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.
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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]
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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
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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.