Al-Din’s legal name. This violates legal confidence and could get Molera disbarred.

The allegations were uncritically promoted by professors Daniel Tutt and Colin Bodayle. Tutt is a George Washington University lecturer who is affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America, an unofficial affiliate of the Democratic Party, and brands himself as a “public critic” of the ACP. Bodayle is a graduate assistant at Villanova University.
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Shaw’s hit job was also cheered on by Jonathan Meade, who uses the X account @jonnysocialism, and Andrew Saturn, both of whom are members of the Socialist Party of America. Saturn describes himself in his X bio as a “federal appointee.”

​Molera, a licensed attorney, had begun investigating Meade and Saturn for potential links to intelligence agencies, according to ACP leadership, but began to receive online harassment and death threats. He then suddenly turned against the ACP, culminating in his public resignation, which he coordinated with Shaw. Molera has since deactivated his X account and left DDGeopolitics, a channel where he had planned to launch a show.

Tutt told Cohen in a January 24 phone call that he suspected that Saturn is a federal agent. When Cohen asked Tutt why he objectively allies with people he suspects to be operating on the U.S. government’s behalf against the ACP, Tutt insisted that his criticism is different from theirs. He also stated that the ACP is worse than the Democratic Party.

Alternative media personality Fiorella Isabel of The Convo Couch also promoted the defamation, privately insisting to Cohen that ACP Executive Board member Jackson Hinkle is an FBI agent, although providing no evidence.

Back at the meeting, asked for evidence of the weapons trafficking allegations, Shaw admitted that he has none.
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“The most I have is screenshots of Ali Hamoud preparing for the meeting, but it would have been him and Dan Cohen [who] were back channeling. I can't access that. The Zoom recording Ali Hamoud promised me.”

On January 21, the ACP sent a cease and desist letter to Shaw.
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That evening, Shaw published a second video claiming to offer a “clarification and apology” but repeating the same allegations against Cohen, Ives, Al-Din, and Pettis. Shaw insisted that a recording of the November 1 meeting be made public and called for all parties to be subjected to polygraph tests, visibly smirking at his own suggestion, while reiterating the lie that the other men plotted to traffic guns through “Russian contacts.”

In the meeting at Gutierrez’ house, Shaw boasts that his “apology” was “mad slick.”

Even as he boasted of his duplicitous behavior, Shaw was aware that his smear campaign had backfired, although still posturing as a victim.

“These two journalists have completely mistreated me and the Haitian people, so I’ve tried to take them down too, but I just… I bit off more than I can chew.”

“My biggest mistake, right, like I told the comrades yesterday – any victory, small victories are ours – any mistakes, I take full responsibility. By dragging in the two journalists with the gun thing, it’s spiraled out of control,” he repeated, explaining that “it’s distracted from the work at hand” of destroying the ACP.

However, Shaw hoped to use Tutt as an intermediary to negotiate with with Cohen and Ives in order to isolate the ACP.

Tutt called Shaw during the meeting, suggesting that he fully retract his posts and accusations, based on the advice of a “lawyer” he had consulted.

When Cohen asked Tutt who the “lawyer” is, Tutt insisted that he is “a buddy of mine from college” who “doesn't even practice law.”
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In the phone call with Tutt, Shaw remained defiant and insisted that he separate his conflict with ACP executives Al-Din and Pettis from that with Cohen and Ives.

“I think Daniel Tutt is in for a rude awakening. I don’t think they [Cohen and Ives] really want to talk to me,” Shaw concluded.

“Cross your fingers though,” interrupted Gutteierez.

“Oh God!” Shaw prayed. “If I can get out of this one. Heavenly Father, oh Mother. I’ll join the Christian church if I can get out of this one. Oh God!”

Earlier in the meeting, Shaw implied that he is planning to blackmail the PSL, which he belonged to until 2018, when he was expelled.

“You know the PSL leadership is sitting back like ‘ah, we hope Danny doesn’t come for us next.’ You better toss me some bone, motherfuckers,” Shaw chides. “I’ll expose the shit out of those petit-bourgeois fools.”

Nonetheless, Shaw indicated that he was pleased that journalist Ben Norton called to congratulate him for his attack against the ACP, Cohen, and Ives.

Norton was fired in 2021 from The Grayzone for violations of his contract and then seized the Moderate Rebels podcast and its associated Patreon page from Grayzone editor and podcast co-host Max Blumenthal, who described Norton as a “criminal mind.” Now relocated to China, Norton co-founded the Geopolitical Economy Report website.

A history of lies

Shaw has a history of misrepresenting his experience on the ground in Haiti to advance his career. He has often claimed to have interviewed “thousands” of Haitians, whom he depicts as having a clear and unified position against Jimmy Cherizier.

In a March 7, 2024 interview with the Dominican outlet VISIONRDN entitled “Terrible gringo reveals - what Barbecue told him in Haiti”, the interviewer repeatedly and incorrectly stated as fact that Shaw had met and interviewed Cherizier, but Shaw did not correct the misinformation and stated that Cherizier was a “mercenary” and “death squad” leader.

Shaw’s attacks are the latest in a broader campaign of incitement against Cohen and Ives, a phenomenon that might be described as “Barbecue Derangement Syndrome.”

In the recording, Shaw boasts that he is “the principal voice of the anti-gang perspective,” a position which aligns with the U.S. State Department’s calls to “hunt down” Cherizier, which the French and Canadian governments also support.

In recent months, Shaw has platformed two of the most vociferous counterrevolutionary Haitian voices – Jean St. Vil aka Jafrikayiti and Dahoud André – who have dedicated themselves to smearing Cohen, Ives, and Haiti Liberté for their reporting and analysis on Haiti’s national liberation struggle.

The ACP was not the only organization deceived by Shaw. Numerous English and Spanish-language publications and channels have published his tirades too, including The Jimmy Dore Show, The Grayzone, Venezuelan-state media outlet TeleSUR, Truthout, NACLA, and the Council on Hemispheric Affairs (COHA), among others.

Even as Shaw’s plot spirals out of control, he insisted he will do it again.

“Won’t be making any mistake like that in the next campaign,” Shaw says. “Nothing like a mistake to teach you in life.”

A COINTELPRO operation?

However amateurish, Shaw’s libelous smear campaign bears the hallmarks of a COINTELPRO operation, which U.S. intelligence agencies have long used to disrupt parties and organizations that they see as a threat.

It is notable that Shaw alleged that Cohen, Ives, Al-Din, and Pettis disparaged both the PSL and BAP, which is not only false but a typical COINTELPRO tactic to create or exacerbate acrimony between like-minded groups.

Whether or not U.S. intelligences agencies were involved in Shaw’s ill-conceived and sloppily executed attempt to sabotage the ACP from within and smear Ives and Cohen, the false accusations objectively aim to accomplish the same thing as any COINTELPRO operation: sow division, confusion, fear, and distrust. It is a cautionary tale of how progressive, anti-imperialist organizations and media outlets can be bamboozled by malicious actors that exploit good faith or naivete to advance a nefarious, imperialist agenda.

“In a Communist Party as young as ours, and which shows so much potential, wreckers and infiltrators like Shaw and Molera are to be expected,” said the ACP’s Chairman Haz Al-Din. “However, after their plot to subvert our Party’s constitution and depose me failed, their latest attempt to defame the Party has massively backfired, and our Party has emerged out of this stronger than ever.”
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“Shaw has exposed his duplicitous and bankrupt moral character for the entire world to see,” Al-Din concluded. “Meanwhile, we will move forward with even greater resolve to meet the challenges of forming a united and independent party of the American working class.”

​Communists are dedicated to the conquest of political dictatorship by the proletariat, and to its defense.
 
Historically the best way to do this has been through a Leninist vanguard party, a Communist Party. This should not be controversial for Marxist–Leninists, but the necessity for a unified Leninist party will be elaborated on later anyway.
 
In times and places where there is no Communist Party, it is the task of Marxist–Leninists to work to build one. Historically, party-building has meant getting in touch with other Marxists, studying together, engaging in social investigation, building media organs and polemicizing in defense of Marxism–Leninism, joining mass organizations, producing and sharpening theoretical insights based on their shared experience and combat with ideological rivals, and learning to depend on each other, on each person in their collective, in order to be productive. That is, becoming trusted comrades that engage in their common work as a collective and assess and direct such work together.
 
Then once many of these practical collectives arise and connect with each other in a given country, they may aggregate themselves into a properly central Communist Party.
 
So far this is just history — in fact, many successful Communist Parties were founded by collectives with even less experience than I indicate and more so with faith and conviction, though often with help from the Comintern, but I digress.
 
If the process sounds familiar, that’s because it is. Infrared and Midwestern Marx, for example, began as study collectives and then media collectives, publicizing knowledge and polemics and attracting others to their worldview. These other people then organized themselves with people around them or people they met through these outlets, worked together, and came to trust and be accountable to one another when facing challenges that would either be dealt with or destroy their work.
 
This was the case particularly for those who went through taqiyya in the CPUSA for 3 years.
 
Only out of this process was the ACP able to be reconstituted.
 
Here is why the Party itself is so important:
 
If there is no national collective body able to aggregate and assess the practical experience of its members (from the Latin word membrum, which means "limb" or "body part"), then practical errors can’t be systematically corrected, successes can’t be replicated, and revolutionary theory commensurate with real national conditions cannot be developed to guide work. Without such a body, revolutionary work could not be directed and concerted, and would instead consist of the weak, blind, spontaneous, and disconnected whims of people here and there — groping in the dark, as Stalin said.
 
A Communist’s allegiance to the people is impossible without allegiance to the Party. Not to this and that personality in the Party, not to this and that plank of the Party, but to the body and form of the Party itself. If you renege on the need for a strong body of revolutionary leadership, you are leaving the American people kneecapped and defenseless. A people without a party is like a body without a nervous system — senseless.
 
Unfortunately, not everyone who ended up joining the ACP had experience in party-building. Many joined simply because they agreed with ACP ideologically. Many were waiting for a party to come along that suited their tastes.
 
Instead, they decided to do whatever personally interested them at the time. That’s fine for them, but it’s hard to pretend to be an authority on Marxist–Leninist praxis if you do that.
 
Why is such an attitude petty-bourgeois?
 
To think of it intuitively:
 
Because it is an approach to politics based on the isolated “handicraft” or work of an individual, based in that person’s individual sense of what is right and what they and others should do, as individuals. “Thinking for yourself” is a common refrain. This is how they make their living, so this is how they behave.
 
This type of attitude is prevalent among small business types and independent professionals, if you have experience with them politically. They can’t get very far with such a mindset, but it’s fine as far as they’re concerned. And it’s preferable to the similar-but-distinct type of groupthink that prevails over institutional professionals and public or private bureaucrats. But neither are proletarian.
 
If any such petty-bourgeois people were brought into a Communist Party, they must be humbled to the level of the “proletarian work ethic,” so to speak, or else their presence petty-bourgeoisifies the Party, which has been a historical pitfall of Communist Parties. Marxism–Leninism teaches us the petty-bourgeoisie must be won over, but from the basis of proletarian political independence, not capitulation.
 
So what is a proletarian attitude?
 
Think, again intuitively, of how it works in a factory. The workers do small, repetitive, often tedious tasks, contributing small parts to a greater whole. Proletarians par excellence have nothing else than the ability to do just such work. If one proletarian wants to advance himself, as proletarian, he cannot do it alone but must help transform all the scattered workers in the factory into one clenched fist aimed directly at the boss. Anyone who breaks that fist, who “thinks for himself,” who tries to get ahead individually, is maligned as a traitorous scab. These workers take no shit because all they have is themselves. Those who are held as the best among them are selfless leaders, those workers who do their work plus helping others with theirs, who bolster the unity between them all, who stand up for their common dignity and assert the authority of the united workers against the authority of the boss.
 
Deindustrialization, deproletarianization, and the petty-bourgeoisification of Communism have wreaked havoc the past few decades. We must be conscious and vigilant of the dangerous revisionism that tempts people to forget the need for a unified party, to supplant iron proletarian discipline and commitment to the necessities of the situation with the fickle whims and fancies of individuals. If we are not vigilant, we ensure the eventual disintegration of the American people’s best hope, the Communist Party.
 
The proletarian line must be upheld and petty-bourgeois revisionism must be smashed, always.

For many years, it seemed to me that the classic Marxist concept of the working class at the vanguard of socialist revolution is not consistent with U.S. realities and conditions. In the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it was middle class students who were in the vanguard of the anti-war movement and an incipient anti-imperialist formulation. In contrast, most workers supported the war in Vietnam and possessed an aggressive and ethnocentric attitude with respect to other nations. In addition, the union movement emphasized wages and benefits, rather than a comprehensive critique that would point the way toward the expansion and development of national industry.

However, since that time, academics and activists, largely of the middle class, have failed to develop the anti-imperialist impulse of the late 1960s. To be sure, they have rejected Reaganism, neoliberalism, and neoconservatism, and they have been advocates for blacks, Latinos, women, gays, and ecological consciousness. However, they failed to personally encounter and take seriously the insights of the people’s movements of the Global South, which would have liberated them for constructive participation in the rapidly maturing worldwide anti-imperialist movement for a more just, democratic, sustainable, and multipolar world order. And which would have provided important lessons with respect to the role of the state in the economy, in which the state directs the economy in cooperation with big corporations, and where the public and private sectors work together in expanding national production and developing the national economy. Public-private cooperation has been the emerging practice of the socialist and progressive states of the Global South and East of the last half century, and appreciation of this important global tendency would have enabled U.S. public debate to move beyond the simplistic Big Government/laisse faire dichotomy and political division.

Compounding this historic failure of the U.S. middle class since the 1970s, academics and activists during the last decade have turned to a form of cultural Marxism that is not Marxist. Guided by post-modern assumptions, cultural Marxism constructs ahistorical and anti-empirical narratives with respect to race, ignoring the historic and permanent gains forged by the African-American movement from 1917 to 1988, and paying no more than superficial attention to the insights of its principal leaders. And it constructs narratives with respect to gender and sexual identity that ignore nature, and that depart from the equal rights agenda of the women’s movement in its earlier waves. Moreover, it has combined these theoretically dubious tendencies with intolerant authoritarianism that attacks with incivility all who raise reasonable common-sense objection. Such tendencies were an important factor, as nearly all commentators have observed, in the disproportionate support of the working class for Trump and the Republican Party in the 2024 elections.

Academics and activists tend to say that Trump supporters are racist and sexist, lacking the sophistication necessary for our times. But blinded by their own assumptions, academics and activists have not carefully observed, and therefore they do not understand, the MAGA phenomenon. Although it lacks consistent anti-imperialist consciousness, the MAGA movement reasonably and correctly responds to the American economic, political, and moral decline.

A first critical step in the U.S. spiral of decline was during the Truman administration, when the U.S. government launched the Cold War and failed to take steps toward the construction of a post-neocolonial world order, which was the best option of the historic moment, taking into account the worldwide rise of anti-colonial and anti-neocolonial movements, and taking into account the arrival of the world-system to its geographical and ecological limits. Subsequently, when the negative consequences of the Cold War became manifest, the American political establishment turned to neoliberalism, reducing the capacity of states throughout the world to take modest measures in defense of their peoples and their sovereignty. After that, the American political establishment turned to neoconservatism and imperialist overreach, embroiling the nation in costly endless wars that did little to promote American interests. Neoliberalism and neoconservatism, inasmuch as they are attacks on the states and peoples of the world, provoked a mass migration to the regions of the advanced economies, which the political establishment made little effort to control, in part because they themselves lacked national identity, and in part because some were positioned to benefit from the cheaper labor that undocumented immigrants provide. During all this time, the American political establishment made little effort to attend to the long-term development of the productive capacities of the nation, which would have been of great benefit to the working and middle classes; it was more oriented to short-term profits and financial speculation. When these dynamics are fully understood, it can be seen that the American political establishment has betrayed the nation and the American people.

If we look carefully at the MAGA program, rather than dismissing it out of hand, we can see that it responds to the various dimensions of the American decline, even though it lacks a consistent anti-imperialism. The MAGA platform proposes: effective regulation of immigration; development of the nation’s economy through economic nationalism; avoiding dysfunctional entanglements in other nations; and leaving divisive wokism behind. The disproportionate support of the working class for MAGA can be understood as an expression of working-class consciousness, where the working class is acting in defense of itself, in reaction to attacks on workers’ wellbeing, imposed by a bureaucratic state that has institutionalized the agenda of the political establishment and its middle class, academic, and activist allies.
​
In this new political context, it makes sense to invoke the classic Marxist concept of a working-class vanguard, of a movement for the taking of political power that derives its force from the support and active participation of workers. Carlos Garrido, Director of the Midwestern Marx Institute and Secretary of Education of the recently formed American Communist Party, suggested to me a formulation of a vanguard constituted by the working class and all class forces that have an antagonistic relation with monopoly capitalism, such that the taking of political power by the working class would make possible a state that acts decisively in defense of all sectors of the people, including not only workers but also professionals and small businesspersons.

​§

The partisan and the MAGA movement

Haz Al-Din maintains that the critiques of the Left are dissociated from actual political struggle and contestations for political power, and therefore they are revolutionary only in appearance. He writes that leftists have disdain for the people; in their view, “people are too reactionary, too fascist, too immoral, or too stupid to accept the supposedly universal values of leftism.” Leftists have “a vicious, savage inhumanity toward all those who fall outside their own discursive community.”1

Invoking Carl Schmitt’s theory of the partisan, Al-Din maintains that the partisan, in contrast to leftists, actually contests for political power. Partisans go down to the people in order to establish a real experiential foundation for their premises. The partisan displaces the left-right ideological distinction by occupying an entirely new counterhegemonic space, which seeks to construct a new order that is based in the people and in commitment to eternal principles of social justice.

For Al-Din, the real political conflict in the United States today is not between the left and right but between leftism and partisanship. And in addition, he maintains, the MAGA movement is the only political space where partisanship exists, where there is a contestation for power rooted in the personal and concrete struggles and aspirations of the people. Therefore, Al-Din calls upon communists to go to the MAGA movement, seeking to transform its diverse earthly formulations into a more mature historical and political conceptualization.2 The MAGA Movement must be educated concerning the true characteristics of communism as formulated by Marx, Engels, and Lenin and the true characteristics of socialism as developed in practice in the Soviet Union and China.

I support this call, although I would give emphasis to Cuba and China, and I would stress the need to raise consciousness with respect to the nations that are attempting to construct socialism in the context of bourgeois political structures, such as Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Bolivia. And I would seek to educate the people with respect to the worldwide anti-imperialist process of constructing in practice a more just and pluripolar world, in which socialist and progressive countries of the Global South and East are playing a leading role.

§

Further considerations

The MAGA movement has a fundamental legitimacy, in that it is rooted in the working class and in middle America. It has attained an understanding of the unsustainability of endless wars and imperialist overreach, adopting the slogan “peace through strength,” which advocates a strong military that functions primarily as a deterrent and not as a force that intervenes everywhere. We must seek to educate MAGA toward a consistent anti-imperialism, in which it arrives to understand that the strengthening of the productive capacities of the nation can only be attained through cooperation and mutually beneficial trade with all the nations and regions of the world, as is persistently proclaimed by the leading socialist, progressive, and anti-imperialist states of the world.

The Trump-led MAGA movement has adopted a strategy of taking control of the Republican Party, rather than establishing a new political party. The MAGA movement has attained control of the Republican Party through Trump’s successes in the Republican Party primaries for three consecutive presidential elections from 2016 through 2024. It has won the presidency in the general elections of 2024, and Trump is effectively forming a cabinet in accordance with the MAGA agenda. It can count on the support of the majority of the Supreme Court on most issues, thanks to conservative Trump appointments during his first administration. And it controls state governments in many red states.

However, the MAGA movement has not attained full political power. The MAGA-controlled Republican Party has attained only narrow majorities in the House of Representatives and the Senate, and not all Republicans are MAGA. And the MAGA movement does not have control of the federal state bureaucracy and its numerous departments. In addition, the MAGA movement does not have control of the media, think tanks, foundations, and higher education, although it has a minority institutional presence in all these areas.

The extent to which the MAGA movement will move toward full political power will depend in large part on the extent to which the second Trump administration can deliver on its promises. If the Trump administration has success in renewing the productive capacity of the American economy, its support among the people will grow, enabling the consolidation of its power in national institutions and in red and swing states.

The possible consolidation of political power by the MAGA movement should not be viewed as something sinister. MAGA’s emergence as a dominant political force in American institutions would be a good thing, if MAGA in conditions of partial political power acts in defense of the nation and the people. During the next four years, political analysts should assess the extent to which the second Trump administration promotes the long-term interests of the nation and the people, basing their analyses on careful empirical observation and not outdated ideological conceptions, distortions, and prejudices.

Having entered the Lancashire cotton mills at the age of eight, Sam Fielden commented: ‘I think that if the devil had a particular enemy whom he wished to unmercifully torture, the best thing for him to do would be to put his soul into the body of a Lancashire factory child and keep him as a child in a factory the rest of his days.’ This willingness to sap the lifeblood of its workers, no matter their age or sex, in the pursuit of profit is what has characterised capital from its earliest inception until today.
​

Repost with thanks from CPGB-ML

May Day, the day of annual celebration of the international working-class movement, originated in the United States, where it was particularly associated with the struggle for the working day to be reduced to eight hours.

Especially militant were the workers of Chicago, whose militancy struck such terror into the hearts of the exploiters that the military were called out to try to suppress them. On 3 May 1886, at the McCormick Reaper works, striking workers were fired on, leaving six killed and many others wounded. A public protest meeting was called at short notice for the following day in an area of the city called the Haymarket.

Although it was an entirely peaceful meeting, with a relatively modest attendance of only some 3,000 because of the short notice, as it was reaching its conclusion the police moved in to demand – quite unnecessarily as most people had drifted away because of the late hour and bad weather – that all participants should immediately disperse.

While the speaker on the platform, the socialist Samuel Fielden, was reassuring police that the meeting was peaceful and would shortly come to an end anyway, some unknown person detonated a bomb among the police ranks, causing a number of deaths.

Although it was never established who had thrown the bomb, and it had certainly been done without the knowledge or consent of the organisers or speakers, the US authorities, as crude and brutal then as they are now, arrested eight people associated with calling the meeting or speaking at it (Albert Parsons, August Spies, Samuel Fielden, Oscar Neebe, Michael Schwab, George Engel, Adolph Fischer and Louis Lingg).

They were all leading members of the International Working People’s Association, an organisation very popular among America’s hard-pressed workers, who had in the previous few years been subjected to two economic recessions causing widespread indigence and despair. The organisation was extremely active in organising many very effective strikes, so the American bourgeoisie moved to destroy it.

Despite a complete lack of evidence, all eight of the leaders were convicted, by a jury made up entirely of employers, and sentenced to death. On 11 November 1887, after many failed appeals, Parsons, Spies, Engel and Fisher were executed by hanging. Louis Lingg committed suicide in prison.
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The egregious injustice of the convictions, however, gave rise to major protests. Six years later the protests finally secured the release of the three surviving prisoners, one of whom was the only born Briton among the eight – the Lancastrian Samuel Fielden of Todmorden.

Autobiography of Samuel Fielden​

We reproduce here extracts from a letter written by Samuel Fielden, which illustrate the dire conditions that impelled the working masses towards socialism in the latter part of the 19th century, in Britain as much as in America, as well as recounting his eye witness account of the Haymarket events that led to the establishment of May Day as International Workers’ Day.

I was born in the town of Todmorden, part of which is in the West Riding of Yorkshire and part in the East Riding of Lancashire, England. I was born in the Lancashire part. The town is like all towns in Lancashire – a manufacturing one.

It lies in a beautiful valley, and on the hillsides are small farms; back about a mile are the moorlands, which could be made into fine farms, as the topography of the moors is more level generally than the enclosed land.

But though thousands of starving Englishmen would be very glad to work them, they must be kept for the grouse and the gamekeeper and the gentry. Grouse sport for the privileged classes being esteemed of more importance than the happiness of thousands of human beings.

The enclosed lands rent for about £2 an acre (about $10). The farms are small, running from 10 acres to 60 acres, hardly any being larger than the latter figure. The farms are all dairy, the milk all being sold in town. There are numerous large mills in the town, Fielden Bros being the largest; it contains about 2,000 looms.

Parents

Here I was born in the year 1847, on the 25th day of February. My father’s name was Abram Fielden, he was one of a family of four sons and three daughters. They were of very powerful physique; my father stood nearly six feet in height; they were a family of hand-loom weavers, until the application of steam to weaving.

This occurred when my father was hardly out of teens, and then they became steam-loom workers. My father became a foreman when quite young in the mill of Fielden Bros, where he worked until incapacitated by infirmities and age. He was a man of more than ordinary intelligence, and was generally acknowledged ‘to know a thing or two’ …

My father was a peculiarly eloquent conversationalist, and the recital of the most ordinary incident from his lips bore the charm of romance. When the ten-hour movement was being agitated in England my father was on the committee of agitation in my native town, and I have heard him tell of sitting on the platform with Earl Shaftesbury, John Fielden, Richard Otler, and other advocates of that cause.

I always thought he put a little sarcasm into the word earl, at any rate he had but little respect for aristocracy and royalty. He was also a Chartist, and I have heard him tell of many incidents connected with the Chartist agitation and movement …

If he ever had studied socialism I believe his strict sense of justice would have led him to adopt it; as it was he was a hater of all forms of affectation, deceit and hypocrisy; in politics of late years he was ostensibly a liberal – in reality a republican.

He took a great deal of interest in the political agitations which have been going on, and having a fairly good memory he could discuss intelligently the political problems that have agitated his country during his lifetime. He was always a staunch supporter of every measure for the relief of the Irish peasantry from the greed of the foreign bloodsucker – the English landlord …

Of my mother I cannot remember so much, as she died when I was a child of ten years of age. I can remember her as small of stature, with dark eyes and hair, and with pleasing and regular features. I remember in the later years of her life she was a very devoted member of the primitive Methodist church.

Her maiden name was Alice Jackson; the family to which she belonged was very poor, and I have often heard her and father tell on the cold winter nights, when the wind would shriek around the corners of the house, of the first meeting of herself and father. How that she was walking in her bare feet through the snow, carrying a basket which contained sand, which she was trying to sell to the poor people to sprinkle upon their stoneflag floors.

You can imagine how poor a family must be when I tell you that this sand was sold for one-halfpenny (1 cent) a quart, and how much a child could carry in a basket, but they were compelled to put their children to this means of earning a few cents …

Child labourer

When I arrived at the mature age of eight years I, as was usual with the poor people’s children in Lancashire, went to work in a cotton mill, and if there is any of the exuberance of childhood about the life of a Lancashire mill-hand’s child it is in spite of his surroundings and conditions, and not in consequence of it.

As I look back at my experience at the tender age I am filled with admiration at the wonderful vitality of these children. I think that if the devil had a particular enemy whom he wished to unmercifully torture, the best thing for him to do would be to put his soul into the body of a Lancashire factory child and keep him as a child in a factory the rest of his days. I think that would satisfy the love of cruelty of his satanic majesty.

The mill into which I was put was the mill established by John Fielden MP, who fought so valiantly in the ten-hour movement. It was then and is now conducted by his sons, Samual, John and Joshua. The last was for some time member of parliament for the West Riding of Yorkshire.

I have read of John Fielden’s description of the treatment of the pauper children that were shipped into the Lancashire mills from the unions of the large cities when Lancashire received its first great impetus as a cotton manufacturing centre. And, horrible as it reads, it was hardly any worse than the treatment that was meted out to the innocents when I became acquainted with the sober side of life as a factory child.

The infants, when first introduced to these abodes of torture, are put at stripping the full spools from the spinning jennies and replacing them with empty spools. They are put to work in a long room where there are about 20 machines. Each child is furnished with a little stool on which to sit. There will be from eight to ten children on each side of the machine. They begin at one end of the room and strip the full spool off, then from there to the next machine, and so on until they get to the other end of the room. When they get there the machine at which they started will be full again.

The spindles are apportioned to each child, and woe be to the child who shall be behind in doing its allotted work. The machine will be started and the poor child’s fingers will be bruised and skinned with the revolving spools. While the children try to catch up to their comrades by doing their work with the speed of the machine running, the brutal overlooker will frequently beat them unmercifully, and I have frequently seen them strike the children, knocking them off their stools and sending them spinning several feet on the greasy floor.

Hell, or the Spanish inquisition, never witnessed more heartless barbarity than is practised upon these poor innocents. It is a pitiful sight to see these children, as they rush from one machine to another trying to recover their lost ground, the tears streaming down their cheeks and sobbing as though their little hearts would break; a sight one would think that would melt the heart of a savage; and all that these children have done to merit this is to be born poor.

Such is the penalty of poverty in Lancashire.

I toiled at this work enduring all its horrors and barbarities for about two years. About that time, being about ten years of age, I was out to tending the elevator, my work being to take the spools that came up from the carding room to the machines on the floor on which I worked, and to take the full spools, after they had undergone the process of being spun into a condition for the warpers to take them and make the warps of them for the weavers, and load them onto the elevator car and send them up to the warpers.

This was heavy work for a boy, but as I was thought a stout boy I was put to this, and, notwithstanding that it was heavier work, I liked it better, and I worked at it till I was 18 years of age, when I became, according to law, a full-timer. The children under that age at that time not being allowed to work had a half a day at the mill and were compelled to go to school the other half.

The factory act of England compels each employer of half-timers to keep a school for them to go to the other half day; they are very strict about this; so much so that no child could stay away from school a half-day without being compelled to lose a half-day in the mill also. This, when you take in consideration the importance that the child’s wages are to the family, is practically compulsory education.

For this work we used to get from one shilling and six pence (36 cents) to two shillings and six pence (60 cents) a week.

If I remember rightly, when I first became a full-timer, I received six shillings ($1.50) per week. At this time I was given work in the warehouse or filling-room, where the weavers received their filling. I worked here two years, when I went to learn to weave.

I learned to weave under my father. I worked at this branch of factory-work until I became 20 years of age, when I went to work as a beamer. That is, I wound warps onto beams, and at this I continued until I came to the United States, at the age of 21, in 1868 …

On slavery

There had appeared in my native town at different times, several coloured lecturers who spoke on the slavery question in America. I went frequently to hear them describe the inhumanity of that horrible system, sometimes with my father, and at other times with my sister.

One of these gentlemen called himself Henry Box Brown; this gentlemen brought with him a panorama, by means of which he described places and incidents in his slave life, and also the means of his escape. He used to march through the streets in front of a brass band, clad in a highly-coloured and fantastic garb, with an immense drawn sword in his hand.

He claimed that he had been boxed up in a large box in which were stowed an amount of provisions, the box having holes bored in the top for air, and marked “This side up with care”. Thus he was shipped to Philadelphia via the underground railroad, to friends there, and this was why he called himself Henry Box Brown. He was a very good speaker and his entertainment was very interesting.

Another one of these gentlemen was called, if I remember right, Henry Green; he was a very fiery orator. I heard him very often. These lectures had a very great effect on my mind, and I could hardly divest myself of their impressions, and I used to frequently find myself among my playmates dilating much upon the horrors of slavery.

I read much of the system from the books of travellers. I remember to have read at a very early age the travels of Harriet Martineau. I also read ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’. When the American civil war broke out I was an enthusiastic champion among my fellows of the cause of the north, and, in fact, so were all the family, my sister not being undone by any of us.

During all that terrible struggle intense interest was manifested by the people of Lancashire, and all during the summer months every night in the week there would be seen groups of men collected in the streets, and at the prominent corners, discussing the latest news and forecasting the next, and in these groups there was always to be heard the advocates and champions of both sides. I used to listen to these orators with a great deal of interest …

But the struggle [against slavery in America] continued, and its effect upon the people became more and more apparent. Mills began to run short time, then no time at all. Then when they could get a little Surat cotton from India, they would run a few days a week. This Surat cotton was terrible stuff to weave; it was full of little chips, and the threads were always breaking, so that the weavers were compelled to have all their looms stopped at once, until they could get time to go from one loom to the other to tie up the threads.

How the people prayed for the “war to cease”. Famine, gaunt and fierce, stalked abroad in the land, and in many cases brought death to end the sufferings of the wretched Lancashire operative. The finances of the relief system was exhausted, private charity was taxed until it could expend no more.

Tramps filled the streets and highways, young women went from town to town, and when they would come to some town they would walk slowly over the streets, holding each other by the hand, and singing some song, which it was hoped would bring some gift of succour to appease their hunger and preserve their weary lives. Many in their desperation were compelled to barter their honour for their lives. Such is the penalty of poverty.

During the panic, as we called it, the mill in which I, my father, sister and brother worked, shut down entirely several times. I went to work assisting to drain some land on which one of my employers has since built a magnificent castle, which is called Dobroyd castle.

I was put to work carrying tiles to the men who laid them; it was in the winter time, and I had to pick the tiles up out of the ice and water. One day I became chilled to the marrow; I began to grow dizzy, then it grew dark and I fell to the ground insensible. I was carried home and thawed out, and the next day I had to go out to the same work again.

My elder brother had for some time been working as undergardener for one of our employers. He was a young man of more than ordinary intelligence, and much of the information which I was enabled to pick up I gleaned from his books. He was also quite radical in his views, and therefore it was a constant torment to him to have to debase himself before his master as lackeys were compelled to do in England.

Now one of these means of debasement was being compelled to put his hand to his cap, in fact, to bow down to Gasler. He endured this as long as he could bear it, when one day he met his master in the town accompanied by his brother. My brother walked past him, pretending not to see him, and therefore did not pay his obedience to his master.

The next day, as he was working in the garden, his master came to him and asked him if he had met him the night before on the street and why he had not made his manners to him. My brother told him that he did not think of it. His highness then fixed his eye upon him and replied, “I thought of it, and so did others,” meaning his brother, and added, “you must be a boor.”

This was too much; and my brother telling me about it after we had retired at night, said he would never humble himself before him again, as it would be harder than ever to do it after what had occurred. He soon after left Mr Fielden’s employment.

Thus must the proletariat bow the knee to the bourgeoisie or starve, and some people call this liberty of contract. There was no work to be had in the town, and he was compelled to go on a tramp.

Having heard that there were fine gardens about Edinburgh, Scotland, he tried to work his way thither, walking all the way and trying to get work on the road; sometimes he would get a little to do; sometimes he had to ask for bread; sometimes he had to apply to the town authorities for lodging, for which he had to break stone on the turnpike to pay for it.

Arriving at Edinburgh he found it impossible to get work there; off again he pursued his fruitless search, until one morning he found himself within 40 miles of home. He felt that he must make home that day or die. He therefore with the resolution of despair set out at night.

He came into the house emaciated, hungry and sick, a mere shadow of himself. After eating his supper he tried to make his way to bed, but his legs refused to carry him. The next morning a violent fever had taken possession of him; for weeks he lay between life and death, and this was the penalty of refusing to bow the knee to Gesler.

All these horrors we suffered, as did thousands of others, and be it remembered the Lancashire operatives never passed a resolution to recognise the south as a belligerent, never dreamed of interfering in any way, morally or otherwise, though they were the only sufferers, and those who did in England were those who were placed above the possibility of being affected by the war.

But the war at last came to a close, and New Orleans cotton arrived. It was a time of thanksgiving, and remarkable scenes were witnessed in some of the Lancashire towns when the first instalment of cotton arrived. The operatives gathered about the depots, brass bands were in readiness, and men with patched clothes and thin features, and women with haggard looks and draggled garments, holding their children in their arms or leading them by the hand, according to their size, crowded around.

Eyes that seemed but a short time before had lost their lustre, now beamed with a light which had seemed to have left them forever but a short time before; forms whose every motion had seemed for months to speak of despair, were now animated by elasticity and eager hope had come again to the despairing, and work would now be had; and this was the open sesame to heaven and earth. At least the gates of the yards are thrown open and large lumbering draught horses are seen moving slowly toward the gates, while piled high into the air behind is seen that which to those poor starving people meant the staff of life-cotton, American cotton.

A shout goes up which is almost enough to shake the bales from their foundations; men shake each other’s hands; the tears of gladness are seen in the eyes of the women; such hilarity, such congratulation, such quaint jokes are thrown around when amidst the confusion the band strikes up an air which had become as familiar in England as in America – John Brown’s body lies mouldering in the grave, but his soul goes marching on.

The men joined in, the women joined in, and the children joined in, while the players tried in vain to make themselves heard except at intervals. And thus they marched in front of the great loads of cotton to the mills. Work immediately became more plentiful, and as nothing prospers when workingmen are poor, so everybody soon became happy and comparatively prosperous …

Departure for America

I had frequently talked to my father of my desire to come to America. My father had tried to dissuade me from doing so, but seeing that I was determined to go, he told me that when I became of age, that is 21 years of age, he would have no more control over me, but until then he refused to give me consent to leave the parental roof.

I accordingly remained until the month of July 1868 … I arrived in New York in the latter part of July 1868, with £3 in my pocket.

A stint of work in the south

I worked [for a time] in the states of Louisiana, Mississippi and Arkansas, and I took every opportunity I could get to learn about the condition of the negro, and I learned that in many cases he was as much a bondsman as ever he was, and in many cases worse.

I inquired particularly into the share system, which took the place of the much dreamed of ten acres and a mule, which [the former slave] had so confidently looked forward to possessing after his emancipation. I found that this system was nothing more or less than a species of robbery, and that by its means the negro was held in as absolute bondage as he was before the war.

The share system operated in this wise: It is well known that the result of the rebellion left the southern planter generally stripped of everything in the shape of property but his land. That property which he had held in human beings had been taken from him by a strong arm of force. It also left the negro without a master, and the first thing [the latter] had to do was find a master, and the first thing the former slave owner had to do was to turn the only means in his possession to some account, and he might possibly have thought that it was worth the considering how he should get possession of the property which had been taken away from him, and the brilliant idea may have entered his head that the remaining property might be utilised for that purpose.

Be that as it may, if he did not think of this then it certainly occurred to him afterward and he did not fail to take advantage of it in the near future, but at the present the old master or his residuary legatees had the land, but had no slaves to work it whereby it might be made to support its owner in idleness, the southern slaveholder having constitutionally as much of an objection to work as Harry L Gilmer has of the truth.

[The former slave] had the necessary qualification, that is a willingness to work, but he had nothing to work with or upon. Thus it came that the old master said to [the former slave], how would you like to rent ten acres of land from me and raise a crop of cotton for yourself? [The former slave] thought he saw visions of a condition beside which the ten acres and a mule faded into insignificance.

Arrangements were at once entered into, and [the former slave] being furnished with a mule, and having agreed that half of the crop of cotton should pay for the use of the land, and that he should have a certain amount of rations advanced for his support and the mule’s, and that out of his share of the proceeds of the experiment he should reimburse the landlord for the advance of rations to himself, family and mule, a careful account of which should be kept by his benefactor, the landlord.

These things having all been satisfactorily arranged, especially to the satisfaction of the landlord, [the former slave] started the mule and started on the road to fortune and glory. All through the hot summer he worked with a light heart and visions of future greatness before him, on into the fall when the bolls of cotton plant burst open, and before the eyes of the delighted [former slave] is exposed the realisation of all his dreams.

The cotton is picked and baled, and to the nearest market or landing is the cotton hauled, in many cases [the former slave] taking all the family in his enthusiasm. … [He] is delighted when he is told that his share amounts to $150 or $200. He immediately begins to think about buying the old master out, but he whistles on the other side of his mouth when the little bill which the master presents for advanced rations and the loan of the mule is brought forward, and which amounts to more than his share of the crop.

There is a terrible disappointment but there is no getting over it. The master having pocketed all the share of the same, and having realised as he had foreseen that it has been a profitable arrangement, has another scheme ready for this emergency. He has a large tract of timber land, which, if he can get cut up into cord wood, will furnish him with fuel and also bring in some money at the adjacent landing, and seeing the despondent attitude of [the former slave], he magnanimously comes forward with a proposition to allow him the privilege of paying his indebtedness to his kind benefactor by clearing this land.

This scheme and others of a similar character have been played very successfully upon the so-called freedmen of the south. In cases where the unfortunate victim has tried to escape this form of slavery by attempting to leave the country, he has been arrested and imprisoned, and sometimes as a prisoner of the county he has been hired out to planters or contractors.

Thus did the latter kind of slavery becomes worse than the former. I have received in every state that I visited in the south incontrovertible proof that this prevailed, not only from the statements of the victims themselves, but I have heard the perpetrators boast of it, and this was the chief cause of the exodus of the negro from the south to the west and north.

The south has been blessed by nature with a soil that is calculated to support a vaster population than would or could settle in it for the next hundred years if it were not for the blighting curse of human avarice which there, as everywhere else, makes the bounteous gifts of nature to her children to produce, instead of happiness and comfort, which they are naturally calculated to produce, in their stead misery, want, degradation and crime.

Return to Chicago

After my return to Chicago in May I worked upon the dredge I had worked upon the year before, and which was finishing up the deepening of the canal at Sagbridge. I worked there until the work was all finished. Soon after that three west parks were commenced, Douglas, Central and Humboldt parks …

I pass over the next few years as containing but little that would be of interest to the average reader. During those years I worked almost entirely in stone yards up to 1879. I worked at all kinds of work in these yards, including driving team.

During those years I was somewhat studious in my habits. I spent a considerable part of my spare time in the reading room of the public library. I attended quite a number of lectures, hearing Mr Bradlaugh, the English reformer and freethinker, Tilton, Bayard Taylor, Robert Collier, James Freeman Clarke, Joaquin Miller, Robert Ingersoll, James Parton and many others.

Marriage

In the fall of 1879 I paid a visit to England. I had intended for years to visit my native home, but financial embarrassments had interposed insurmountable obstacles. My principal reason for going was to fulfill a matrimonial engagement which I had entered into 11 years before …

I fulfilled the engagement referred to above and returned to the United States in February 1880. The fruit of my marriage has been two children, one a girl of two and a half years age, the other a boy who has been born since my imprisonment …

About this time, in the fall of 1880, I was informed of the calling of a meeting for the reorganisation of the Liberal League, the principal object of which organisation was the total separation of church and state. I attended the meeting at 54 West Lake Street, and after listening to the proceedings and the statement of the objects of the proposed society, I joined the society then and there.

A hall was rented at the corner of Halsted and Madison streets, and the society entered upon its mission. Lectures and discussions were the feature of the exercises. Theology, science, philosophy of every quantity and quality; political economy, social economy, domestic economy and, in fact, every kind of economy, and perhaps a little extravagance thrown in once in a while as a condiment, the diet being of a rather heavy character.

However, I became acquainted with a very intelligent, as well, I believe, as a very conscientious class of people. I took part in the discussions and became more or less prominent in the society, being elected financial secretary, vice-president and delegate to the national congress held at Milwaukee in the fall of 1889, which I attended, taking part in the proceedings and supporting the adoption of a labour plank in the platform or constitution of the society.

During the year 1883 labour meetings were held on the lake front and I was invited to speak there. I hesitated and asked what was the object. The person who asked me replied, “You are not afraid to speak in the cause of labour, are you?” I replied “No!” and I accordingly spoke there several times that fall, as well as at other parts of the city in the open air.

I had not at that time any preference for any labour organisation but thought the subject of labour offered a broad enough field for agitation. I spoke on the general question of the wrongs of labour. I continued my connection with the Liberal League.

In the following summer, having become a socialist by conviction, through listening to and taking part in the discussions at the Labor League, I became connected with the International Working People’s Association … I was a member of the American group, which held meetings in different halls in the city for the discussion of social and industrial economy …

May Day

I worked all … day … the 4th of May, taking a load of stone to Waldheim cemetery, which is a day’s work. I returned home, getting to the stable about half-past five in the evening, when I took care of my horses and went home to my supper, intending to go to [a] meeting at 368 West Twelfth Street.

Just before going into the house I brought an Evening News, and looking over the announcement column, I saw that there was a call there for the American group to meet at 107 Fifth Avenue. I hardly knew what to do. I knew that I ought to attend the American group, as I was treasurer of the group, and it was the period for election of officers, and I also knew that if it was a meeting that would require any money I ought to be there. I finally concluded to go there.

I left home about 7:20 … [and] it was close to 8 o’clock .., and yet at that time I did not know that there was going to be, or had been, a meeting called at the Haymarket that night … I found out after entering the room that the meeting had been called for the purpose of considering whether the American group should attempt the organisation of the sewing girls of the city, whose wages were pitilessly low.

[A] Mr and Mrs Parsons had anticipated that the group would vote in the affirmative and had taken the responsibility of having a number of hand-bills printed, which hand-bills were present at the meeting, or some of them. On asking what the meeting was called for, I was shown one of these bills, and was told that was what the meeting was called for … I therefore sat down and waited until Mr and Mrs Parsons should come.

After waiting some time they came, and we decided to try to organise the sewing girls of the city. Mr Parsons made a motion that the treasurer should pay over to the ladies the sum of $5, which should pay for the bills which had been printed, $4, and the other dollar should go for the car-fare and incidental expenses in looking around for halls, etc. This was agreed to. I paid the money and received a receipt for the same …

About this time [a] Mr Rau came in and said that he had been over to the Haymarket and there was a large crowd over there and no one to address them but [a] Mr Spies, and that he wanted Mr Parsons and I to go over there and assist him. We went over there, and Mr Spies, who was speaking, stopped in a short time after we arrived and introduced Mr Parsons. Mr Parsons spoke at considerable length, as has been reported.

When I was introduced by Mr Spies, the audience was getting smaller and I had told Mr Spies that it was hardly worth while for me to speak. He said I might make a short speech. I spoke for about fifteen to twenty minutes, when, without the slightest intimation or thought of such a thing, on turning my face to the south, I saw the police approaching.

They were, in fact, very close to me when I first saw them. I stopped talking and was undecided what to do. The meeting had been a more than ordinarily peaceable one, and had been getting smaller and more quiet up to that time, so that there were not more than two or three hundred at the most, in my opinion, when the police arrived.

A few minutes before this the weather had become somewhat threatening; a very large black cloud had rolled up from the north, causing quite a stampede. On this account Mr Parsons called out from the crowd that the meeting had better adjourn to Zepfs hall on the next corner. Someone replied that this hall was occupied, and then I said to the audience that I would be through in a minute or two and we would all go home.

I then began to draw my remarks to a close. Before I could do this, however, the meeting was invaded by the police, and Captain Ward, in a very loud voice cried out: “In the name of the people of the state of Illinois I command this meeting to peaceably disperse.”

Whatever had been my doubts at the intention of the police, they were at once removed and I at once thought that I would try to prevent any trouble between the meeting and the police. This was my object in staying on the wagon after I saw the police on the ground, and as Captain Ward uttered the above expression I stepped down toward him and replied: “Why captain, this is a peaceable meeting.”

I did this for the purpose, more than anything else, of trying to allay the excitement and nervousness under which he was labouring, and thus, by this conciliatory manner, showing to him that we were not disposed to be quarrelsome. Had the captain at the time met me in the same manner, even though he had still insisted on the dispersal of the meeting, I myself would have dispersed it, and believe all would have been well, but the captain, in a very violent manner, altogether ignoring my pacific attitude, turned to the police, saying as near as I can remember: “I command this meeting to disperse, and I call on you to disperse it now.” …

[As] the captain began to give the second command, I stepped from the wagon, leaping down at the south end of the wagon. As soon as I reached the ground I said: “All right, we’ll go,” or “Well then; we’ll go,” and walked towards the sidewalk. I think I had just stepped on the sidewalk when I saw the flash in the middle of the street and heard the explosion of the bomb. Almost if not entirely simultaneously with this explosion the police began to fire into the crowd.

The crowd ran in every direction. I happened to have my face turned to the south at the time of the explosion, and I ran in that direction. Immediately after the explosion, I was struck in the knee by a bullet, which after striking the bone, travelled upward and slightly across, and then came out making two holes. I felt the blow, but did not know what it was.

I continued … running as fast as I could, for the crowd who were falling down and crawling on the sidewalk, and calling: “O, God! O, God! Save us,” while volley after volley of bullets were poured into the wildly flying and unresisting mass. I finally reached the corner and ran east.

As soon as I felt myself safe I felt of my knee and found that my knee was wet. I knew that I was wounded. After going over to the south side to look for some of my companions of the evening, being anxious to discover what had become of them, I went and had my knee dressed.

The next morning I was arrested. On the afternoon of the same day, 5th of May, without having had an opportunity of seeing a friend or a lawyer, I, with A Parsons, A Spies, and Mr Schwab, was railroaded through a coroner’s jury, at which jury the assistant state’s attorney stood between the coroner and the several witnesses and, in whispers, prompted them what to say …

Of my subsequent trial and conviction the public are aware.

This is a truthful narrative of my life and my connection with the Haymarket affair, for which I am held as accessory to the act of a person with whom I have no connection or knowledge, and with whom no witness had ever during the whole of this trial, stated that I knew of his existence, and, as far as this record goes, who is as much a stranger to me as he is to Judge Gary or the state’s attorney.

Hoping the reader of this will calmly and dispassionately consider those facts, and feeling sure that whoever does so will feel that if any person can be connected and convicted as accessory to the act of some person unknown to the accused, the innocence of a crime is no shield or security to any member of society.

If this conviction is just, then whenever any crime is committed all that is necessary for the authorities to do is to find some persons obnoxious to them, present them to the jury and tell the jury that though they may not have committed the crime they are charged with, yet it is the opinion of the prosecution that it will be a good thing to get rid of them anyway, and this is the handy way of doing it.

Patient reader, I remain faithfully yours, Samuel Fielden.

T​he last week has shocked American lawmakers as their efforts to ban the Singaporean app, TikTok, under the auspices of being used by the Chinese to surveil Americans, has backfired terribly.

Millions of Americans marched to the App Store this week to download the Chinese equivalent of Instagram, Rednote, which translates to Little Red Book, an homage to the famous cultural revolution pocketbook of Chairman Mao’s Quotations.

​Is this not a clear case of a process turning a thing into its opposite, as the monumental German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel repeatedly describes it in the various moments of the Concept’s development in his Logic?

The American political class, unable to tame the contradictions of its decaying society, is forced to externalize onto a boogeyman ‘other’ the faults for the wretched conditions its system has put its people in. China is today’s boogeyman, the entity onto which all blame is placed.

It is not the U.S.’s decades long covert involvement in the drug trade, used to fund the contras and destroy poor communities at home, which has led to the fentanyl crisis of today. No, according to the fanciful imagination of the ideologues of empire, it is the Chinese who are to blame!

It is not the fault of massive monopolistic investment firms like Blackrock, Vanguard, and State Street for buying up property and farmland for speculation. No, it is the Chinese! You know, the country whose president quite literally emphasized that ‘houses are for living in, not for speculation,’ which is leading the speculation effort in the American housing market.

American propagandists turn the world on its head as a way to cope with the fact that it is the decaying, highly financialized capitalist system that has produced these outcomes for the people, not a foreign boogeyman.

The war on TikTok is but one part of an all-out assault on China by the American ruling class.

The irrationality of this attack could not be any clearer once one realizes that TikTok in the U.S. was forced to hand control over its servers from ByteDance to Oracle, a Texas-based company that quickly hired a litany of NATO and state department officials to do ‘content moderation’ on the app: a code word for censoring discourse that challenges their narratives, and proliferating those which defend it.

Our accounts at the Midwestern Marx Institute, the largest Marxist-Leninist think tank in the U.S. would get banned seven times, including our first account which amassed nearly half a million followers in less than a year.

But even with all the censorship on the American version of the app, this was not enough. Their control was tubular, and leakages to their censorship edifice became evident.

Videos showing the truth about key geopolitical events, especially the barbarity of the Zionist entity’s genocidal assault on Gaza, would continue to go viral, reaching millions of Americans. Such a disavowal of the ‘official narratives’ of the U.S. empire could not go unpunished. Banning the app completely was the only ‘solution’ the elite could come up with.

These are the actions of a desperate empire in the midst of a deep crisis of legitimacy.

As could have been expected, the intent to censor the truth by banning TikTok turned into its opposite, into the great migration onto the Little Red Book app by millions of American ‘refugees.’

Videos are now going viral of American creators saying quite explicitly that they will rather give their data to Xi Jinping than the U.S. government. The propaganda, clearly, is no longer working on a population struggling with paying bills and drowning in debt.

The development of the crisis of capitalism has turned the American dream into its opposite, into the American nightmare. This is an era of nodal points, where radical leaps into opposites are evident all over.

The TikTok ban is a clear case of an action whose intended result produces an opposite effect.

The hope to curb ‘Chinese surveillance of Americans’ on a Singaporean app backfired into a mass exodus to a Chinese app.

As we say in Cuba, le salió el tiro por la culata.

Belarus is set to hold its national elections on January 26, 2025, in a climate fraught with geopolitical tension. As the Russian Special Military Operation (SMO) continues unabated and Russian-EU-NATO relations plunge to historic lows, the spotlight is on Belarus, a nation also known as "White Russia." Its steadfast alliance with the Russian Federation, and the state's consolidation of major industries, have made it a focal point of criticism from liberal regimes within the EU-NATO.

The elections come at a particularly volatile moment for the Eastern European and Central Asian regions. Recent developments include the controversial annulment of Calin Georgescu's election by Romania's Constitutional Court—Georgescu being a vocal critic of NATO and Western liberal democracies. Meanwhile, Georgia is grappling with a burgeoning "color revolution" targeting Mikhail Kavalashvili, the Georgian President of the Georgia Dream Party. Both Georgescu and Kavalashvili have been labeled by their detractors as agents of Russian President Vladimir Putin, further inflaming anti-Russian rhetoric among pro-EU liberals.
​
Against this backdrop, the Belarusian elections are shaping up to be not just a domestic affair but a key event in the broader struggle for influence in the region, with global implications for the emergence of a multipolar world.

​Opposition figure and self-proclaimed "President-in-Exile," Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, has called on her supporters to boycott the vote, which bears striking similarities to strategies previously employed by pro-NATO factions in nations like Georgia, Ukraine, and Venezuela. This recurring tactic involves urging electoral boycotts, preemptively declaring fraud in the face of likely defeat, and orchestrating widespread protests to challenge the legitimacy of the elected government. The earliest examples of this included the Western backed, funded, and trained Otpor (later CANVAS) in Yugoslavia in the 1990s. This approach highlights a well-documented pattern utilized by leaders aligned with Western interests to undermine opposing regimes. The use of the National Endowment of Democracy by the United States to facilitate regime change was even documented by the Chinese government.

To fully comprehend the likely criticisms that will emerge from the opposition following the election, one must first examine the structural framework of Belarus’s government and the operational mechanics of its electoral process, which in turn helps to shed light on the narratives likely to dominate the post-election discourse.

Understanding Belarus’s Government Structure

The President
 
Often described as the "last Soviet-style republic," Belarus has retained many of the centralized processes it inherited from the Soviet era, with a strong emphasis on executive authority. Its political system, defined by the 1994 Constitution and subsequently amended through referenda, combines executive, legislative, and judicial elements. However, the presidency remains the central force in Belarusian governance.
 
The President oversees the implementation of domestic and foreign policy and acts as the guarantor of the Constitution, national independence, and territorial integrity. The role allows for some legislative oversight, allowing the holder to issue decrees and edicts that, under certain conditions, hold the force of law. The President can also appoint key officials, including the Prime Minister (with parliamentary approval), judges of the Supreme and Constitutional Courts, and members of the Central Election Commission. And of course, the President is the Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces, which gives an incredible amount of power due to the Union State with Russia.
 
This is why the West will be frothing at the mouth to bring Belarus to its knees, for its institutional links with the Russian Federation, Russian Military, and now hosting Russian nuclear weapons.
 
The National Assembly
 
The National Assembly of Belarus is a bicameral legislature consisting of the Council of the Republic and the House of Representatives, which have 64 and 110 representatives, respectively.
 
The House of Representatives - the lower chamber - is responsible for drafting and adopting laws; reviewing the annual state budget; ratifying the international treaties; and approving or denying the Prime Minister appointed by the President.
 
The Council of the Republic on the other hand consists of six members appointed by the president, with another 56 deputies that are elected by the regional councils across the six regions of across the country. It is this body that is empowered to approve or veto any of the laws that have been drafted by the House of Representatives. This body also reviews international treaties and any constitutional amendments that are made. It is also empowered to execute an impeachment process against the President.
 
The breakdown of the parties within the national assembly from the February 2024 House of Representative elections are as follows:
 
1. Belarusian Party “Belaya Rus” (White Russia): 46.4% (51 seats)
2. Republican Party of Labour and Justice: 7.3% (8 seats)
3. Communist Party of Belarus: 6.4% (7 seats)
4. Liberal Democratic Party: 3.6% (4 seats)
5. Independents: 36.3% (40 seats)
 
While independents are not officially affiliated with a particular party, many maintain close ties to established political groups, effectively extending the influence of major factions within the assembly.
 
The Council of Ministers
 
Operating under the leadership of the Prime Minister, the Council of Ministers functions as the executive branch, governing administrative matters and policy implementation, with cabinet members of the Prime Minister overseeing various departments such as defense, foreign affairs, the economy, and so forth. As such, they are the ones responsible for the development of the national economic, social, and other cultural policies; while also creating plans for the execution of laws and decrees as well as drafting the state budget.
 
The Judiciary Branch
 
Judicial appointments are selected by the President, however are entrusted to retain a level of independence in which their orders adhere to the laws of the republic and the constitution. It is divided by the Constitutional Court and the Supreme Court.
 
With 12 judges in its body, the Constitutional Court reviews the laws passed by the National Assembly in their compliance with the 1994 constitution. Of the 12 judges, six are appointed directly by the President whereas the other six are appointed by the Council of the Republic.
 
The Supreme Court is regarded as the highest judicial body for civil, criminal, and administrative cases; it serves to provide uniform application of the law and advisory for the lower courts.
 
The President also appoints the Prosecutor General to oversee the application of the law through the law enforcement bodies.
 
Local Councils and Executive Committees
 
Belarus is divided into six regions and the capital city of Minsk, each governed by regional councils and executive committees. While these entities manage local administrative matters, they are largely subordinate to the central government, a very Soviet-esque style.
 
Members of the local councils are elected by the citizens in their respective regions to deal with the nitty-gritty of their day-to-day life such as overseeing local budgets and administrative issues. They deal with the concerns of the average Belarusian citizen directly. The Executive Committee members are appointed directly by the President, simply to ensure the process of delegating the national policies at the regional and local levels runs smoothly as directed.
 
As seen, the Belarusian system emphasizes the role of the government in maintaining national unity, economic stability, and social cohesion, protecting Belarus from Maidan-style interference and anarchy.
Belarus hasn’t just held onto its Soviet-style government—it’s also preserved much of its economic framework from that era. Key industries like manufacturing, energy, and agriculture remain under significant state control, reflecting a centralized approach to economic management.

At the same time, Belarus is undergoing a technological transformation, boasting one of the most advanced tech sectors in Eastern Europe. Yet, despite these strides, the country’s economy is still firmly rooted in its industrial foundation, remaining a highly productive, manufacturing-driven nation.

A Soviet Legacy with Modern Adaptations

Manufacturing
 
Under the ownership of the national government, manufacturing hails as the backbone of the Belarusian economy, accounting for nearly 20% of GDP and employing approximately 25% of the workforce - predominately working on heavy machinery, automotive, industrial equipment, and chemical production.
 
BelAZ, or the Belarusian Automobile Plant, in Zhodino, is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of large dump trucks, especially in areas of construction and mining. On October 7th, 2024, the company announced it would begin the process of deploying universal robots to assist in the production.
 
According to Belarus Today, despite the international sanctions on the company as a result of the Russian SMO, in 2023 BelAZ sold 963 mining dump trucks to 19 different countries. Though the company did take a hard financial hit preventing profits, it was able to preserve its team without layoffs, survive the hit, and is now able to implement innovative projects for future production.
 
The revenue drawn from companies like BelAZ, Minsk Automobile Plant, and Minsk Tractor Works is accounted for in the state budget to further national interests.
 
Energy

Belarus’s energy sector, though far smaller in scale than those of its Russian and Ukrainian neighbors, plays a critical role in the country’s economy. Contributing to 10% of the country’s total GDP, the industry focuses on oil refining, natural gas distribution, and electricity generation, with 80% of its energy resources imported from Russia. Belarus refines Russian crude oil both for domestic use and export, creating a mutually beneficial economic relationship between the two nations.

Once a vital transit route for Russian energy to Western Europe, Belarus’s trade with the EU has sharply declined in recent years, largely due to European sanctions imposed after the disputed 2020 presidential election where Western countries refused to acknowledge President Lukashenko’s re-election. Despite these tensions—and even amid the construction of a dual-sided border wall—Belarus and Poland remain surprisingly interlinked. Poland continues to be Belarus’s largest trading partner within the EU, highlighting the complexities of their economic ties in a politically charged environment.

The Mozyr Oil Refinery operates under a joint ownership structure. The Belarusian government controls 43% of the refinery, while the remaining shares are held by Russian entities, including Slavneft—a collaboration between two energy giants, Rosneft and Gazprom Neft.

As of 2005, the refinery employed around 3,781 workers. The Mozyr Oil Refinery Workers Association (MNPZ) bolstered its workforce, which included 2,235 active employees and 700 retirees at the time. The Naftan Oil Refinery, located in the northeastern city of Novopolotsk, operates under full state ownership, with the Belarusian government maintaining control.

Together, these refineries highlight the intricate blend of state and Russian collaboration that defines Belarus’s energy infrastructure, illustrating the close economic ties between the two nations while cementing Belarus’s position as a key player in regional energy markets.

Agriculture

Remaining a cornerstone of the Belarusian economy well after the Soviet dissolution, agriculture plays a vital role in both employment and GDP contribution. Approximately 9% of the workforce is employed in the sector, which accounts for around 7% of the nation’s GDP.

Belarus’s fertile lands produce a range of essential goods, with grain, potatoes, dairy, and meat standing out as the sector’s primary outputs. The country is renowned for its dairy products, ranking among the world’s top exporters. Belarusian meat, cheese, butter, and milk products find eager markets abroad, especially in Russia and China, where they are hailed for their quality and competitive pricing.

While collective farming—a hallmark of the Soviet era—has largely declined, the state still maintains significant ownership over agricultural enterprises.

Per the 2023 Belarusian state census report, roughly 50% of Belarus’s workforce is employed by state-owned enterprises, reflecting the enduring influence of centralized economic planning in the country's post-Soviet structure. Meanwhile, around 45% of workers contribute to the private sector, which includes the service industry and a rapidly expanding IT sector. Belarus has positioned itself as a hub for technological innovation in Eastern Europe, with thriving software development and tech services industries that attract foreign clients, particularly in the EU and Russia.

Belarusian Hi-Tech Park

Often referred to as the “Silicon Valley of Eastern Europe”, the Hi-Tech Park (HTP) in the capital city of Minsk was established in 2005 as part of a strategic initiative by the Belarusian government to diversify the economy and attract foreign investment. This was an effort led by Valeriy Tsepkalo, a former advisor to President Lukashenko and a candidate in the 2020 Presidential elections.

The idea of HTP emerged as the government sought to capitalize on the growing global demand for IT services and software development. President Lukashenko signed Presidential Decree No. 12, which created a legal framework for the park. This decree granted companies within HTP significant tax exemptions and special legal conditions, making it an attractive and competitive destination for IT businesses.

The state played a crucial role in providing the initial funding, regulatory support, and infrastructure necessary for HTP's development. The state also retains ownership of the park, with its administration directly overseen by the Ministry of Communications and Informatization of Belarus.

HTP’s growth was remarkable, with the number of resident companies rising from a handful in its early years to over 1,000 by 2023. The park shapes its focus from traditional IT outsourcing to advanced fields like AI, blockchain, gaming, and cybersecurity.

The park's exports surged, reaching $3.2 billion in 2021, with the majority of products and services targeting markets in the EU, the U.S., and Russia. By 2023, HTP employed more than 60,000 professionals.

Despite its success, HTP faces challenges, particularly in the aftermath of the 2020 EU sanction package and the 2022 sanctions package for Belarus’s participation in the SMO.

Nonetheless, HTP is full of growth potential, especially considering Belarus’s ascension to the BRICS economic alliance which will take effect on January 1st, 2025, just weeks before the upcoming presidential elections.

Belarus’s economic and political framework—rooted in its Soviet heritage—has not only ensured stability since the dissolution of the USSR but has also shielded the nation from the economic upheaval experienced in Russia and Ukraine under Western-imposed shock therapy, namely the chaos of drug and sex cartels. This continuity has enabled Belarus to achieve economic growth despite its estrangement from the so-called rules-based international order.

The Belarusian people remain central to their nation’s economic sovereignty, reaping direct benefits from a model designed to prioritize collective prosperity and national independence. This stands in stark contrast to the U.S., where the unchecked forces of corporatism have eroded the living standards of the working class in favor of profit-driven oligarchies.

Yet, the very industries that empower Belarus’s populace and reinforce its sovereignty are perceived by Washington and NATO allies as ripe for subjugation. The prospect of dismantling Belarus’s self-reliant system in favor of submission to transnational corporate interests mirrors the devastation wrought in Ukraine, where entities like BlackRock have entrenched foreign control under the guise of reconstruction and reform.

In the face of NATO escalation of the conflict in Ukraine, it should come as no surprise that the forces that sought to lead a color revolution in 2020 will be more emboldened—possibly having learned from past mistakes to return with a much bigger bite as the stakes have only become much more precarious—for both the pro-NATO and pro-multipolarity forces.

The Belarusian Opposition: The Trite Romance of Liberal-Nationalism

When Lukashenko was announced as the winner of the 2020 presidential elections, the country erupted into unprecedented, historic protests. What was represented to be spontaneous mass discontent with electoral results quickly devolved into a state of emergency.

Three main oppositional figures were leading the anti-Lukashenko movement: Maria Kalesnikova, Veronika Tsepkalo (wife of Valeriy Tsepkalo), and Svetlana Tikhanovskaya. The three sought to craft a facade of the “liberal, progressive women united against the old Soviet dictator” to garner sympathy from international audiences, drenching their image entirely in a Hollywood-style trope of light versus dark; free pro-democracy against dark Soviet authoritarianism. At the forefront of this alliance was Svetlana Tikhanovskaya.

Tikhanovskaya emerged as the beacon of the Belarusian liberal-nationalist movement when her husband, Sergei Tikhanovsky—a popular YouTube blogger and vocal critic of Lukashenko—had been jailed for 15 days after participating in an unsanctioned protest against the Victory Day Parade. The event, deeply rooted in the Belarusian national identity, commemorates the country's liberation from Nazi Germany during WWII. With Tikhanovsky detained, Tikhanovskaya entered into the spotlight, registering as a presidential candidate and becoming the face of the opposition movement.

Hoping to unseat Lukashenko, a diverse coalition of pro-NATO political figures, civil society groups, and international supporters emerged and coalesced around Tikhanovskaya, using their connections to international contacts in the West to ensure her victory, whether by the ballot box or by a Maidan-style coup.

Tikhanovskaya largely remained vague about her plans to re-invent Belarus to the public, however, her campaign website featured a link to the Reanimation Package of Reforms for Belarus, created by the same NGOs that wrote the reforms package for Ukraine under Maidan. Her team had removed the link once critics highlighted the connections to Ukraine’s Maidan reforms, but Historic.ly’s Esha Krishnaswamy managed to archive the site on the Wayback Machine just before it was taken down.

The reforms sought to reshape Belarusian society by pivoting decisively toward the West, emphasizing integration into institutions like the EU and NATO. Central to this vision was reducing Russian influences, both culturally and politically. The measures proposed banning Russian media and curtailing other perceived Kremlin-aligned forces, including removing Russian as an official language—a significant shift given that an estimated 75% of Belarusians identify Russian as their native tongue. This pro-NATO agenda aimed to re-invent Belarus’s identity, creating an idea of Europeanness while distancing it from its historical ties to Moscow.

Perhaps most controversially, the reforms offered the overhaul of Belarus's economy by privatizing its vast state-owned industries in a bid to attract foreign investment. It went further to demand the reduction of Belarus's reliance on Russian energy imports, setting a cap on the Russian share and instead turning to the more costly alternative of U.S. liquefied natural gas (LNG), much like what has been laid out for Ukraine. Of course, Tikhanovskaya’s public-facing campaign slogans centered on “human rights” and “democratic values”, while little was spoken of the neoliberal economic reforms planned.

Then on August 9th, 2020, the presidential elections were held, where the incumbent President Alexander Lukashenko, in power since 1994, was officially declared the winner with around 80% of the vote. Soon after, coordinated protests broke out in the capital city of Minsk. Thousands poured out onto the streets demanding that Lukashenko step down and for new elections to be announced, a demand the opposition called for on August 8th, 2020, before the elections even took place.

The government responded with a harsh crackdown: security forces used tear gas, rubber bullets, and stun grenades to disperse protesters. Thousands were arrested as the government found evidence of Western meddling, and the events drew widespread condemnation, particularly from the US-EU-NATO axis.

The protestors adorned the symbols of the Belarusian nationalist movement, the Pahonia white-red-white flag with roots from Belarus’s occupation by first the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and then the German Nazi occupation which installed the Belarusian Central Rada puppet government, comprised of Nazi-selected Belarusian ultra-nationalists. Many were unaware of the roots of this flag, particularly the liberal youth from the capital who have long forgotten their history.

​However, while plastered across timelines on social media, the protestors proved to be a loud, but small minority. Pro-government supporters also took to the streets, waving the flag of their nation with its roots from the Soviet period and chanting “za Belarus” (to Belarus) as a retort to the opposition’s chant “zhivye Belarus” (long live Belarus). And though the opposition tried to manufacture a feminist image of themselves, it was Belarusian women who organized many of the pro-government demonstrations—another group welcoming President Lukashenko to the 2020 Women’s Forum.

There was a clear divide among the population to the responses of the protests. Much of the proponents of the opposition’s campaigns were young, middle class city university students while the government’s supporters were older, former Soviet workers - many of whom condemned the protests for waving the symbols of the Nazi-installed occupational government of the Belarusian Central Rada.

​Soon after the protests began, the Coordination Council for Tikhanovskaya’s campaign was formed to force Lukashenko out by manufacturing civil unrest and seeking recognition from the EU as the legitimate transitional government.

Lithuania was the first to formally recognize Tikhanovskaya as the elected leader of the country, offering her official diplomatic status where she remains based today. Soon after, the Czech Republic and Poland followed suit, where Poland then built a border wall in the forest connecting Belarus and Poland. Additionally, the European Parliament and the Council of Europe had been vocal in recognizing Tikhanovskaya’s claim of leadership of the Belarusian people, despite that even US-backed Zubr ‘Bizon’ and Chestniye Lyudi election monitoring groups reported from exit polls that Lukashenko won with at least 61.7% of the vote.

While Tikhanovskaya claims leadership over her home country from abroad, a trial was held against her in absentia in Minsk where she was sentenced to 15 years in jail for high treason and conspiracy to seize power. She has also faced scrutiny from some of her own former supporters after it was revealed on ONT TV that her campaign had embezzled funds intended for the jailed protestors and their families, to which they had not received the intended financial assistance as advertised. With her reputation tarnished outside of the eyes of pro-EU extremists, Tikhanovskaya relies primarily on the support of NATO governments for any legitimacy.

On May 28th, 2024 Belarusian Radio Racyja, financed by the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the U.S. Embassy in Poland, reported that 6,700 Belarusian citizens participated in the Coordination Council’s elections where Pavel Latushko, former Minister of Culture, was declared the Deputy Head of the United Transitional Cabinet of Belarus, led by Tikhanovskaya. Latushka has taken to social media (x.com/@PavelLatushka) to urge EU leaders to oppose the Belarusian government and lend words of support to the Ukrainian Army, which is currently engaged in the killing of Belarusian soldiers.

The Belarusian Nationalist Movement: Collaborationists in the 21st Century

More than just re-adopting the symbols of the day, the Belarusian nationalist movement continues its struggle to the 21st century through a marriage with European liberalism —reinventing itself to be more digestible to the European liberal of today, while still carrying over its central ideological values.

Founded in 1943, the German Nazi-backed political entity known as the Belarusian Central Rada (BCR) projected itself as the legitimate Belarusian government, rejecting Soviet authority, albeit subordinate to the shadow of occupation forces; parallel to Tikhanovskaya and Europe’s assertion of its legitimacy today over the Lukashenko government.

The BCR was led by Radaslau Astrouski, who believed through aligning the Belarusian nationalist movement with its German fascist counterparts, they would be supported in creating an independent Belarusian republic.

The nationalists framed their collaboration with the Germans as a necessary tactic to fend off communism and Soviet authority, sharing German values of anti-Russian sentiment. Nonetheless, the Germans still greatly limited their ability to express their own national symbols and rhetoric, only going so far as to allow anti-Soviet policies and repression.

With the German retreat in 1944, the BCR dissolved, and its leaders fled to the West. In exile, they worked to maintain their vision of Belarusian nationalism, leveraging platforms such as Radio Free Europe to oppose the Soviet Union. However, their collaborationist history tarnished their reputation within Belarus, where they were widely discredited.

Nonetheless, in the sanctuary of the West, they were allowed to work against the Soviet Union through media apparatuses like Radio Free Europe and pro-NATO civil society. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, organizations like the Belarusian Democracy Movement and the Belarusian National Front Party continue the legacy of the Belarusian Central Rada, under great restriction due to Belarus’s laws against the promotion and rehabilitation of Nazism.

Established in October 1988, the Belarusian National Front Party (BNF) became the first oppositional party in the country, emerging as a response to the chaos within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

It was the first party since the German occupation to use the Pahonia flag and consolidate the forces of pro-European liberals and Catholic, anti-communist nationalists. The party had little relevance and success until the August 2020 protests, in which the party affiliate media channel NEXTA gained notoriety as it covered the events in Belarus, including organizing protest meeting locations and promoting oppositional figures.

NEXTA was formed out of Poland in 2015 by Stepan Putilo, a Belarusian national who relocated for university studies. An ardent critic of Lukashenko’s government, Putilo used the digital space to spread his message to other young, university-aged Belarusians much like the Belarusian nationalists before him had done with Radio Free Europe, creating more alternative, pro-NATO media. In 2020, journalist Armen Gasparyan claimed that Putilo’s great-grandfather was a collaborationist by the name of A.G. Putilo during the 1941 German occupation of the country. As a result of Putilo’s digital participation in the 2020 color revolution attempt, he has been labeled a terrorist with an outstanding warrant for his arrest.

​While Putilo remains active, his former colleague Roman Protasevich met a starkly different fate. Protasevich, who between 2014 and 2015 served in the ultranationalist Azov Battalion during the conflict in the Donbass region, was arrested in May 2021 after Belarusian authorities forcibly diverted a Ryanair flight he was aboard to Minsk, citing a bomb threat. The global reaction was swift, with widespread condemnation and sanctions against Belarus. Ryanair’s CEO, Michael O’Leary, denounced the incident as “state-sponsored piracy.”

The likes of ultra-nationalists like Stepan Putilo and Roman Protasevich are among the many who Tikhanovskaya calls political prisoners while omitting insights into the nature of their crimes.  Tikhanovskaya decried the arrest of former Azov Battalion member Protasevich, calling Belarus “North Korea in the middle of Europe,” and demanded an investigation into the landing with stricter sanctions to be imposed on Belarus, a call that borderlines treason.

But while having minimal political history herself, Tikhanovskaya is well embedded with, and led by, key figures in the Belarusian nationalist movement. Sitting as her chief advisor is Franak Viacorka, who served previously as the Creative Director for the Minsk bureau of the CIA-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and is currently a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council, the pro-NATO think tank. Viacorka’s father, Vincuk Viacorka, was a foundational member of the far-right BNF party and a key player in Belarusian nationalist movements since the 1970s.

As the liberal-nationalist forces united together in a campaign to isolate and balkanize Russia, fanning the flames of the conflict of NATO aggression against Russia, the Belarusian opposition braces itself for a renewed campaign to seize power in the Eastern European country as they have prematurely condemned the electoral process altogether.

Belarus Joins BRICS: A Step Towards Multipolarity and Sovereignty

In a significant geopolitical move, on January 1st, Belarus formally joined the BRICS alliance, signaling its intent to deepen ties with the emerging multipolar world order. The timing is pivotal. With elections on the horizon, the move bolsters President Alexander Lukashenko's pursuit of sovereignty and resistance to Western sanctions, particularly as the US-EU-NATO wages its proxy war in Ukraine.

For ordinary Belarusians, the impact could manifest in the form of increased trade opportunities and investments, much of which has been stagnant since the 2020 and 2022 sanctions package. The emerging alliance that has challenged the rules-based-order is still precarious and has yet to fully form, but for Belarus the BRICS alliance offers a role in the rise of sovereign civilizational states and a lifeline outside of Euro-Atlantic hegemony.

With its ascension to BRICS as well as its position in the Union State with Russia, eroding Belarusian sovereignty with a Maidan style coup becomes all the more essential in the broader campaign against Russia. As such, the opposition at the service of NATO governments have to be all the more emboldened to undermine the country’s sovereignty. The pushback and media campaign that will ensue in the lead up to the elections will be inorganic, perfectly crafted political theater. Time will tell if the small country can once again withhold its own Maidan from brewing.

The same forces that seek to undermine Belarusian sovereignty, reducing it to a vassal in the broader conflict against Russia, are those who simultaneously exploit the livelihoods of everyday Americans. The Biden administration’s policies have already plunged Ukraine into turmoil, marking a somber chapter in the region's history. Meanwhile, American taxpayers are drained of resources desperately needed for their own communities, diverted instead to fuel the profits of the military-industrial complex and line the pockets of Ukraine’s corrupt comprador elite.

As Belarus stands firm against globalist efforts to subjugate its independence, Americans might find a shared struggle in this defiance. The same adversaries that assail Belarus also erode the well-being of the American people, plundering both nations in their pursuit of unchecked power.