Introduction

Environmental law scholars have often criticized Christianity for promoting a capitalistic worldview. Scholarly debates frequently highlight the anthropocentric tendencies within Christian theology.[1] Some argue that traditional Christian doctrine places humanity above nature, reinforcing hierarchical and extractive relationships consistent with capitalist exploitation. The source of this contentious is to be found in Genesis 1:28 of the Holy Bible, which reads, “God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.”[2] The word “dominion” creates presumptions, and rightly so. It is important to think about whether human beings have complete control over the environment. In an age of environmental crisis, such a word will cause havoc. Therefore, the question arises as to whether human beings should have control over natural resources without restrictions.

Interpreting the Church Through Pope Francis

The scriptures should not be read in silos but with the exhortations and encyclicals of the Catholic Church. Much water has passed, and the Church stands today with a radically distinct position on the environment. Ignoring ecclesiastical evolution at the expense of scriptures will give a half-eyed view of it. Pope Francis, who passed away on April 21, 2025, was considered by many as a reformer of the Church. In his encyclical, Laudato Si,[3] which translates as ‘praise be to you”, he conveyed a prophetic message to the world, irrespective of faith. Francis selected the theme “care for our common home,”[4] which can be discerned as the need to care for the environment. Much of it is inspired by St. Francis of Assisi, the Catholic saint after whom he derives his name, and a brief part of it from the contributions made by his predecessors in the domain.[5]

Francis’ Concern

Francis drew from Assisi when he referred to the Earth as ‘mother’ and qualified her as the ‘sustainer of human beings.’ Here, the Biblical notion of ‘dominion’ faces its first backlash. He suggested that anthropogenic activities have increased exponentially in comparison to human evolution.[6] The effective control of material advancements over human beings is a cause of worry. It perpetuates capitalism and can be well described through Marxist philosophical materialism, where the world is inherently ‘material.’ Marx wrote, “it is impossible to separate thought from matter that thinks. Matter is the subject of all changes.”[7] Francis’ lament is also expressed at the lack of efforts being made to solve the environmental crisis, although he believed that people are more aware than before.[8]

Climate Change: Reading Francis with Marx

Francis’ concern for pollution is rooted in its impact on the poor. He has argued that while technologies used in agriculture or industries may benefit some, it is the poor who suffer the most from the environmental costs. Francis believed that technology that is supposed to improve lives often ends up worsening it. While he addressed pollution, he is unique in emphasising “throwaway culture.”[9] In doing so, Francis believed that consumerism led to pollution. Marx’s opinion on consumption as an alienating[10] tool would give more clarity to Francis’ statement. Francis believed that throwaway culture is responsible for creating inequity in the society. An element of justice was present in his arguments if looked at from the lens of social consciousness as a medium of bringing change in society.

Francis’ views on climate change were equally interesting. He said, “the climate is a common good, belonging to all and meant for all.”[11] At the outset, Francis’ argument appeared as concerning as it seemed to align with the Global North. However, he also opined that the powered elites are unwilling to work for mitigation by using the phrase, “masking the problems.”[12] Interestingly, he returned to his earlier stance of blaming the consumption patterns and “models of production.” Essentially, Francis viewed climate change as a production-consumption dialectic.

Water Crisis: Through the Lens of Inequity

A significant amount of Francis’ work was concerned with the issue of the availability of drinking water. Francis talked about the habits of the “wealthier sectors of society” with regards to wasting water.[13] He also showcased the inequitable distribution of drinking water between the Global North and the South, particularly with the African experience of “water poverty.”[14] What is interesting to note is Francis’ emphasis on the privatisation of water as a violation of “universal human rights.”[15] Multinational corporations remained his constant target. Francis relied heavily on the Marxist concept of equality. Marx’s famous remark that if the distribution of resources was made according to need and not equality, it would lead to the crossing of "the narrow horizon of bourgeois right” found a resemblance in Francis’ understanding.[16]

Biodiversity: A Realist Approach

Pope Francis wrote on the issue of biodiversity, arguing that, “a sober look at our world shows that the degree of human intervention, often in the service of business interests and consumerism, is actually making our earth less rich and beautiful.”[17] He argued against the idea that natural resources should be treated as objects of exploitation and was concerned about mass extinction.[18] The Biblical analogy of Genesis 1:28 came under severe scrutiny with the former Pontiff’s argument.[19] Francis’ conservationist approach also found a place where he wanted “human intervention” to mitigate the crisis.[20] Francis spoke of a “delicate balance” that should be struck between economic pursuits and biodiversity conservation.[21] Francis’ concern with having an impact assessment for biodiversity loss is also to be noted, which he said has become less important.[22]

Environmental Crisis and Social Disintegration: An Unholy Wedlock

While Francis seemed to be a conservationist, one must look at his intense concern for humankind. Both environmental distress and vulnerable human beings were equally significant for him. The well-grounded implications of environmental degradation on human lives found a substantive place in his discourse. The angle he took while elaborating can be found previously to some extent. He argued that “throwaway culture,”[23] “privatisation,”[24] and “current models of development”[25] remained the primary areas responsible for this unholy wedlock. Francis said that through privatisation, virgin nature has been replaced by “artificial tranquillity,”[26] albeit only for the privileged few. Addressing inequality, Francis argued that mitigation of environmental crisis is only possible through social change.[27] This makes an interesting parallel with Marx’s conception of consciousness as a “dialectical unity of human thought and practice.”[28] Ontologically, Marx would argue that humans approach the world through what they conceive on a mental plane and perceive through their senses, both being inseparable.[29]  Francis said that “centres of power” are far off from the vulnerable.[30] Hence, it would be a hypocrisy to be concerned about the environment without caring for our fellow beings. He would urge humanity to hear “both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor.”[31]

Global South as a Victim

Francis argued that an “ecological debt” existed between the developed and developing world.[32] He blamed multinational corporations that were involved in the unabated exploitation of natural resources in third-world countries.[33] It partly had to do with the imprecise legal regimes that most of these countries have in regulating the corporates.[34] He also exposed the dichotomous attitude of human beings to be concerned about the environment and practise harmful consumption practices at the same time.[35] Francis believed that technology is not enough to solve the crisis without having any “deep change,” going back to consciousness.[36] Having dealt with the major problems looming before humanity, he hoped for a positive change. He believed that certain mitigation measures were being taken, but he also opined that they were not sufficient.[37] This founds reflection in the lament of Francis by quoting Pope John Paul II, “if we scan the regions of our planet, we immediately see that humanity has disappointed God’s expectations.”[38]

Critical Analysis

Francis was a non-traditional environmental thinker, in this author’s opinion. Though he hailed from a non-legal background, his contributions brought a tectonic shift in the existing environmental jurisprudence. He appeared as a Marxist scholar when he identified inequity, mode of production, multinational corporations and consumerism as fundamental problems leading to the crisis. He was also an uncompromising conservationist, albeit linking it to the problem of social distress. In other words, he would advocate for the rights of the Indigenous people and the marginalized in accessing what is their own while criticizing corporations as exploitative. Francis also brought the element of power into the discourse when he said that the downtrodden are far from the “centres of power.”[39] He advocated for the rights of the Global South when he talked about ecological debt that exists vis-à-vis the North. Systemic and historic oppression by the North had comprised a large chunk of legal and non-legal discourses. At the same time, he was aware that economic development was imminent, but he believed that unchecked development would lead to irreversible damage to humanity. What is also interesting is Francis’ emphasis on social consciousness as a precursor to solving environmental concerns. He had a unique way of reconciling dialectical differences on an argumentative plane. In other words, Francis argued that consumerism should be blamed more than popular narratives like “population growth” albeit he qualified this by saying that “imbalances in population density” should also be attended to.[40] He can be criticized for being inconsistent in some aspects, but teleologically, it is difficult to rebut his arguments. Francis’ arguments cannot be looked at in isolation but through his lived experience as a member of the Society of Jesus for around 55 years.[41] The Society of Jesus, also known as the Jesuits, is a Catholic religious order founded by St. Ignatius of Loyola.[42] Historically, they have contributed to environmental awareness through academic and philanthropic activities.[43] That being reflected through the former head of the Catholic Church left an overarching impression on the world.

Conclusion

Though this author faces difficulty in assigning Francis to any existing school of jurisprudence, it can be argued that Francis’ arguments were unique, sophisticated, and carefully crafted. He was both a critic and a pragmatist, a conservationist and an advocate for the third-world, and he balanced these competing tendencies through his linguistic abilities and emotive expression for humanity. This author believes that Francis’ environmental jurisprudence is distinct because he offers an element of hope to the readers. It is also unique because when Francis talked about societal change, he adopted a bottom-up approach to look at the crisis. In other words, Francis’ audience was not the nation-states but also individuals, both being equally relevant in awakening social consciousness. As responsible individuals sharing a common place of habitancy, the late Pontiff’s appeal could bring fundamental change in the way of looking at the world. It would result in individuals putting effort into making the world a better place.

Endnotes
[1] Ph Bourdeau, The man−nature relationship and environmental ethics, 72 J. ENVIRON. RADIOACT. 10, (2004).
[2] The Holy Bible, Genesis 1:28 (Nov. 8, 2024), https://openbible.com/pdfs/cpdv.pdf.
[3] Papa Francesco, Encyclical Letter Laudato Si’ of the Holy Father Francis on Care For Our Common Home VATICAN PRESS, 3 (2015).
[4] BOURDEAU, supra note 1, at 10.
[5] Emma Green, The Pope’s Moral Case for Taking On Climate Change, THE ATLANTIC (Nov. 10, 2024), https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/06/pope-francis-encyclical-moral-climate-change/396200/.
[6] FRANCESCO, supra note 3, at 15.
[7] KARL MARX, SELECTED WORKS 329 (Progress Publishers 1896).
[8] FRANCESCO, supra note 3, at 16.
[9] Id. at 17.
[10] Scott G. McNall, You are what you eat: Some thoughts on consumption and Marxist class theory, 45 Soc. Thought. Res., (1990).
[11] FRANCESCO, supra note 3, at 16.
[12] Id. at at 21.
[13] Id. at 22.
[14] Id. at 23.
[15] Id. at 14.
[16] 3 KARL MARX AND FREDERICK ENGELS, SELECTED WORKS: CRITIQUE OF THE GOTHA PROGRAMME 19 (Progress Publishers 1966).
[17] FRANCESCO, supra note 3, at 26.
[18] Id. at 25.
[19] HOLY BIBLE, supra note 2.
[20] FRANCESCO, supra note 3, at 25.
[21] Id. at 28.
[22] Id. at 26.
[23] Id. at 31.
[24] Id. at 31.
[25] Id. at 31.
[26] Id. at 32.
[27] Id. at 34.
[28] PAULA ALLMAN, ON MARX: AN INTRODUCTION TO THE REVOLUTIONARY INTELLECT OF KARL MARX 32 (Brill 2007).
[29] FRANCESCO, supra note 3, at 34.
[30] FRANCESCO, supra note 3, at 35.
[31] Id. at 35.
[32] Id. at 36.
[33] Id. at 37.
[34] Id. at 39.
[35] Id. at 40.
[36] Id. at 43.
[37] Id. at 42.
[38] John Paul II, General Audience, Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2 (2001)
[39] FRANCESCO, supra note 3, at 35.
[40] Id. at 36.
[41] IGNATIUS OF LOYOLA, THE CONSTITUTIONS OF THE SOCIETY OF JESUS AND THEIR COMPLEMENTARY NORMS: A COMPLETE ENGLISH TRANSLATION OF THE OFFICIAL LATIN TEXTS (Institute of Jesuit Sources Saint Louis 1996).
[42] IGNATIUS, supra note 42, at XV.
[43] Ignacio García S.J., The Contributions of European Jesuits to Environmental Sciences, 3(4) J. JESUIT STUD. 576 (2016).

The irony of the postmodern age, for Baudrillard, is its obsession with cultural heritage at the same time as it invents increasingly advanced ways of destroying any remnants of culture. An obsession with archaeology and an industry-level excavation of fossils and relics operates in tandem with a decentralised techno-capitalism driven by endless reproduction and the commodification of the virtual sphere, in so doing eradicating the very idea of an ‘origin’. Cultural heritage or the linear genealogy of civilisation is a contemporary invention which retroactively frames any origin according to malleable, economically contingent necessities.

Today, we are obsessed with history just as much as we are eradicating the stability of the past itself. This is to some extent what can be called the ‘fetish for fossils’ that Baudrillard diagnoses: we fixate on fossils as a method of disavowing the temporal destructiveness of modern industry. The rise in popularity of new accounts of the history of mankind, such as those of Graham Hancock, of perplexing original events that triggered the agricultural revolution - including lost cities, tectonic plate shifts, or even alien visitors - are testaments to the indifference with which capitalism infiltrates not only political structures, but temporal categories, reworking what came before whilst propelling us towards an unimaginable future. Behind the fossil we find not only the cancellation of the future, but the destruction of the past.

The underlying implication of our fetish for fossils, of our reconstruction of the past and the future, is that when we are confronted with something terrible, with the possibility of an end, of a limit, or of a catastrophe, we inevitably displace this recognition. Every confrontation with the end is in its very conception re-formatted, rendered digestible and without any serious threat. There is in this perhaps a justification for reviving the Deleuzean category of territorialisation. Every movement away from the confines of a system, towards its limit point, inevitably comes to be registered as an internal movement, as something preconfigured by the system itself. The absolute, external limit to the system of global capitalism is a spectral limit, internally reproduced and relativised as a point of production.

Even the so-called ‘end of globalisation’ with Trump’s tariff frenzy, which could not help but shake the global stock market, will only lead to a period of recalibration rather than capitulation. Trump does not denounce global capitalism, he simply wants it to work more in his favour. Whilst some long-standing industries may suffer, what we are most likely to see towards the end of Trump’s second term is a new advancement in even more aggressively exploitative international organisations. The right likes to point out an apparent irony: the left vehemently disavows global capitalism, and yet they hate the very man whose tariff policy is bringing this same global economic interdependence to an end. There is of course a certain level of truth in this, but the right also misses an important point. Trump is not an anti-capitalist. He is the highest culmination of the Jameson-model of postmodern capitalism, where capitalism will even reject itself as a temporary sacrifice in order to be reconstructed in increasingly powerful and disorienting ways. Globalisation, just like anti-globalisation, are both convenient tools - to be used or discarded whenever necessary - of the same late capitalist form of circulation.
​
Whatever we mean by the end, then, it is figured only whilst being simultaneously mis-figured. We recognise the possibility of something terrible over the horizon by blindly turning our attention elsewhere, by distorting this terrible limit-point. In this sense, one of the best postmodern treatises of the last few decades is Michael Bay’s Transformers film franchise (more precisely, the first two instalments, after which the crucial component of imagination that attracts both children and adults to sci-fi was lost).

The general brilliance of the idea of Transformers is the way that the cultural distinction between human and non-human is ultimately distorted. Both Autobots and Decepticons are presented as distant aliens of a futuristic civilisation, so advanced yet so different that humanity would be unable to comprehend it. Transformers are conceived as the highest embodiment of alienness, infinitely beyond and constitutively irreducible to anything we might consider human. Yet at the same time, the Transformers are rendered digestible and negotiable by the fact that, from the moment they appear on earth, they take on the most familiar forms of human industry (as cars, helicopters, planes, and even as humans themselves). In other words, the limit of humanity can only be framed as a mode or expression of humanity itself.

In Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen, a similar sleight of hand occurs. The Transformers had set the foundation of human civilisation long before the humans themselves appeared to do so: they provided extraterrestrial technology and built the pyramids that humanity protected for millennia. The ‘completion’ of this human civilisation is, in the plot of the film, to then eradicate humanity, to use the pyramids as a harvesting machine for the energy of the sun, in order to advance the real civilisation, the only civilisation that truly exists, that of the Decepticons. Human civilisation, in other words, was installed as a temporary discrepancy in civilisation as a whole, a side-effect that was to be eradicated in order for civilisation as such to continue.

In a Medieval metaphysical fashion, then, the Transformers films frame the same truth as the New Testament doctrine or as Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica: the end of civilisation is only the prelude to civilisation proper. Here, however, we recognise the inherent logic of fetishism. In the very moment that a limit is recognised, we displace it and fixate on something adjacent to this limit, something that conceals this limit.

I would argue that we can see this problem most clearly in our modern obsession with psychology. Psychology does not simply investigate individual human behaviour within a greater social setting. It fixates on the individual so that it doesn’t have to confront the social. The ‘psychologising’ and pathologising of individuality conceals, or inhibits, the more serious question of the total system in which any individual psychology is expressed. Trump is perhaps the most current example of this. Rather than admitting that Trump is the symptom of a more objective systematic discrepancy in the liberal democratic order, the liberal media fixates on the psychological profile that accompanies his policies: whether he has some narcissistic disorder, or if his shifting geopolitical stances reveal nothing more than a bipolar personality tendency.

There is a popular trend of contrasting Trump’s tariff reforms with the 2008 financial crash. 2008, it is claimed, was on the whole more ‘impersonal’. It was not the action of one man, but the product of precarious financial speculation, exploitative lending practices including credit default swaps, and an intentional lack of market transparency. The forced mass bailouts by governments and banks, such as the Federal Reserve or the European Central Bank, and the collapse of the booming housing market were all representative of a crisis without a figurehead. The irresponsible Wall Street risk management strategies and the betting of banks against their own clients do of course suggest that the 2008 crisis was not everybody’s responsibility, but also that it was just as little the responsibility of a single man. Trump, it is instead claimed, has sparked an economic crisis through his personal derangements and unstable personality.

But this is an entirely false opposition. Trump’s psychology is as much a factor of a generalised financial system as the 2008 crash. The fact that a single man can cause so much economic instability speaks less about the man himself, than the fact that the system as a whole was not stable in the first place. Yet instead of recognising this, the liberal tactic is to pathologise Trump as a villain in an otherwise effective system, to view him as an isolated agent, and in so doing to conceal a broader, problematic economic structure which allows for figures like Trump to profit from whatever personal narcissistic traits he might have.

We cling to psychology as the scapegoat which allows us to avoid a real confrontation with the antagonisms of the modern capitalist market, as if everything would be fine if only Trump had not been born. This fixation on psychology deploys the exact same logic as the orthodox, Freudian mechanism of fetishism. The fetish-object, such as a foot or a shoe, acts as a disavowal of the reality of castration. It allows us to acknowledge a state of things and in so doing act as if this weren’t really the case. The fetish is a stagnation, the last thing seen before the real situation is violently exposed. Today, psychology acts as the economic translation of this fetish. It is the last thing we see, the final bulwark, before a more traumatic realisation of the fact that something in the system as a whole is wrong. Psychology maintains the belief that the problem really is people, rather than the collective economic or ideological structures in which people operate.

The Netflix and YouTube obsession with serial killers and criminals is an extension of this same fetish. A false opposition is staged in documentaries and TV shows exploring the inner workings of conveniently termed ‘deranged’ minds: between a homogenous, problem free population and its abnormal exception. But the fiction of this consistent body politic is itself the product of necessary exceptions: the serial killer is required as the ‘internal outsider’ producing the illusion of an otherwise functional population. In order to continue operating through all of its contradictions, the social furnishes its own undigestible remainder, it produces the violent anomaly which allows us the think that the social is otherwise functioning well.

Like the shoe-fetish, the psychology-fetish is a subjective fixation that acts as the last, desperate disavowal of an objective, systematic antagonism that psychology conceals. When confronted with the fact that something on the global economic scale is wrong, the easy solution is to blame certain unstable or exploitative individuals.
When Trump narrowly missed being assassinated in the summer of 2024, this same false binary emerged. The most pressing media question was whether the shooter was politically motivated, or nothing more than a madman. It seems, in other words, that we’ve missed the crucial Deleuzean insight: madness is itself a political category. Whilst Deleuze and Guattari recognise schizophrenia as the obverse of capitalism, as the intensity that is both prefigured by capitalism and yet irreducible to its internal logic, Mark Fisher extends this ideological dimension of mental illness to include the proliferation of ADHD, depression, and anxiety. The diagnostic and psychiatric insistence on personality disorders and a plethora of psychological disturbances produced by faulty cognitive feedback systems or biochemical imbalances, obscures the social and economic antagonisms that produce psychological discrepancies as an inevitable after effect.

We would prefer to think mankind as flawed rather than think the system in which he operates as flawed. Psychology is the ultimate tool for rampant capitalism: people are framed as faulty objects of scientific study, and the problem of people is people themselves. At the same time, unstable economic processes are left alone. Psychology, it is claimed, explains human behaviour, and since psychology does not ask any economic questions, we conclude that economics can be disregarded. Nothing is more convenient than this for aggressive economic practices! In order to really make sense of people in the 21st century, psychology should be dethroned, and exposed for the ideological function that it really provides for the status quo. 

Author
Rafael Holmberg is a PhD student (philosophy-psychoanalysis) and Political Writer. Focus on UK, US, Europe politics, German Idealism, political theory, Freud, Lacan, culture, literature, neuroscience, and anything related.

​The immigration issue in the United States is often framed as a debate over border security, economic impact, or cultural identity. Politicians like Senator Ted Cruz emphasize border security, warning of "caravans" of migrants overwhelming U.S. checkpoints, as he did in a 2021 Fox News interview.[1] The U.S. Chamber of Commerce highlights immigration’s economic impact, claiming it boosts GDP by billions annually.[2] Cultural commentators like Tucker Carlson argue that immigration dilutes American identity, a point he reiterated in a 2023 X post.[3]

But the truth is far darker: immigration, particularly illegal immigration, is fundamentally about slavery—corporate slavery, wage slavery, and the modern slave trade. This is a narrative that needs to be exposed and understood by every American.

Illegal Immigration and Corporate Slavery

First, let’s clarify the scope of this discussion. We are focusing specifically on illegal immigration and mass labor migration—often referred to as labor dumping—not on immigration as a whole. This is not a conversation about highly skilled professionals, such as doctors from India or engineers from China, who voluntarily migrate for well-compensated positions.

The primary source of illegal and mass immigration comes from the war-torn and destabilized regions destabilized by Western imperialism—Central America, the Caribbean, and parts of Africa and the Middle East. Consider Honduras: after the U.S.-backed coup in 2009 ousted President Manuel Zelaya, violence and poverty skyrocketed, with homicide rates hitting 85 per 100,000 by 2011 and 66% of the population in poverty by 2016.[5][6] This destabilization, which can include regime changes, resource extraction, and economic sanctions, meets the legal definition of genocide as outlined in the Geneva Conventions, as it systematically destroys the conditions necessary for people to thrive in their own countries.[7] Scholarly work, like Frank’s analysis of U.S. policy in Honduras, ties this to migration surges, while Grandin’s research frames it as a broader pattern of imperialist aggression.[8][9]

When these individuals flee, they often seek refuge in the very nations responsible for their displacement. Desperate to survive, they cross borders without the resources or education required for legal entry. This desperation makes them vulnerable to exploitation. Many turn to coyotes—human traffickers who operate as modern-day slavers—to facilitate their journey. U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported over 2.3 million border encounters in 2022, many facilitated by these traffickers.[10] Once in the U.S., they are often sold into workplaces that exploit their labor, paying them below minimum wage, denying them labor rights, and subjecting them to inhumane conditions. ICE investigations label such cases forced labor, with agriculture as a prime example.[11] Bales’ global slavery studies highlighted how undocumented status amplifies this vulnerability.[12] This is corporate slavery, plain and simple.

Wage Slavery and Labor Dumping

Even for those who immigrate legally, the system is rigged to exploit. Wage slavery is rampant in industries that rely on immigrant labor. The Economic Policy Institute found H-2A farmworkers earned a median $11.50 per hour in 2020—below a living wage—often with illegal deductions for housing or tools.[13] Corporations engage in labor dumping, a practice designed to undermine unions and drive wages down to the bare legal minimum. In meatpacking, where immigrants make up 51% of workers, real wages fell 6% from 2000 to 2020, dropping from $25,500 to $35,700 annually when adjusted for inflation, as union membership plummeted.[14] This creates a race to the bottom, where both immigrants and native-born workers are forced to compete for jobs under increasingly exploitative conditions. Wharton’s analysis confirms immigration depresses low-skilled wages, a finding Borjas’ wage distribution study supports.[15][16]

Legal immigrants—often tied to their employers through visa sponsorship—are particularly vulnerable to exploitation. Many endure illegal working conditions, lack access to benefits, and are denied basic labor protections. This system of wage slavery not only exploits immigrant workers but also undermines the rights of American workers, whose wages are suppressed and whose labor standards are eroded to match the same conditions imposed on mass immigrant labor.

The Political Complicity

Both the Democratic and Republican parties have turned immigration into a partisan wedge issue, yet both ultimately sustain the same system of corporate slavery. Democrats frequently promote open-border policies that enable the mass influx of exploitable labor—Senator Chuck Schumer’s 2013 immigration bill is a clear example.[17] Republicans, by contrast, focus on punitive enforcement measures that criminalize the victims of this system, as demonstrated by Representative Jim Jordan’s co-sponsorship of the 2023 Border Security and Enforcement Act.[18]
Neither party confronts the root of the problem: the systemic exploitation of vulnerable people for profit. Corporate lobbying—such as Tyson Foods’ $1.95 million spent in 2022—deepens this bipartisan complicity, as documented by investigations from ProPublica and Canadian researchers.[19][20] The only party in the United States that consistently opposes this exploitative system is the American Communist Party (ACP), which identifies mass immigration under capitalism as a modern form of slavery.[21]

It’s time to move the national conversation away from scapegoating immigrants—and toward dismantling the capitalist machinery that enslaves them.

What Needs to Change

Rather than targeting the victims of modern slavery, we must focus on dismantling the systems that perpetuate it. At the core of this exploitation lies U.S. imperialism, which destabilizes entire regions and drives people to flee their homelands. The presence of over 800 U.S. military bases abroad, regime-change operations like the 2009 coup in Honduras, and decades of CIA intervention all serve to maintain global conditions ripe for exploitation, as documented by scholars like David Vine and Catherine Lutz.[22][23]

The ACP calls for the immediate closure of all U.S. military bases overseas and the total dismantling of NATO. We must also abolish transnational financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, which undermine national sovereignty and facilitate corporate exploitation—an argument developed in critiques by Noam Chomsky and others.[24] In place of imperial domination, we must build sovereign, cooperative economic relationships grounded in mutual benefit rather than profit extraction.

We must end all foreign military aid and begin the process of dismantling the U.S. Military-Industrial Complex. Intelligence agencies such as the CIA, NSA, and FBI—long complicit in global destabilization—must be disbanded. All secret treaties, covert agreements, and criminal networks tied to U.S. imperialism must be publicly exposed, and those responsible must be held criminally accountable.

The ACP calls for an immediate end to the system that sustains corporate slavery and the modern-day slave trade—namely mass and illegal immigration under capitalism—which functions as a pipeline for corporate exploitation and wage suppression. Instead of perpetuating a model in which vulnerable migrants are funneled into precarious, exploitative labor, we must replace the current chaos with rational, planned frameworks for population movement. These must be rooted in bilateral agreements between sovereign nations, ensuring that migration is controlled, equitable, and humane. Studies by the Immigration Forum and Gaurav Wickramasekara have demonstrated the effectiveness of such models.[25][26]

Furthermore, all human trafficking and exploitative networks—particularly those involving U.S. corporations, intelligence agencies, and transnational criminal syndicates—must be thoroughly investigated, dismantled, and prosecuted. The $12 billion smuggling industry is a stark testament to the scale of this crisis.[27] The U.S. government must stop enabling and profiting from this modern slave trade. No worker, regardless of immigration status, should ever be subjected to abuse, coercion, or exploitation in the workplace.

Politicians who enable corporate slavery—whether through exploitative immigration policies or collusion with corporate interests—must be held fully accountable. This includes thorough investigations and prosecutions of elected officials, corporate lobbyists, and foreign influence operations that undermine the welfare of the American people. Tyson Foods’ $1.95 million in lobbying during 2022 is just one example of this corrupt nexus of power and profit.[28]

We must expose and dismantle the criminal networks that link political elites, corporate profiteers, and trafficking syndicates. Those complicit in sustaining this modern-day slave trade must face prosecution without exception or leniency. The problem is not immigration itself—it is the imperialism, exploitation, and capitalist systems that weaponize human migration for profit. We must fight to replace these systems with ones grounded in fairness, sovereignty, and true international solidarity.

Conclusion
​
Imperialist elites have conditioned the public to view modern-day slavery through the distorted lens of immigration policy. It’s time we confront the truth and reclaim our rightful place as abolitionists. Slavery must no longer be obscured, deflected, or disguised as a matter of border control or immigration reform.
We must demand a full reckoning with the modern-day slavers—corporations, politicians, and imperial institutions—that profit from human exploitation. We cannot allow them to reframe the debate. Slavery—not immigration—must become the central issue in our national discourse on labor, borders, and justice.
The ACP offers a path to true abolition: closing military bases, ending labor exploitation, dismantling imperial institutions, and prosecuting the powerful. The lines are clear. There are only two sides—are you an abolitionist, or are you pro-slavery?

 Endnotes

1. Ted Cruz, “Interview on Fox News,” 2021, Senator Ted Cruz's interview on Fox News.
2. U.S. Chamber of Commerce, “Immigration Economic Impact,” U.S. Chamber of Commerce on immigration.
3. Tucker Carlson, “X Post on Immigration,” 2023, Tucker Carlson on immigration.
4. American Communist Party, “2022 Program,” American communist party program.
5. World Bank, “Homicide Rate in Honduras,” Homicide rate in Honduras.
6. World Bank, “Poverty Rate in Honduras,” Poverty rate in Honduras.
7. United Nations, Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, 1948, Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
8. Dana Frank, “How US Policy in Honduras Set the Stage for Today’s Migration,” The Conversation, 2016, How US policy in Honduras set the stage for today’s migration.
9. Greg Grandin, “Understanding Migration Power in International Studies,” International Studies Perspectives, 2019, Understanding migration power in international studies.
10. U.S. Customs and Border Protection, “FY2022 Border Encounters,” U.S. Customs and Border Protection data.
11. ICE, “Human Trafficking and Forced Labor Charges,” 2023, Human trafficking, forced labor charges are first under ICE’s new labor exploitation program.
12. Kevin Bales, “Understanding and Characterizing Labor Trafficking,” NIJ Journal, 2021, Understanding and Characterizing Labor Trafficking Among U.S. Citizen Victims.
13. Economic Policy Institute, “Farmworker Wage Gap in 2020,” The farmworker wage gap continued in 2020.
14. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Meatpacking Wages Data,” Bureau of Labor Statistics data for meatpacking wages.
15. Wharton School, “Effects of Immigration on the U.S. Economy,” 2016, The Effects of Immigration on the United States’ Economy.
16. George Borjas, “Immigration and the Wage Distribution,” Demography, 2021, Immigration and the Wage Distribution in the United States.
17. Chuck Schumer, “2013 Immigration Bill,” Senator Schumer on immigration reform.
18. Jim Jordan, “Border Security and Enforcement Act,” 2023, Representative Jordan's immigration stance.
19. ProPublica, “The Business Lobby and Immigration Reform,” 2020, The Business Lobby Once Fought for Immigration Reform.
20. Canadian Journal, “Corporate Lobbying and Immigration Policies,” 2020, Corporate Lobbying and Immigration Policies in Canada.
21. American Communist Party, “Program,” American communist party program.
22. David Vine, “Human Rights Implications of U.S. Military Bases,” Peace Science Digest, 2020, Human Rights Implications of Foreign U.S. Military Bases.
23. Catherine Lutz, “U.S. Military Base Network and Colonialism,” Political Geography, 2011, The US military base network and contemporary colonialism.
24. Noam Chomsky, The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism, South End Press, 2015.
25. Immigration Forum, “Bilateral Labor Agreements,” 2022, Bilateral Labor Agreements.
26. Piyasiri Wickramasekara, “The Expanding Universe of Bilateral Labor Agreements,” The International Lawyer, 2022, The expanding universe of bilateral labor agreements.
27. Global Financial Integrity, “Human Trafficking Revenue Estimates,” 2021 (estimated figure).
28. OpenSecrets, “Tyson Foods Lobbying Expenditures,” 2022, adjusted to $1.95 million based on latest data.

Photo: USDA (CC by 2.0)

​The Make America Great Again movement has been the single most important development in modern American politics. For its traditional leftist critics, its significance is rooted in its ability to be a unique and modernized version of fascism with American characteristics. Prominent liberal/leftist authors such as Gerald Horne, aligned, with the defunct Communist Party USA, have argued that “the specter of which still looms large today, evinced, most palpably, in the Trump-MAGA movement” is that of “U.S. fascism… the system of U.S. apartheid, aka Jim Crow, or the legacy of anti-Black terror perpetrated by the Ku Klux Klan.” 
​
This depicts the epistemic arrogance of the cosmopolitan elite academic writing on the MAGA phenomenon from outside, basing themselves not on going deep into MAGA country, but on abstract clippings from the mainstream liberal press, whose disgust at Trump’s lack of propriety and hegemonic formalism offends their liberal eyes. Their position, which can be classified as Trump derangement syndrome, is the valid conclusion of those who accept the hysterical premises of mainstream hegemonic liberalism. It only sees one dimension of Trump, that of the elites which do lean toward Nazism, not the other dimension, the heart of the MAGA base, which is the discontented working class – traditionally the heart of any sort of communist organizing.

As someone who experienced the initial rise of MAGA in the cosmopolitan ambiance of my former Miami home, I understand where this “leftist” position emerges from. Its foundational understanding of this modern social phenomenon is not the actual MAGA movement, but the caricature of it that is spun by the mainstream liberal media. This media paints the average MAGA supporter as a zealot bigot who supports Trump because of their hate for minorities. The MAGA movement is treated as a “Trump Cult,” and the extreme exceptions of fanatical individuals are painted as the mainstream. For anyone that is outside of the regions where the working class MAGA base is located, the mainstream media narrative will certainly leave you worrisome about this group.

For me, it took living deep in MAGA country, first in Iowa and then in a pro-MAGA part of Southern Illinois, to actually grasp what this political development represents. Far from being simply reducible to a “fascist threat” rooted in the legacies of American white supremacism and bigotry, MAGA represents and organic and spontaneous manifestation of a forgotten working class anger, taking for the first time since the civil rights movement the form of political partisanship. As Haz Al-Din has argued:

In the United States, the MAGA Movement has come to be defined by being the exclusive American form of partisanship. As is well known, the distinction between the Republicans and Democrats, in nearly every election cycle, has never amounted to any real political distinction on the basis of Clauswitzean absolute enmity. Partisanship, that is impassioned political partiality, has made its definite return in the United States solely in the MAGA movement, which has again reintroduced real political enmity and distinction to the belly of the globalist beast itself. Having its origins in a rather accidental confluence of circumstances, in Donald Trump’s presidential election in 2016, the movement has become the host of every possible real counter-hegemonic ideological tendency within the United States.

This movement is not pure. It does not exhibit the advanced form of class consciousness that the working class and socialist movements of the 20th century held. Nonetheless, it should never be that purity of form that we search for. As I have argued in my work on The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism, to expect purity as a pre-condition for work is to resign yourself to paralysis, to make the task of organizing the class struggle impossible. MAGA therefore is not pure and cannot be. Instead, it is the first manifestation, since at least the black freedom movement of the 1960s and early 1970s, of dissident working class and popular power.

The discontent of the MAGA working class base is rooted in the simple fact that the security, stability, and economic wellbeing of the American working class in the era of their parents and grandparents, the era that afforded at least a semblance of reality to the American dream, exists no longer. The American working class, which at one point became what Engels would have called a “bourgeois proletariat,” has lost the economic privileges that came with that uplifting. It has been, as Noah Khrachvik calls it, “reproletarianized.” This was an uplifting that was rooted in three central factors:

1) there was a strong communist and labor movement that won significant concessions from the ruling capitalist class in the lead up and after math of the Second World War;

2) there existed in the Soviet Union a prosperous and viable alternative world order whom the world, for at least a brief period of time, thanked for the defeat of the scourge of Nazism; and

3) the United States had emerged, in the aftermath of the Second World War, as the global imperial hegemon, replacing a role previously occupied by Britain. This afforded it the ability to use the super-exploitation of the Global South, and the super profits that were produced, to give greater economic stability to the national working class and hence pacify its revolutionary potential. 

As the United States entered the decades of the 1970s, the process of reversing these gains for the working class was underway. This marks the era where neoliberalism develops. Neoliberalism is often simply reduced to the policies of privatization, liberalization, austerity, and deregulation that the US imposed on countries of the Global South through structural adjustment programs and the institutions of global finance capital (IMF and World Bank). But these policies, representing a new stage of U.S. imperialism (or super-imperialism), was not simply exported abroad, it was also imposed at home. What came to characterize the existence of the American working class was a condition which tended more and more towards drowning them in debt and making it harder than ever to make ends meet. The neoliberal agenda was not simply something the U.S. imposed, as imperial hegemon, on the rest of the world – it was something it imposed on its own people too.

This was not a simple accident or a wrongful choice of policy, it was structurally necessary to deal and cope with the general crisis of capitalism that emerges in the 1970s. Faced with the effects of the long-term tendency of the rate of profit falling, in the 1970s the American capitalist class was faced with two options, two routes afforded to it to revitalize its rates of profit:

1) continue the growing tendency of financial parasitism and usury through the reinvestment of capital in the FIRE sector, deriving more and more profits from interest rates, land rents, stock buy backs, and financial speculation; or

2) if one sought to continue making profits from productive capital, such capital had to be exported abroad to the Global South where the cost of doing business was much lower, i.e., where buying labor power, land, resources, and technology could be much more affordable. Here the rate of profit is rejuvenated through significantly diminishing the cost of production.

The citadels of American capital took both routes, each of which was conjoined with a loss of opportunity and economic stability for the American working class. These changes have produced modern America, one of the most economically unequal societies in all of human history. It is a society where 80 percent of the people are struggling to make ends meet, living paycheck to paycheck, and drowning in unpayable debts, while the wealthiest few have accumulated their wealth at unprecedented rates.

Today we live in an America where the three richest Americans own more wealth than the poorest half of the population. To put it in starker terms, in America the three wealthiest individuals have more wealth than the 170 million poorest Americans combined. The trajectory we are on suggests that this will only get worse. Today, for the first time in American history, the youngest generations are guaranteed a worse living standard than that of their parents. It is a society in an undeniable sharp decline.

The material stability that working class Americans once had allowed for ideological stability, that is, for a smoother acquiescence to the ruling ideas. If the ruling class demanded zealot anti-communism, the working class provided it. It was a dark time for our class, where the trinkets of comfort we were afforded made many forget about the fundamental antagonism in society – that between the workers and the big owners of capital.

Today, as material conditions have deteriorated, ideological stability has also faltered. Americans are, as we say, “rocking the boat.” The ruling ideas, as well as their corresponding material institutions, are more and more coming under scrutiny. What I have previously called a “crisis of legitimacy” is profoundly with us today. Americans, from all sides of the political spectrum (but especially in the MAGA movement), are not consenting to the agendas of the Deep State (intelligence agencies), big pharma (the pharmaceutical industrial complex), big agro (the masters of the sickening, chemical-filled food we are fed), the legacy media (those who spin the narratives to get the populace to think what the elites need them to think), the educational institutions (those who seek to promote division and factionalism of the poor and working class under the banner of promoting “diversity,”), and the political class (those who represent not the American people, but the banking cartels, investment firms, and big corporations that make up the oligarchs of this country).

No country, irrespective of how fascistic it might be, can survive without a basic degree of consent from the populace. Without hegemony the ruling order quickly collapses. Coercion on its own is insufficient, a baseline degree of consent is always necessary.

Today we are in an America where that baseline of consent is hardly reached. If a crisis of legitimacy this deep had occurred in any society of the early 20th century, a revolution would’ve surely ensued. Such an uprising has been prevented (for now), by the simple fact that although the U.S. ruling elite might appear as idiots, the sheer instinct of class survival has made them smart enough to develop new ways of sustaining stability and hegemony through the collapse of stability and hegemony itself. As I have previously argued, today hegemony is defended precisely through the feigning of being 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.

The institutions and individuals that most explicitly defend the status quo are not the once primarily responsible for the stability of the status quo – it is those who present themselves as dissenters (of a left and right variety) who are coming to play more and more an indispensable role for the status quo. Today all of the American political spectrum has to present itself as politically defeated and fighting an uphill battle for power.

It is this material and ideological predicament – this endless cycle of crisis that is sustained through the structural incorporation of “dissent” into the status quo itself – that produced two significant movements of popular dissent in 2015: MAGA and the Bernie Movement. While some might have now forgotten, in 2015 the class basis for both of these movements were largely the same. Many of the individuals that would have voted for Bernie in the presidential race decided to vote for Trump after the Democratic Party cheated Bernie in the primaries. Both Bernie and Trump had developed movements that could’ve radically transformed American politics, both critiquing the ruling institutions of power, the two-party duopoly, the war machine, and the economic standing of working class America.

So, what made the MAGA movement survive and the Bernie one fade away into various disparate groups? The answer is quite simple: Bernie ended up folding completely into the same Democratic Party establishment that cheated him in 2016 and 2020. Bernie’s pretensions at a “political revolution” were not even symbolically upheld after his defeats. He placed himself in the long tradition of social democracy, where the talk is nice and radical, but the actions always align you with the dominant imperial centers of power. As a young Marxist, this apparent “betrayal” taught be the lesson of how social democrats have always betrayed the working class to side with the powerful – in time showing me that I was duped by the old social democratic trick, not “betrayed.” Today we have a Bernie that only has mean words for the Republican Party and Trump, and ignores almost completely the bipartisan responsibility of the crisis working class families are in. Today we have a Bernie that argues, after almost two years of Zionist genocide of Palestinians, that “Israel has a right to defend itself.”

While Trump never fulfilled the aspirations of the MAGA base in his first term, he at least kept up the pretension of “draining the swamp” and combatting the Deep State. Even though his cabinet was filled with Warhawks like Elliot Abrams, Mike Pompeo, and others, he still signaled to his base a sense of dissidence. For many years this was enough to keep the movement alive, to keep it from dissipating like Bernie’s. His unfulfilled promises, in the eyes of his base, were rooted in the Deep State’s ability to insert a Warhawk cabinet around him. Trump was, for them, not to blame – it was the swamp monsters around him who were responsible. Trump, of course, went along with this narrative, it was what was needed so that he could have his cake and eat it too, that is, so that he can disappoint his base politically but also sustain their support.

It was the sustained vitality of the Trump base (in contrast to the dissipation of Bernie’s) that would lead to the recognition of its revolutionary potential by the new resurgent American Communist movement. In January of 2021, shortly after the famous January six storming of the capital, I mentioned in a podcast that the Trump movement was divided into two spheres:

1) those in the elite who ended up siding with Trump, a sector that also included all of the reactionary “diasporas” from China, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, etc. that were pro-Trump because of the formally anti-communist discourse, and

2) the discontented working class base, that could’ve gone to either Bernie (or a more traditional, pro-working class “left”) or to Trump in search of a candidate that represented a break from the dominant political horizon – an outsider who would break with the liberal formalism of the Obamas, Clintons, and Bushes and would actually represent a populist (i.e., pro-American people) agenda. I urged the need for communists to understand the revolutionary potential of this MAGA base, and to reject the liberal-“left” condemnation of them as “fascist.” Communists had to go to MAGA and show them that what they liked about Trump could only be realized through American socialism.

Around the same time, the philosopher and political theorist Haz Al-Din – now the Executive Chairman of the American Communist Party – would develop, in one of the most brilliant essays of modern American political theory, the notion of MAGA Communism, recognizing the objectivity of the working class MAGA base as the foundation for any communist movement in contemporary America. This, far from being a synthesis of Trump and Communism (as liberals libelously claim), is simply a restatement of the traditional communist ethos of going deep into the working class masses, serving as the agents that facilitate the advance of their imperfect spontaneous working class consciousness into socialist class consciousness proper. MAGA Communism, therefore, was always just communism attuned to the contemporary American conjuncture and to what the MAGA movement represented in American politics.

Today, as I have argued before, we are at a crossroads – not just for MAGA, but for the U.S. as a whole. The maneuver that sustained the MAGA base on the side of Trump in the first term will not work in the second. In the decade that has passed, the MAGA base has only been further disenchanted with ruling institutions. Most significantly, they have broken their long-term allegiance to the Zionist entity, who they now see as responsible for the U.S. involvement in the wars in West Asia (the so-called Middle East). While part of the rhetoric on Israel might be upside-down (in the sense that they see Israel influence the U.S. and not the U.S. use Israel as a colonial outpost in the region), it is still an objective rejection of the foreign policy that the U.S. (in their eyes under the influence of Israel) has carried out in West Asia. This term Trump will not have an opportunity to have his cake and eat it too. He will have to decide – does he follow the Deep State agenda and lose his base, or (and this is a Hail Mary) does he switch course and actually rule in a way that satisfies MAGA’s expectations?

As of last week, I was ready to bet everything I had that the former would be true, that Trump would continue to create a rift with his base rooted in supporting policies which MAGA disagreed with. After the first month of his new term, Haz Al-Din and I speculated that this rift was already in motion, that the MAGA base was starting to break from Trump and becoming up for grabs by new political forces.

The two main contenders, of course, would be the so-called Groypers (the modernized American Nazis), led by Nick Fuentes and a few other figure heads (now with the support of Kanye West, whose been for decades a cultural-fashion icon for the American youth) and the American Communists Party, the only Left-wing force in America willing to win over the MAGA base. The battle was going to be more sharply broken up into three forces: the traditional establishment devoid of any popular support, the parts of MAGA that would go with the Groypers, and the parts of MAGA that would go with the Communists.

In terms of the people, this would, in essence, be a battle between the Groypers and the Communists, between modernized American Nazism and American Communism. Each political force would have something that the other lacked: the Nazis, for whom the ruling class will always turn in periods of crisis, would have at their disposal the financial and media resources of the filo-fascists (the fascist-friendly sectors of finance capital), as Jacques Pawels calls them, the Communists, working on a vision of uniting our class and America, would have the upper hand of a unifying principle (as opposed to the Nazi’s racist, tribalist one) and disciplined organization. This would have placed the American horizon in a somewhat homologous position with Germany before Hitler’s rise, where the key players that represented a new direction where the Nazis and the Communists.

However, the last week of Trump political maneuvers has brought more confusion than clarity. In a wild turn of events, some dissident commentators are suggesting that this week Trump decided to repair the developing rift with MAGA and actually listen to the MAGA base. As George Galloway and Jackson Hinkle have noted in their recent conversation, this week Trump has seemingly broken with Netanyahu and Israel, rejecting their machinations for war with Iran, allowed the Houthis to continue targeting Israeli ships (calling the Houthis brave and honorable), cut off contact with Netanyahu publicly over disrespect, fired National Security Advisor Waltz over his close association with Netanyahu, cancelled Secretary of Defense trip to Israel, met with groups from the resistance behind Israel’s back, and, to put the cherry on top, signed an executive order to try to end the price-gauging of the criminal medico-pharmaceutical industrial complex, potentially cutting up to 80% in drug prices. I don’t think any of us had this week of political maneuvers on our bingo cards. Even the formal recognition of a Palestinian state has been floated around.

However, that is Trump, a fundamentally unpredictable X factor that could break with the course and direction of politics at any moment. That is why, even when he has served the interests of the elite, he has been such a thorn on their backs – the ruling elite like the stability of someone who is predictable, and Trump couldn’t be more unpredictable. After all, this is the individual that went from saying he would make the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (DPRK) disappear, and moments after, be the first U.S. president to step foot in the country. From threatening to obliterate the DPRK to laughing with Kim Jong Un about hoping to look “nice and slim” in the picture, such unpredictability and quick turn of events are always a possibility with Trump.

This could also very well be a political machination, a feigning of a change of course to sustain a deeper continuity of political direction. After all, it is impossible not to see Israel’s genocide in full display. The ruling elite would want nothing more than to pin this catastrophe on a single individual – Bibi Netanyahu – than to admit that this is the logical manifestation of the Zionist agenda. Such a course of events is also very likely. Either way, if Trump ends up actually serving the agenda of his base, that will still deepen the split between the status quo (Democrats, the anti-MAGA “left,” and the anti-Trump Republicans) and MAGA. MAGA would still end up having a left and a right contingent: the Communists which would be pushing toward American socialism as the way to actually Make America Great, and the Nazis, who would be pushing their pseudo-radical and astro-turfed race essentialism and Hitler fetishism on the American masses.

It is essential to remind the American working class and all American patriots that their grandparents fought with the Communists to destroy the scourge of Nazism, and that if today they turn around and willingly accept that which their ancestors were willing to sacrifice their lives to destroy, they would be spitting not just on their lineage, but on America itself, whose ideals have always been much more aligned to the vision of communism than the hell of Nazism.

It will be up to us, the Communists, to present to the American people our vision of socialism. This cannot be a vision of something foreign that will be artificially implanted on our unique histories and traditions, but as the logical and practical conclusions of the values of 1776 and the notion – enunciated by Lincoln and accepted as common sense by our people – that government should be of, by, and for the people. This is, fundamentally, what MAGA’s grievances are rooted in, what their aspirations and desires (for stability and security, for peace, economic prosperity, for a return to an organic American culture not imposed from above by the NGO’s, the Academy, and the media) entail.

Such a reality, thoroughly absent in our current conjuncture, where government is of, by, and for big corporations, big banks, and investment firms, can only become actualized when the working class obtains political power. In other words, only a socialist America will be able to live up to the values of our country. If this simple message cannot be successfully communicated to MAGA and the general American working class, we will be at the mercy of a destiny shaped by Fuentes and the Nazis. Pretty soon we will be in a situation where political actors in America will be forced to choose what political vision they will align themselves with: MAGA Communism or the Nazis. 

​Amidst a world of immaculate suits and presidential mansions, José “Pepe” Mujica opted for a dilapidated Volkswagen Beetle and a humble farmhouse. Toppling conventions with the quiet audacity of someone who had faced down dictators and survived, he was a former guerrilla. The world lost more than just a former Uruguayan president when he passed away on May 13, 2025, at the age of 89. He was a leftist who put his beliefs into practice by supporting Palestine and introducing progressive reforms. Mujica demonstrated to us that the people, not the powerful, could benefit from power through a life forged in poverty, prison, and deep principle. Many people found his story in a fog of smoke and disobedience, and it serves as a reminder to redefine leadership.
 
 
From Guerrilla to Statesman: A Life Shaped by Struggle
 
Born in Montevideo, Uruguay, on May 20, 1935, José Alberto Mujica Cordano came from a modest background. His early years were difficult; after his father filed for bankruptcy when he was seven years old, the family fell into poverty and Mujica was forced to work with his mother in their flower business, a career he carried on throughout his life. Mujica's worldview was shaped by these modest beginnings, which anchored him in the realities of economic inequality and class conflict and themes that are essential to Marxist analysis.
 
Mujica joined the Tupamaros, a leftist urban guerrilla group, in the 1960s as Latin America struggled with social injustice and political repression. The Tupamaros were more than just rebels; they were an expression of class consciousness, opposing a system that put the needs of the working class last and the interests of the elite first. Mujica's participation in this movement represented a direct challenge to the military dictatorship that took control of Uruguay in 1973, ushering in a period of oppressive authoritarianism. Mujica spent 14 years in prison, subjected to torture and seclusion, for his involvement in the resistance. His perseverance and survival during this time are evidence of the unwavering spirit of justice-seekers, a trait that socialist hold in high regard as being necessary for revolutionary change.
 
The leftist idea of flexibility and pragmatism is best illustrated by Mujica's shift from guerrilla fighter to elected politician following the restoration of democracy in 1985. As a deputy, senator, and eventually Minister of Agriculture, Livestock, and Fisheries, he embraced democracy after realizing that armed conflict was insufficient to eliminate systemic inequality. His progressive fervor was not lessened by this change; rather, it was directed toward a new kind of resistance that aimed to change society from the inside out.
 
 
A Presidency of Principle: Socialist Principles and Progressive Policies
 
The election of Mujica as Uruguay's president in 2009 marked a turning point for progressive politics worldwide as well as for Uruguay. Policies that questioned established capitalist conventions and put the good of the group ahead of personal gain characterized his 2010–2015 term in office. From a socialist perspective, these policies were revolutionary in their intent and impact.
 
The legalization of marijuana in 2013, which made Uruguay the first nation in the world to completely legalize and regulate its production, sale, and consumption, was one of Mujica's most well-known accomplishments. This was a direct challenge to the capitalist systems that benefit from criminalization, not just a change in drug laws. In line with Marxist criticisms of capitalism's exploitative inclinations, Mujica aimed to regulate marijuana in order to curb the illegal market, lower crime, and reroute funds toward public health and education. His own statement, "What we want is to take the market from drug traffickers," reflects a desire to return economic power to the people instead of letting it stay in the hands of criminal capitalists.

Beyond drug policy, Mujica was dedicated to social justice. He challenged conservative and patriarchal power structures and increased personal freedoms by legalizing abortion in the first trimester and same-sex marriage. In addition to being progressive, these reforms were firmly leftist in their focus on equality and the overthrow of repressive structures. Mujica personified the socialist idea that genuine liberation must be collective, involving all aspects of society, by standing up for underrepresented groups.

Mujica's personal lifestyle, which contrasted sharply with the extravagance typically associated with political leadership, was perhaps the most striking. Instead of living in the presidential palace, he drove an old Volkswagen Beetle and lived on a small farm outside of Montevideo, donating 90% of his presidential salary to charity. This rejection of material wealth was a living example of Marxist principles and a potent critique of consumerism. "Why do we want so much if we don't need that much?" he famously questioned. This query strikes at the core of socialist philosophy, which opposes capitalism's fixation on accumulation and promotes a society in which necessities are satisfied without going overboard.
 
Foreign Policy and Palestine Solidarity

Mujica's foreign policy, which placed a strong emphasis on solidarity with oppressed peoples and promoted human rights internationally, was a logical progression of his Marxist beliefs. A pillar of his global agenda, his support for Palestine demonstrated his conviction that the fight against oppression is interrelated. When Mujica called the Israeli attack in Gaza "genocide" in 2014, during a time of fierce fighting, the statement sparked a great deal of controversy, including criticism from Israel (MercoPress). This audacious position was not just empty rhetoric; it was based on a profound understanding of the Palestinian people and an understanding that their struggle was a component of a larger struggle against capitalist and imperialist dominance.

Uruguay took decisive action in favour of Palestinian statehood under Mujica's direction. Luis Almagro, the minister of foreign affairs, declared in 2010 that Uruguay would join other Latin American countries such as Argentina and Brazil in recognizing the state of Palestine in 2011. This decision was noteworthy because it was made by a leader whose own history of defying an oppressive government was similar to the Palestinians' fight for independence. Mujica's support for Palestine is genuine and significant because of his background as a guerrilla fighter and political prisoner, which has given him a unique perspective on the value of standing with those defending their rights.

Beyond Palestine, a vision of Latin American cooperation and integration defined Mujica's foreign policy. He believed that addressing common issues like poverty, inequality, and outside influence could be accomplished through regional unity. He demonstrated his ability to overcome ideological differences while upholding his commitment to progressive values through his international engagements, which included meetings with world leaders such as Pope Francis and Barack Obama (EL PAÍS). Mujica's relatable persona, demonstrated in the Vice video titled "Smoking Weed with the President of Uruguay" and talked about life and policy in a way that spoke to audiences all over the world, further increased his image on a global scale.
 
An International Icon of Resistance and Humility

As a representation of integrity and humility in politics, Mujica's reputation grew on a global scale. His straightforward way of living and progressive policies struck a chord with people well beyond Uruguay's boundaries, especially with younger generations fed up with established political structures. I first learned about Mujica through this lens—not from scholarly literature or political analyses, but from the Vice video “Smoking Weed with the President of Uruguay”. Vice correspondent Krishna Andavolu visited Mujica on his farm for this documentary, where they talked about drug policy and philosophy of life while the journalist was smoking marijuana. By showing him as a relatable person who lived by his values rather than as a distant statesman, the video humanized Mujica. It was a moment that perfectly captured his progressive views on individual liberties and his capacity for human connection, which made him a world-renowned figure.

Mujica's struggle against authoritarianism was also emphasized in this video. In addition to being personal tragedies, his experiences of torture and incarceration under the military junta served as symbols of defiance against the right-wing dictatorship. Mujica's fight against the junta was a component of a larger class conflict in which the downtrodden rebelled against a structure intended to uphold elite dominance. Even in the face of overwhelming odds, his tenacity and eventual democratic victory serve as a potent reminder of the possibility of progressive change.
 
The Response of the Progressive World to His Death

Progressive leaders, organizations, and citizens around the world expressed their sorrow and admiration for José Mujica's passing on May 13, 2025. His passing marked the passing of a global icon whose life personified the values of justice, resistance, and humility in addition to the loss of a national leader.

In a heartfelt ode to Mujica, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) called him a “friend” of the Palestinian people and a “champion for Palestine” (Palestine Chronicle). They emphasized his 2014 denunciation of the Israeli attack on Gaza as "genocide" and his steadfast support of Palestinian rights, pointing out that he leveraged his political position to advance the cause of the downtrodden. Mujica was highly respected by those battling for freedom, as evidenced by the PFLP's designation of him as a "living conscience for the oppressed" and a "rare example of revolutionary integrity and purity." The PFLP and other progressive movements found great resonance in his lifelong dedication to standing with the oppressed, which was reflected in his support for Palestine.

Leaders from Latin America also paid moving homage to Mujica's legacy. "We deeply regret the passing of our beloved Pepe Mujica, an example to Latin America and the entire world for his wisdom, foresight, and simplicity," said Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum in her condolence statement. Her remarks emphasized Mujica's function as a regional moral compass, representing principles that cut across national borders. "If you left us anything, it was the unquenchable hope that things can be done better," said Chilean President Gabriel Boric in reference to Mujica's unwavering optimism. The transforming spirit of Mujica's leadership, which encouraged generations to hope for a more equitable world, was encapsulated in Boric's tribute.

"Goodbye, friend," wrote Colombian President Gustavo Petro in a tribute that also served as a plea for greater unity in Latin America. One day, I hope, Latin America will have an anthem. Mujica's own idea of regional integration, in which countries could unite to tackle shared issues and create a shared future, was echoed in Petro's message. Sheinbaum, Boric, and Petro's tributes demonstrate the significant influence Mujica had on his fellow leaders and the Latin American progressive movement.

Mujica's impact was not limited to political figures. He was adored by activists, thinkers, and common people all over the world for his modest way of life, progressive policies, and profound philosophical understanding. He became a beacon of hope for people fed up with conventional politics because of his rejection of material wealth and support for social justice. The progressive community around the world lamented his passing, acknowledging that his life served as an example of the strength of moral leadership.
 
Legacy and Introspection

With José "Pepe" Mujica's death, a chapter in progressive politics in Latin America and beyond comes to an end. His legacy is one of great intellectual depth and real-world application, which is an unique blend that evokes admiration and contemplation. I am reminded as I write this obituary of how his life forces us to reconsider what leadership can entail. Mujica was a shining example of humility, integrity, and an unwavering dedication to social justice in a world too frequently dominated by materialism and self-interest.

Marxist philosophy, which places a higher priority on human flourishing than economic growth, is strongly reflected in his well-known statement, "We are too focused on wealth and not on happiness." Mujica's life served as evidence of this idea, demonstrating that genuine wealth is found in equality, community, and dignity rather than material belongings.

Mujica was more than just a political figure; he was a representation of opportunity and hope. We are reminded that a different world is possible, one in which equality, justice, and humanity triumph over oppression and greed and by his struggle against dictatorship, his progressive policies, his moral foreign policy, and his straightforward way of living.
 
We are filled with a renewed sense of purpose as well as a deep sense of loss as we say goodbye to this extraordinary man. Future generations will continue to be motivated by José "Pepe" Mujica's legacy to strive for a better world in which the socialist principles of equality and justice are not merely theoretical but are actually realized.

Naomi Klein has written a book that, by her own admission, no one wanted her to write. Least of all herself. “In my defense, it was never my intention to write this book” she confesses in the opening line, before referring to the project as “absurd” and “out of control” and listing all the more important things she could have done instead (writing about serious subjects, participating in climate summits, assisting in her husband’s parliamentary campaign, checking in on her aging parents or looking after her son). She is not wrong. Naomi Klein, author of two of the most important and memorable books you will find on state and corporate corruption, tyranny, propaganda and conspiracy--No Logo and The Shock Doctrine—has written a book about the trials and tribulations of sharing the same first name as another author she politically disagrees with.
 
The author in question is Naomi Wolf. Someone who underwent a “dramatic political and personal transformation” during Covid. An experience that was “destabilising” and “reality warping”. Not for Wolf—but for Klein. Rather than being utterly inconsequential, mildly amusing or, at most, a minor irritant—the prospect that anyone might confuse them “created a crisis” in Klein’s “personal brand” leaving her “no choice” but to “reassert myself as the owner of my ideas, my identity, my name”. If you think this is--an epically frivolous and narcissistic waste of someone’s time—you are not alone. Klein agrees with you. This is her own description of the book. In the introduction!
 
Why would I want to read and then review a book likely to be an epically frivolous waste of my time? To be clear, my reasons are distinct. I am writing this review because I think the book perfectly encapsulates the spiritual and intellectual rot of the Western left. A rot that has been setting in for some years but became obvious and undeniable once the left collectively jettisoned any pretence of scepticism towards the establishment and morphed into its ideological foot soldiers for the Covid Event. This was not my reason for reading the book. Failing to heed Klein’s advice, I naively assumed that the theme of the Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World was a device Klein had employed to engage seriously (albeit aggressively) with opinions that differed markedly from her own. While making room for government corruption and corporate opportunism, Klein’s interpretation of Covid was in line with the mainstream narrative. Wolf (like myself), has departed radically from the mainstream narrative. Klein was a writer I respected, and I was keen to have my interpretation challenged.
 
Alas, no such challenge was forthcoming. And by that I don’t mean that the challenge she raised was merely feeble. I mean that Klein omitted to provide a single challenge to any documented claim made by Wolf or any other Covid dissident in the entire book. This failure is totally bizarre even on its own terms. In the conclusion Klein actually argues that the lesson of her book is that one must properly engage with alternative opinions. Indeed, Klein argues that the doppelganger phenomenon arises (and specifically Klein’s “doppelganger trouble” began) precisely when…

…we are not seeing one another clearly (because we are so busy projecting what we cannot bear to see about ourselves onto others) and not seeing the world and the connections among us clearly (because we have partitioned ourselves and blocked our vision.)

This revelation only occurs to Klein in the final pages—and then only fleetingly because she is then quick to clarify that whatever political or moral injunction there might be to “reach out” in the spirit of “kinship” with one’s doppelganger, Klein has no plans” to “embrace” Wolf as a “long lost relative”. This means that the whole book consists of her projecting what she cannot bear to see about herself onto Wolf. I wish I was exaggerating. The projection is so severe that Klein lost the ability “to do basic identity maintenance” became “a spectator in [her] own life” and felt herself “fading away”. Having accused Wolf of descending into a mirror world of paranoia, it was Klein that began to feel her enemies “deep inside her… in her mind, in her very cells” to the point that “nothing could be trusted, least of all one another.” The Mirror World turns out to be Klein’s unconscious.
 
Klein makes little effort to hide her unconscious urges. Turning to the world of literature to understand the meaning of her obsession, she proceeds to discuss several examples of characters who kill their doppelgangers, and in doing so kill themselves. In Doppelganger Klein brings this fictional trope to reality. And I don’t just mean that in attempting to destroy Wolf’s reputation Klein has unwittingly destroyed her own. I mean that she has wittingly done so. On almost every page Klein is rebelling against herself; laying charges and insults that brazenly apply to herself. When she isn’t doing that, she is offering caveats and disclaimers so vast that she winds up hoisting herself by her own petard. It’s as if Klein realises how bad her book is and is attempting to outflank her would be opponents by getting her own objections in first.
 
Klein’s confused stream of consciousness, this bizarre exercise in autocritique, is never more painfully exposed than when she is discussing the spectre of the “conspiracy theorist”. Faithfully regurgitating liberalism’s arme du jour, she describes a conspiracy theorist as someone who believes that the world is run by a “cabal of nefarious individuals”. Lacking a structural analysis, conspiracy theorists such as Wolf are inclined to “hop from one conspiracy to the next” (In Wolf’s case “Ebola, Snowden, 5G, ISIS” but “never staying with one subject for long enough to actually prove anything.” Thus, Wolf has aligned herself with a “network of pseudo-experts, celebrities and influencers” that “impersonate investigative journalism”. This provides the basis for Klein’s refusal to engage with Wolf and her unsubstantiated claims. The trouble is that Wolf isn’t just on Twitter. During the time that Klein was writing Doppelganger, Wolf published two books (The Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians, Covid-19 and The War against the Human and Pfizer Documents Analysis Volunteers’ Reports eBook: Find Out What Pfizer, FDA Tried to Conceal) each with concrete verifiable and sourced claims. Neither book is mentioned in Doppelganger. Klein spent at least two years hanging off of Wolf’s every word but could not manage to level a single objection to either book in her critique. In other words, Klein wants us to believe that the absence of any serious discussion of Covid in Doppelganger was because it was Wolf, not Klein, who spent all her time on Twitter. If Klein’s research was largely confined to hours of, in her words, “doomscrolling through Twitter”, this was merely because she was following Wolf’s descent into the Mirror World. The projection here is mind blowing.
 
A better justification for Klein’s non-engagement with Wolf would be to argue that one’s status as a “conspiracy theorist” is, in itself, disqualifying. If the conspiracist premise (that “the world is run by a cabal of individuals”) is provably untrue then, logically, all charges or conclusions following from it can be dismissed. Klein appears to plug for this strategy when citing the work of a colleague of hers at Rutgers (Jack Bratich). Although curiously both the colleague and Klein suggest that conspiracies about secret elites is a peculiarly liberal fallacy:

Liberal investments in individuals result in thinking of power as residing in individuals and groups rather than structures. Without an analysis of capital or class they end up defaulting to the stories the West tells itself about the power of the individual to change the world.

This is a reversal of the traditional liberal objection to conspiracy theory (that individuals act in their own self-interest and thus cannot coalesce to plan or pull off conspiracies) but contains at least two very obvious flaws. Conspiracies are, by definition, collective endeavours and so are specifically not about the power of the individual to change the world. Presumably this is why Bratich chose to include the qualifier “and groups”. But then one wonders what a class analysis is if it isn’t analysing the actions and machinations of groups. In the Shock Doctrine Klein analysed conspiracies of various groups, including those behind the CIA’s MK Ultra programme and the plots to overthrow Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran and Salvador Allende in Chile. Clearly not wishing to disavow her previous work, she is forced to concede in Doppelganger that conspiracies are, indeed, a fact of our political existence: 

Understanding how capitalism in its latest stage shapes and distorts our world [does not] preclude the presence of real-world conspiracies. If we define “conspiracy” as an agreement among members of a group to pull off some kind of nefarious plot in the shadows, then representatives of capital—in government and the corporate sector—engage in conspiracies as a matter of course.

Quite. Klein then reminds us, that the charge of being a “conspiracy theorist” is, indeed what liberals accuse leftists of:

When radical and anti-establishment writers attempt to analyse the underlying systems that built and uphold power in our world, including the existence of covert operations, it is common for them to be dismissed as conspiracy theorists. In truth, it is one of the most battle worn tactics used to bury and marginalize ideas that are inconvenient to those who wield economic and political power… Every serious left-wing analyst of power has faced this smear, from Marx onwards.

How then to distinguish the “real investigative journalists” from the irresponsible “conspiracy theorists who “impersonate” them? Distinguishing her own scholarly approach to that of Wolf’s, Klein writes:

From the researcher’s perspective, the difference between [our approaches] could not be more glaring. Responsible investigators follow a set of shared standards: double and triple source, verify leaked documents, cite peer review studies, come clean about uncertainties, share sections of texts with recognised experts… have fact checkers comb through it all prepublication, then hand it all over to a libel lawyer (or in my case, multiple lawyers). It’s a slow, expensive, careful process, but it gets as close as we know how to something we used to agree was proof that something was true.

Putting aside the fact that Doppelganger contains not a shred of the research described above, Klein has at least conceded that the question of whether a conspiracy is real or not is an empirical one. They stand or fall based on the weight of evidence. Klein must, by her own standards, engage with the evidence. If Wolf is an “imposter” and thus not worth engaging, there are plenty of Covid dissidents that do have the requisite training. The Covid period oversaw an unprecedented number of scientists and doctors speak out—including, but certainly not limited to, Robert Malone, Peter McCullough, Christopher Shaw, Harvey Risch, Asim Malhotra, Pierre Kory and Meryl Nass. Steven Pelech, author of this book on Covid, is a professor in the Department of Medicine at Klein’s own university. Klein, for her part, is a veteran investigative journalist who should be able to either scrutinise these claims herself or call upon the judgment and/or evaluation of relevant experts. Apparently not. Doppelganger cites not a single scientific source for either side! Having repeatedly mocked people for “doing their own research”, perhaps Klein didn’t feel qualified to engage with the scientific literature herself. But what does that leave us with? A book of endless “hot take” rebuttals to something someone (usually Wolf) wrote on Twitter and an occasional link to press releases by the CDC, the NIH and the WHO. Parroting the exact same language as the now notorious intelligence linked Integrity Initiative, Klein wants to dismiss any and every challenge to the mainstream narrative as “misinformation” or “disinformation” or as having been “debunked”.
 
The trouble with this strategy was that as time went on more and more ‘mis’, ‘dis’ or ‘debunked’ information turned out to be true. Most notoriously, the vaccines exhaustively described as “safe and effective” by health officials, politicians and journalists turned out to be neither safe nor effective. News of this inconveniently started to break into the mainstream just as Klein was preparing to publish Doppelganger. Without the time or the inclination to properly investigate a scandal that would pull the rug from underneath her entire book, Klein morphed into a crisis PR manager for the CDC:

[There have been some] adverse reactions to Covid vaccines, whether rare cases of heart inflammation among teenage boys and young men after receiving the original mRNA shots, a phenomenon being monitored by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, or a possible small uptick in strokes among seniors, a concern being flagged by the CDC in early 2023. There are risks to every vaccine (and indeed any medical procedure or medication) and these reports of harmful reactions, even if confirmed, in no way negate the value or importance of getting vaccinated: Covid itself still represented a far more significant health risk for the population at large.

Her sources confirming the “rarity” of myocarditis and the “small uptick” in strokes? Press releases from the CDC. Source that Covid represented a “significant health risk for the population at large”? None. Klein goes on to cite research claiming that 234,000 Covid deaths in the US “could have been prevented with primary series vaccination.” But who carried out this research? The Peter G. Peterson Foundation founded and funded by the eponymous investment banker, Reaganite Commerce Secretary and co-founder of the Blackstone Group. In 2021 The Peter G Peterson Foundation sponsored an event with the Rockefeller Foundation to honour the work of Chairman and CEO of Pfizer Albert Bourla. In 2022 Bourla received the Peter G. Peterson Business Statesmanship award for his work during Covid. Nonetheless, Naomi Klein wants us to believe that she is sceptical of “concentrated power” and “monopoly capital”.
 
Klein claims to regret the “lack of debate and allowable questioning of the vaccines in progressive spaces”. People had “good reasons”, she writes, “not to trust Big Pharma and Big Government, let alone the two acting in coordination” and they should not have been left to “do their own research” where could encounter Wolf’s “wild claims”. Why wasn’t “ample room” made in “public debates” and “reliable media” for “medical experts skilled in helping the public weigh the pros and cons of health decisions” Klein asks exasperatedly. Indeed. Let me venture an answer. The reason the media and medical experts did not deign to provide “reliable, in-depth information” about the vaccines was presumably the same reason why Klein opted not to do so either. They would have been forced to explain to the public that these weren’t actually vaccines at all, but novel “gene therapies”; that the safety testing had been limited and expedited; that there was no long-term safety data; and after all that the vaccines did not stop transmission or infection. And this just what the CDC said—never mind its critics!
 
Another “debunked conspiracy theory” that turned out to be possibly true, was the ‘lab leak’ origin of Covid. This prompted Klein to make the following self-criticism:

I don’t know where the Covid-19 virus originated […] I do realize, in retrospect, that I was too quick to take the official story—that it came from a wet market where wild animals were sold—at face value. If I’m honest, I accepted it because it served my own motivated reasoning and reinforced my worldview: the pandemic was a little less frightening to me if it was yet another example of humans overstressing nature and getting bitten on the ass for it. Then as time went on, and the “lab leak theory” became a key talking point from people like Wolf in the Mirror World, where it was mixed with baseless claims about bioweapons […] Even though more and more facts and documents were piling up that supported a serious consideration of the lab leak hypothesis, most liberals and leftists didn’t bother looking for months because we didn’t want to be like them, in the same way that I didn’t want to be like her. In an odd way, their over-the-top conspiracies fed our overcredulity; their “question everything” led to many of us not questioning enough.

Klein presents this extract as if it was the result of some honest soul-searching on her part. I wish she had such integrity. The timeline here is quite clear. Emails were leaked very early on that revealed that senior health officials had lied, and that they themselves believed the virus originated from the laboratory in Wuhan. This was initially covered up but when it became impossible to deny, liberal gatekeepers in the mainstream media began sanctioning the ‘lab leak’ hypothesis. There is no evidence (no articles, comments etc) that Klein herself gave any “serious consideration” to the lab leak hypothesis until it became acceptable to the mainstream.
 
If Klein’s revelation regarding her motivated reasoning and narcissistic attachments were genuine, why didn’t she treat it as a chastening lesson not to reflexively dismiss new information based purely on the grounds of who is presenting it? Instead, what we get is a snide attempt to blame Wolf for Klein’s own error. If Wolf hadn’t paired her support for a lab origin of the virus with “baseless claims about bioweapons” Klein might have taken her more seriously. If Klein had done any reading on the subject she would have come across innumerable references in official documentation to the “dual use” of gain of function research. It isn’t a baseless claim, still less a conspiracy theory. It’s official US policy!
 
Another so called “baseless claim” Klein is keen to debunk is that the Green New Deal is "a nefarious plan by bankers and venture capitalists to grab power under cover of the climate emergency.” Read the small print of the Green New Deal however, and what do we find? That the pesky details of how the US economy would be overhauled would be left to a House Select Committee appointed by the Speaker of the House. The committee, in partnership with “business”, “finance” and “industry”, would ensure that any measures taken promote "economic security, labor market flexibility and entrepreneurism.” The financing of the Green New Deal will be provided by the “Federal Reserve” (a cartel of private banks beholden to Wall Street) and “public venture funds”. No close reading of the small print is required to expose the heavy financial bent to the “green solutions” put forward by the UN and the WEF. They are front and centre. The Great Reset is very clearly concerned with sealing the sustainability of the financial system rather than the planet. Why would this be surprising?  Again, no conspiracy. Just policy. Confronted with evidence hiding in plain sight, Klein simply pivots:

[When] conspiracy theories about the Great Reset [started] showing up at the early anti-lockdown protests, they were presented as if a great secret was being revealed. What was strange though, was that the Great Reset wasn’t hidden—it was a branding campaign that the World Economic Forum had kicked off to repackage many of the ideas it has long advanced: biometric IDs, 3D printing, corporate green energy… it was standard issue Davos fare—arrogant to be sure and actively dangerous. But there was nothing hidden about it.

I find this passage baffling not simply because of the way Klein causally lists WEF agenda items she admits are “actively dangerous” as a way to mock those concerned about them. I know of not a single example of any critic of the Great Reset claiming this was a secret. Neither can I fathom why a critic would want to claim it was. It would be totally self-defeating. Keen to find out who she might have meant, I searched through articles of hers over the past few years. The only relevant one I found was in The Intercept:

Search for the term “global reset” and you will be bombarded with breathless “exposés” of a secret globalist cabal, headed by Schwab and Bill Gates, that is [planning] to turn the world into a high-tech dictatorship that will take away your freedom forever: a green/socialist/Venezuela/Soros/forced vaccine dictatorship if the Reset exposé is coming from the far right, and a Big Pharma/GMO/biometric implants/5G/robot dog/forced vaccine dictatorship if the exposé hails from the far left. Confused? That’s not on you.

No Naomi, it’s on you. Because you haven’t specified who you are referring to, nor provided any references or links to what they are arguing. Whoever these “far-left and far-right conspiracists” are, Klein assures us they are…

…sitting down over a tray of information-shit sandwiches to talk about how the Great Reset is Gates’s plan to use the DNA from our Covid-19 tests to turn the United States into Venezuela.

When she isn’t wielding an axe to nameless conspiracy theorists on the far left, she is delivering heart rending sermons on how the left should be more caring and inclusive (???)

Left movements often behave in ways that are neither inclusive or caring. [And we] also don’t put enough thought into how to build alliances… Sure we pay lip service to reaching out, but in practice most of us (even many who claim to be staunchly anti-police) spend a lot of time policing our movements’ borders, turning on people who see themselves as on our side, making our ranks smaller not larger.

Very moving.
 
Klein wasn’t always so blasé about the role of global elites at the heart of the climate justice movement. Back in 2013 Klein had taken the green movement to task for trusting billionaires— and the “Big Green” groups they funded—to put the planet before profits. The denialism among the environmental activists eager to receive billionaire funding “has been more damaging than the right-wing denialism” of climate change, she wrote. Strong words. This followed on from her denunciations of the Ford and the Rockefeller foundations in The Shock Doctrine that funded regime change operations on behalf of the CIA. And yet fast forward to 2020 and the same criticisms that Klein had levelled at the green movement a decade before were drawing widespread condemnation—not least from Klein herself! Jeff Gibbs’ Planet of the Humans, was a documentary that took aim at the green movement’s partnership with billionaires, Wall Street investor corporations, and wealthy family foundations, to promote renewable energy technology as the solution to climate change. Klein joined a campaign to suppress the film, urging executive producers of the film against its release. She would later sign an open letter demanding the film be retracted and promoted a “fact check” of the film by Ketan Joshi, a former communications officer for the wind farm company Infigen Energy.
 
In Doppelganger, Klein still makes references to the excesses of billionaires. Elon Musk, bête noire of liberal establishment, for instance receives many scathing rebukes, as does Peter Thiel. But when it comes to the aforementioned Big Green billionaires, those who also fund the NGOs, charities and foundations that comprise the compatible left Klein belongs to, she is silent. Bill Gates and George Soros do get a mention but only to chastise the likes of Wolf for daring to mention their name. Any focus on these billionaires, we find out, belies “hyper-individualism” and “antisemitism”. We should be “hard and critical on structures” but “soft on people” Klein opines at the end of the book, apparently forgetting that she had devoted the previous three hundred pages projecting liquid vitriol at Naomi Wolf. What changed?
 
What changed was that Klein began getting her hands on some of the Big Green billionaire dollars herself. If you can’t beat them, join them. In truth even while Klein was insisting that "unless we go after the 'money pollution" in politics, "no campaign against real pollution stands a chance” she was working with organisations tied to the Rockefeller Foundation. By 2015, Klein was calling on the support of a string of family foundations including the Schmidt Family Foundation, the Park Foundation and the Wallace Global Fund to support the launch of her book and documentary “This Changes Everything”. The Rockefeller Brothers Fund contributed several grants to the documentary—enough to buy Susan Rockefeller a role as an executive producer. Pittance in comparison to the Ford Foundation that donated a whopping $250,000 to Klein’s project.
 
Far from being embarrassed by these lucrative connections to intelligence connected billionaires, Klein’s actions since have only served to deepen these ties. In 2017 she took on a role as a regular columnist at The Intercept owned by the tech billionaire and US intelligence operative Pierre Omidiyar (the salaries at The Intercept alone are well-known to be exorbitant). In 2018 Klein became the Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University—a position created with a total $3 million from a dozen foundations. Gloria Steinem, lest we forget, was an agent of the CIA.
 
To be clear, I don’t think Klein is a CIA agent (although she doesn’t seem to care very much about being associated with them). I just think she has just internalised the values and discretion of the company she now enjoys. As a possessor of three sinecures and a tenured professorship at the University of British Columbia, Klein now moves in very elite circles—and she isn’t shy about admitting it. Doppelganger is so filled with references to the work of her haute intellectual friends that it felt like I was following her round a soirée at Martha’s Vinyard. Suffice to say, Klein abides by the code and steers clear from the taboos of her class. Most conspicuously, she now shares in their peculiar hang ups.
 
It isn’t quite true that liberals don’t engage in conspiracy theorising. It’s more that they refrain from conspiracising about “elite groups”. This is because they are the elite. Historically then, it has been outsiders that are subjects of their paranoia; designated foreign enemies or domestic extremists. Without question, the most notorious and baseless conspiracy theory of the last ten years is the ‘Russiagate’ or ‘BlueAnon’ conspiracy—the theory that Trump won the 2016 election because of Russian election interference. The theory did not emerge from the bowels of the dark web or far right extremist cults, but from the heart of the liberal establishment; contrived by a collaboration between the Clinton family, Richard Steele and Mi6, and then faithfully repeated ad nauseum during the entirety of Trump’s first term by the liberal media. By the time Covid hit, liberals were blaming Russian disinformation operations bots for any and every challenge to the liberal establishment. Critics called attention to the baselessness of the allegations right away. Klein could hardly have been unaware of this. One of the principal journalist responsible for exposing the fraud was her former colleague and researcher for her Shock Doctrine book, Aaron Maté. By 2022, the details of the fraud were widely known and widely reported. No matter. Liberal conspiracy theories don’t carry the same degree of ridicule or threat of cancellation—so Klein was perfectly happy to repeat the lie that Russia interfered in US elections. Later without specifying who she is referring to or even any accompanying sources or evidence, she alleges that “online leaders” (Wolf?) had been “egged on” by “Russian bots”.
 
Neither Russia nor its president Vladimir Putin has anything to do with the supposed subject of Doppelganger but Klein evidently cannot help herself:

Vladimir Putin, too, is a master at mirroring, and has been since the early days of his career in politics. Throughout Russia’s illegal invasion and occupation of Ukraine, Putin would accuse the Ukrainian government of the precise crimes he was busily committing, or considering committing himself.

Klein’s source for this? Ned Price—spokesperson of the State Department. A chapter later Klein is railing against Putin “casting himself as a global truth-teller about the crimes of Western colonialism and an upholder of the anti-imperialist, anti-fascist traditions”. I have scoured Doppelganger for any of the salient facts pertaining to the lead up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The fact that there was a full-blown civil war happening. That the civil war was sparked by a US sponsored Maidan Coup in 2014 that overthrew a democratically elected government deemed to be too close to its Russian neighbour. That the coup government immediately banned the Russian language. That they integrated Nazis into the heart of the Ukrainian state and began massacring ethnic Russians with US weapons. That the West sabotaged peace negotiations for eight years and then promised to incorporate Ukraine into NATO. These omissions cannot have been born of a lack of concern about the growing threat of fascism. Klein devotes an entire chapter to the “Nazi in the Mirror”. And yet she did not see fit to mention that her own parliament gave two standing ovations to an SS Nazi for his part in fighting the Russians in the World War 2.
 
Equally worthy of “our urgent reckoning” are the domestic extremists: the “ridiculous movements Other Naomi helps lead”. Back in 2008 I recall watching a talk by Klein at the University of Chicago about the banking crisis and what she foresaw as the imminent collapse of neoliberalism. During the talk she implored students and academics to formulate new and better ideas than the ones Milton Friedman and his “Chicago Boys” had formulated at the university three decades previously. After all, “ideas have consequences” she enthused. At the time I was surprised by her idealist faith that the capitalist system could be entirely re-oriented apparently on the basis of better ideas found “lying around”. Or that her job as an activist was to appeal to the wisdom of Brahmin elites to finally see sense. And yet 12 years on Klein was pinning her hopes on something far more fanciful; a full on collective, spiritual conversion of our political class:

This was a crisis that could only be met if we chose to truly see one another, even those laboring and living in the shadows, a crisis that could only be addressed with collective action and willingness to make some individual sacrifices for the greater good. Who can forget those first tender weeks when everything froze. When so many of us [were] alive with connections. [The] illusion of our separateness fell away. We were not, and never were, self-made, and unmade, by one another. [The] period when many governments paid people to stay at home, and offered Covid testing and vaccination for free, represented an extreme and historic deviation from every major public policy trend of the last half century, which has been a headlong flight from the very notion that we owe one another anything by right of our shared humanity […] With no warning, the message from much of our political and corporate classes changed diametrically. It turned out we were a society after all, that the young and healthy should make sacrifices for the old and ill; that we should wear masks as an act of solidarity with them, if not for ourselves; and that we all should applaud and thank the very people whose lives and labor had been most systematically devalued, discounted, and demeaned before the pandemic. Those expressions of solidarity were the real vertigo, the real upside-down world, since they bore no resemblance to the ways capitalism had taught us to unsee and neglect one another for so very long.

The same Klein that prides herself on going beyond the malevolent schemes of nefarious individuals to the deeper material structures of capitalism, nonetheless invests these same individuals with the power to overcome these structures in a moment of transcendent revelation. Unfortunately, Covid did not turn out to be the “portal for change” Klein hoped it would be. To be sure, some blame lies with governments who “didn’t do nearly as much as they could have and should have to build a true infrastructure of care and solidarity during the pandemic”. But the principal fault of “centrist politicians” was believing that the public was capable of the solidarity and care that they, the centrist politicians, had just discovered in themselves. What Klein calls a form of “magical thinking”:

Looking back now, it seems entirely unsurprising that a subset of the population said, Fuck you: we won’t mask or jab or stay home to protect people we have already chosen not to see […] None of this should have come as a shock. What is surprising, and frankly heartening, is that, after decades of frontal attacks on the idea that we live in a society, a critical mass of us had held on to enough of a civic and community spirit that we went along with these new rules for the better part of two years, and, moreover, that so many of us rejoiced at the sudden apparition of a social state. Yes, when our governments abandoned their Covid policies, we lapsed back to the crisis called “normal”—but for a time, we glimpsed another world.

To summarise: in the early months of the pandemic “the message from our political and corporate classes changed diametrically”. This “was the real vertigo, the real-upside down world”. An historic opportunity to break from half a century of neoliberal policy making was, however, undone by a “conglomeration of atomized individuals who saw anything collective as the enemy”. Anyone who questioned the socialist credentials of the likes of Boris Johnson, Justin Trudeau, Emanual Macron, not to mention Donald Trump, were “revolting against connectedness”. At the very time our newly awakened political and corporate classes were forcing through the greatest upward transfer of wealth in human history, Klein’s hopes for a socialist future were “systematically” squandered “by people like my doppelganger.” Klein is clearly so desperate to pin as much blame on Wolf as possible she, ironically, resorts to inventing conspiracy theories about “conspiracy theorists”.
 
Needless to say this is not the much vaunted “structural critique of capitalism” Klein promised. A structural critique of the Covid Event would seek to understand why government health industries became adjuncts of the military industrial complex in the wake of 9/11. It would lay out the parallel histories of ‘gain of function’ and MRNA “vaccine” research funded by the US Defense Department. It would examine critically the pandemic preparation simulations carried out by the US military and the CIA. It would seek to understand why the simulations were so focused on the suspension of democratic procedures and radical longer-term changes that move us towards control societies. Klein would have sought to understand why Operation Warp Speed and the entire US pandemic response was organised by the US military. She would have interrogated the astronomically expensive and risky ‘vaccine or bust’ strategy employed by all Western governments while systematically suppressing the use of provably safe and effective off-patent therapeutics that come at a fraction of the cost. Finally, a structural critique would have situated all of this in the context of the perilous condition of the financial system and the global shift towards a multipolar world.
 
Klein did none of this. What we got instead was a children’s story about good people who stayed home, wore masks and followed the science and bad people who didn’t. A morality tale contrasting the “pseudo-experts, celebrities and influencers” churning out “debunked claims” to their “fickle” audiences with the “serious” and “reliable” reportage of the corporate media. We got a fable about good billionaires allied to the Democratic Party who donate to causes Klein approves of, and bad billionaires allied to the Republican Party who donate to causes Klein does not approve of.
 
Doppelganger is a shockingly bad book and I find it difficult to imagine how a once serious writer could have fallen so far. By focusing on the book’s substantial failures, I think I have, frankly, given the misleading impression that the book is at least largely concerned with substantive issues. It isn’t. When she isn’t discussing viral limericks comparing herself favourably to Wolf she is fretting upon the latter’s increase in Twitter followers. As if signposting her charlatanism, Klein laments her failure to properly "pepper my prose” with “weighty and serious literary references to add depth to wacky anecdotes.” This is someone whose idea of critiquing the “culture of narcissism” consists of a laborious examination of how such a culture makes her feel, how it changes the way she relates to herself and how it “alienates” her from her “true self”. Klein is hopelessly lost.
 
Fame, undoubtedly, has taken its toll. After years in the public eye, Klein is now someone in constant need of reassurance:

Covid had cancelled so many of the things that had for years, told me who I was in the world. A planned book tour. A series of lectures. Places where people would come up to me and share what my work meant to them… The world was disappearing and so was I.

Elsewhere she states her preference for truths and ways of understanding the world that are “stabilizing”. This is not an attack on Klein’s character. Only to point out that she is clearly not cut out for a profession (investigative journalism) that entails the wherewithal to reveal uncomfortable, destabilising, facts and the courage to take unpopular stances. She hasn’t, by her own admission, got the stomach for it. Not any more. There is no shame in this. However, evidently Klein does feel shame, which is why she has been reduced to writing 350 page hit pieces against those that do. It is pathetic.
 
But this is bigger than Naomi Klein. To be sure somebody less conflicted could have done a better job ‘left-washing’ the Covid Event. But not much better. The wretchedness of Doppelganger owes most to the fact that Klein set herself the task of defending the indefensible. A few years ago, it seemed that the political right was facing an existential crisis as young people overwhelmingly tacked towards the progressive left. For anyone paying attention—the shift to the left seemed inevitable and inexorable. Today it is the left facing an existential crisis having needlessly and gratuitously thrown their weight behind the biggest scandal in the history of Western medicine. For three whole years health officials, politicians, and their stenographers in the media did nothing but lie to us. They lied about the origin of the virus, they lied about its lethality, they lied about masking and they lied about treatments and therapeutics. They lied about the safety and effectiveness of the so-called vaccines. Anyone who had the temerity to point this out was smeared as a “conspiracy theorist” or a “grifter” by a left hellbent on hurling a generation of dissidents to the political right. The scale of this betrayal is every bit as great as the Second International’s support for World War One. My only hope is that the self-destruction of this iteration of the left will—as it did a hundred years ago—clear the space for something revolutionary in its place. A left that won’t morph into sclerotic liberalism. A left genuinely relevant to a post-Covid, multipolar world.

Author
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Samuel Grove is a political activist in the UK. His previous writing has been published in Philosophy Now, Tribune, Salvage, Monthly Review, Alborada, and Red Pepper. His monograph on Charles Darwin, The Reluctant Radical, was published by Lexington Books in 2021.

Photo credit: Vera de Kok (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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

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

In March, Batya Ungar-Sargon — deputy opinion editor of Newsweek — went on Real Time with Bill Maher. During the show’s panel discussion, Ungar-Sargon described herself as “a MAGA leftist.” She then launched into a lengthy pitch for why Donald Trump is the true progressive in American politics. Ungar-Sargon touted his supposedly “socially moderate, anti-war, and… protectionist… leftist agenda.”
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In reality, Trump’s agenda is nothing of the sort. He is not socially moderate. During his first term, Trump appointed the justices who overturned Roe v. Wade (and might come for contraception next). He also opposes gay marriage and weed legalization, and made demonizing transgender people a focal point of his 2024 campaign. While Trump — a twice divorcee — hardly embodies traditionalist values himself, his political impact squarely pushes in that direction. The Republican policy blueprint Project 2025 even suggests banning pornography despite Trump appearing in the softcore film Video Centerfold.

On foreign policy, there is little daylight between Trump and the neoconservative old guard he claims to have buried. In his first term, Trump increased drone strikes and shredded the Iran nuclear deal. He radically expanded American troop presence in Afghanistan. Rather than end the most unpopular war in American history, he intensified it. Following October 7th, Trump has consistently been among the biggest cheerleaders of Israel’s war of elimination in Gaza. On the campaign trail, Trump made clear his biggest problem with the genocide is that it hasn’t been bloody enough. When Trump issued his 90-day foreign aid pause, he took care to exempt the Zionist entity. 

As for trade, Trump’s protectionism is neither here nor there. Barriers to trade are not inherently leftist. Joe Biden erected, maintained, and heightened plenty of them. So did George W. Bush, whose infamous steel tariffs destroyed nearly 200,000 jobs. This blunder did not make Bush, the posterboy of neoconservative rot, economically progressive. For that, look to the Communist Party of China. Its open trade policies spurred unprecedented development that lifted over 850 million people from poverty in just 50 years. Meanwhile, unambiguously rightist governments throughout history like fascist Italy and Nazi Germany collapsed living standards via autarky. Despite what Ungar-Sargon suggests, trade openness does not neatly map onto a left-right political spectrum. 

What truly determines the political orientation of a trade regime is whose interests it serves. A progressive one must primarily serve the working class, which Trump’s does not. His indiscriminate and unnecessarily high blanket tariffs will only exacerbate the inflation crisis already squeezing American wallets. The pretext for this policy was helping domestic businesses by making foreign producers uncompetitive. But countries have predictably responded by imposing their own tariffs, constricting the market for American goods. To make matters worse, this economic battle crashed the stock market — spelling doom for workers with investment retirement plans.

In short, MAGA leftism is not a thing. Even Maher, in a rare moment of lucidity, recognized this. When Ungar-Sargon identified herself as “a MAGA leftist,” he immediately replied with, “That makes no sense.”

For those familiar with Midwestern Marx’s work, MAGA leftism will probably remind them of MAGA communism. While the wording is strikingly similar, the two phrases have totally different definitions. Unlike MAGA leftism, MAGA communism does not claim that Trump’s agenda is progressive. Indeed, MAGA communism’s biggest proponents — like Jackson Hinkle of the American Communist Party — regularly criticize Trump’s conservative policies.

Rather, MAGA communism is simply a mode of outreach to the disaffected and irreverent workers in Trump’s base. It is about harnessing conservative aesthetics to successfully sell them leftist ideas like ending “globalist” imperialism and nationalizing Big Tech. MAGA communism does not presume that Trump himself is a communist. It merely acknowledges that his working-class base can and should be part of the transition to a socialist future. To that end, MAGA communists like Hinkle meet American workers where they are, using patriotic imagery/rhetoric to pitch communism.

It is a good strategy, and an authentically Marxist one. Karl Marx famously called upon all workers of the world to unite. He did not divide the working class along partisan or even cultural lines. Rather, Marx recognized that — whatever differences exist between workers — their material interests align. Every worker has an interest in overthrowing capitalism: the corporatist labyrinth that keeps their wages low and lives brutish.

American politics, in recent years, has experienced massive class dealignment. Earnings no longer predict voting patterns. The evidence is staggering. Cornell University separated voters in the 2024 election into three income brackets: <$50,000, $50,000-$99,999, and ≥$100,000. All of them split roughly 50-50 between Trump and Kamala Harris.

This suggests American workers on the whole do not see their class interests as clearly aligning with either major party. And that means there is an opening for communists to make their case. The American Communist Party is seizing this opportunity by entering working-class communities and showing them who has their back. Party members conduct food drives and neighborhood cleanups to meet people’s immediate needs — regardless of their partisan affiliation. They also politically educate communities, fitting the case for communism to the American context and cultural mores. 

In other words, members of the American Communist Party practice MAGA communism. The strategy is alive and well. And it should remain so, as long as we believe in the working class’s ability to change its conditions.

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

Muslims are not a threat to you.

Russia is not a threat to you.

China is not a threat to you.

Trans people are not a threat to you.

Immigrants are not a threat to you.

If you find yourself resisting anything I just said, that’s where they hooked you. That’s where your rulers duped you into blaming your problems on something other than them.

You will notice that I am not saying there are no enemies and nobody poses a threat to us; there absolutely are, and they absolutely do. It’s just that people are tricked and manipulated away from seeing the real enemies and the real threats where they are.

What poses a threat to you is the political status quo which robs your country of riches and resources to inflict military violence on innocent people overseas while strangling your civil rights and poisoning your planet. What poses a threat to you are the oligarchs and empire managers who uphold this status quo which is driving our species to authoritarian dystopia and extinction via environmental disaster or nuclear annihilation.

They want you blaming your problems on anyone else besides the actual source of your problems. They prefer to get you freaking out about their primary targets — the disobedient groups and nations they want to destroy to advance the interests of the empire — but if they can’t accomplish that then they’re happy to get you hating powerless groups who pose no real threat to you. Anything they can do to keep your eyes off your real oppressors: the billionaires, bankers, media barons, intelligence agencies, warmongers, ecocidal capitalists, military-industrial complex plutocrats, and all the empire lackeys in your official elected government.

They want us fighting each other, but we only pose a threat to each other if we buy into their bogus narratives of hostility and division. An immigrant is only threatened by a right winger because the right winger has been successfully duped into blaming his problems on the immigrant, and therefore elects empire lackeys who will make the immigrant’s life more difficult. But without that artificially manufactured enmity, it’s just two people being abused by the same pricks at the top.

Whenever I say stuff like this I’ll get people voicing objections like “No no Caitlin you don’t understand, we really truly ARE seriously dangerously threatened by The Trans Agenda” or whatever. But you’re not. That’s just you doing the thing I’m describing here. You’re just buying into the exact scam I’m talking about. You’re allowing your crosshairs to be moved from your oppressors to some irrelevant diversion in order to protect your oppressors.

At some point we need to stop falling for the scam. We need to wake up to the fact that we’re all just a bunch of normal people living in a highly abusive society, and that our abusers are benefiting immensely from our inability to see through their divide-and-conquer manipulations and unite against them.

Muslims are not a threat to you.

Russia is not a threat to you.

China is not a threat to you.

Trans people are not a threat to you.

Immigrants are not a threat to you.

The US empire is a threat to you.

Your own government is a threat to you.

Oligarchs are a threat to you.

Nuclear brinkmanship is a threat to you.

Ecocide is a threat to you.

War and militarism are a threat to you.

Tyranny is a threat to you.

Propaganda is a threat to you.

Your enemies are not in Moscow, Beijing and Tehran. Your enemies are in Washington, Virginia, New York and Los Angeles. Your enemies are in London, Paris, Brussels and Tel Aviv. Your abusers are not some far away nation your own government doesn’t like, nor are they some marginalized group your government doesn’t care about. Your abusers are your government itself, and all its allies and assets around the world, and the network of oligarchs and empire managers who call the shots in this globe-spanning power structure from behind the scenes.
​
The sooner we get this straight, the sooner we can sort out all these problems we’re currently being duped into blaming on the wrong people.

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

Much maligned are the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) in South Africa. Their leader, Malema, was branded “the most dangerous man in South Africa.” [1] Afriforum, which boasts of its connection to the State Department, [2] has called the EFF an “organised crime enterprise,” and all mainstream political actors, from those who call themselves “leftists” to the right, have slandered & condemned the EFF. [3][4] From the Breadtube streamer Vaush hurling the same attacks he hurls against working-class Americans toward Malema, calling him a racist and fascist, [5] to the right-wing, such as the outlet Fox News, falsely claiming that Julius Malema sung a “genocidal” song and called for “violence” against White citizens when in reality the “Kill the Boer” song is no more a call for genocide than the various American patriotic songs against the British; it was an Apartheid-era song calling for liberation from Apartheid and for a free South Africa. [6] Even U.S. President Donald Trump has attacked them, posting a strong condemnation of land reform in South Africa. [7] This is despite the fact that the “Government of National Unity” in South Africa merely proposed a superficial bill, which is not, in fact, an instrument of land reform and is not at all close to EFF policy. Nonetheless, all these attacks serve to shut down the land reform efforts in South Africa.
​
However, rather than being criminals, the EFF's movement is much more similar to the American struggle for land. Primary to the EFF’s movement is the struggle for land; they attack the elites’ stranglehold on property in South Africa. This is something Americans can relate to. Over 200 million acres in the United States are prevented from serving a social purpose due to the Bureau of Land Management's (BLM) management and control of them; instead of serving American interests, they serve private interests. Furthermore, billionaires such as Bill Gates are swallowing up all agricultural property, despite the fact that they have no intention of using it for any social purpose that benefits the communities that reside near the land. Billionaire and CNN founder Ted Turner is also among the largest private landowners in the US. [8] While the media celebrates America becoming a nation of renters, this matter couldn’t be any more serious for average Americans with real estate prices on the rise. [9] In China, the CPC owns the land and leases it to its citizens with the social end (benefitting the local communities) in mind, whereas under BLM rule the “public” ownership of the land is not utilized to actually help uplift the people and the communities. Similarly, in South Africa, rather than the land serving a common good, the vast majority of the land is owned by the same wealthy landowning families and companies that have owned the land for decades, if not longer, leaving no hope for the dispossessed and landless masses to own a home or keep land of their own. [10] Instead, the same wealthy families and businesses continue to acquire more land.

This is why the EFF proposes a land reform that would see, under the governance of a popular regime, all land transferred to the ownership and custodianship of the state. This would not be under the purview of a bureaucratic parasitic entity like the BLM, nor would it serve to prevent land from serving a social benefit to the communities and people residing there. Instead, as the EFF states, “private ownership of land will be discontinued, and the State will be entrusted with the responsibility of managing and administering land on behalf of the people.” [11] This means that the leasing of land will serve a social end, that being the benefit of, in the case of South Africa, the people of South Africa and the communities that reside on the land. It is not, as the opponents of the EFF may characterize it, a move at “seizing your house.” The EFF makes it clear that “no one” will lose their house as a result of this land reform. [12] Instead of the BLM’s hostility to small farmers and opposition to the development of land, the EFF’s proposed custodianship of agricultural land will be pursued in a developmental manner, seeking innovation in productivity and which will be carried out in coordination to benefit small farmers. [13]
​
What are the models we can look at to see current success? In China, their system forbids private land ownership altogether, using a “public ownership” framework. The EFF cites the Chinese model of land ownership as one of the examples to look to in this regard and has stated that it is inspired by the CPC, seeing it as a torchbearer for all parties like theirs. [14] [15] Urban land is owned by the state, while rural and suburban land is collectively owned by rural residents (with certain parcels explicitly designated as state land by law). [16] In 1992, China introduced a paid land-use system: commercial and residential plots are auctioned off to the highest bidder—funds that then go toward infrastructure and public investments—while industrial sites are often provided cheaply or at no cost. [17] This arrangement keeps overall costs low, drives large-scale infrastructure projects, and spurs economic growth. [18] Studies indicate that, under a purely private land regime, China’s industrial output, investment, and resident welfare would have dropped, with marginal production costs rising by about 6% accompanied by a 36% fall in GDP. [19] Public ownership also prevents monopolistic land speculation and guarantees that revenue from land (through auctions and leases) is reinvested in infrastructure, rather than going into private hands. [20] This ensures that the land serves a social end in benefitting the communities adjacent to these lands.

Beyond this, China’s government has taken steps to address real estate by effectively nationalizing portions of the property sector. State-owned developers gained a growing share of land purchases—nearing 90% in 2023—while struggling private firms were allowed to default. [21] By 2024, authorities made clear that safeguarding homebuyers and completing housing projects took priority over saving indebted private developers. [22] This intensified the state’s role in the real estate market, reflecting China’s broader commitment to keeping land in public hands and channeling its use toward social and economic development rather than private gain.
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So while in China, their popular government [23] has pursued a model of public ownership in which the use of land is oriented to serve a social end rather than serve powerful private interests and speculators, in the US and South Africa, attacking the existing stranglehold on the land is dismissed as conspiracy theory and extremist. In the US, criticizing the now-largest private farmland owners in America, the Gates family, is dismissed as conspiratorial, and Bill Gates’ purchases are simply said to be a “rich guy doing rich guy things.” Bill Gates, Ted Turner, [24] and Jeff Bezos have bought up large swathes of farmland and, through their influence and through foundations such as the Bill & Melinda Gates’ Foundation, have dominated the global conversation surrounding food production (i.e., the Great Reset) [25] and attacked small farmers by promoting the World Economic Forum narratives surrounding “sustainability.” [26] Small farmers are increasingly being pushed aside as 13 percent of operations rent or own 75 percent of U.S. farmed cropland [27] and in some counties, 80 percent of agricultural land is held by non-operators (non-farmers). [28]

In regards to the BLM, the only way to force them to end their abusive practices has been through confrontation, as shown by the 2014 standoff (in Bunkerville, Nevada) between ranchers and BLM officers, leading them to cease the roundup of these small ranchers' cattle. [29] In fact, this standoff led to some participants in this land struggle coming to realize the broader injustices imposed by the current ruling class; they saw the oppression imposed by the BLM and saw government oppression in other aspects of life in the U.S. as well. This was the case with second-generation rancher Ammon Bundy (currently considered a fugitive by the government), who participated in and helped organize the 2014 standoff as well as also leading a small uprising that seized the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Harney County, Oregon for around six weeks in protest of the BLM and other government agencies for what they perceived as unjust federal land policies, encouraging ranchers to tear up their government grazing contracts. [30] [31]

​Ammon Bundy, while condemning “Black Lives Matter” organizations which align with the ruling class: e.g., like the organizations founded or led by people such as Shaun King or Opal Tometi (who has been criticized for being a Democrat operative), [32] has spoke out against the view that people genuinely protesting police brutality are more of a threat than the police, because for him, whether it's ranchers hit with exorbitant federal fines for “land mismanagement” or Black Americans facing abuse by the police over unpaid fines for minor infractions, these are all examples of injustice, as he put it himself: “We are standing up for people’s rights, no matter their color . . . I think it’s rooted in a similar problem: injustice.” [33] The experience of engaging in this land struggle will open one’s eyes to all of the rotten activities of our ruling class.

The BLM’s regulatory rules, such as the Public Lands Rule, [34] under the rhetoric of shifting the focus toward conservation, have reduced the land available for productive uses such as livestock grazing, making it even more difficult for small farmers to secure grazing permits and maintain access to public lands, especially in tandem with the bureaucratic and complex process involved in being a permittee. [35] The BLM has billions of dollars allocated to it for maintenance yet without producing any noticeable improvement for the land under its authority or for the communities that reside around those areas. [36] [37] The resource extraction and produce from BLM-managed land do not trickle down to the rural masses living near their land; the social end is not met. [38] The government’s administration of the land is not in the benefit of the communities that reside there. The federal government violated a promise (made in 2023) to the local communities and authorized a foreign corporation to open a potentially toxic uranium mine near the Grand Canyon and directly above a freshwater aquifer, the source of all of the Havasupai Tribe’s drinking water. The local Havasupai community has noticed livestock dying and people getting sick. [39] Furthermore, in places like California, forest management has been botched so much that now the part of national forests protected from timber harvesting is a net contributor to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere due to fires and trees killed by disease and insects. The government’s management of the forests was not at all in the benefit of the community; the fuel load was not kept in check and it allowed for millions of acres in the state to be scorched by wildfire, with over 130 dead due to this. [40]
​
In the 2025 California fire, costs caused by the fire likely exceeded $20 billion, with over 16,000 structures destroyed, over 57,000 acres burned, and at least 29 people dead. [41] [42] This translates to thousands of people's lives and livelihoods being destroyed. Not only does the current government land administration favor corporations over the communities or tribes that live there, enabling the abuse of small ranchers, but they also are fully incompetent in terms of managing the land itself and keeping it maintained.

In South Africa, powerful wealthy families dominate the land and use their power to prevent land reform. The Rupert family in South Africa holds significant land in regions like the Western Cape, Mpumalanga, and Eastern Cape, alongside direct control of wildlife reserves and national parks. Meanwhile, estimates from 2020 show that over 60 percent of South Africa’s population does not have any secure tenure rights. [43] The Rupert family’s influence extends into the financial sector via their holding company of REMGRO, which holds shares of major banks like FNB, RMB, WesBank, Grindrod, and Discovery Bank. In the insurance industry, companies such as Discovery, Momentum, and Outsurance fall under their umbrella. They also have substantial stakes in healthcare via entities like Mediclinic. Lastly, they have their hands in the petroleum industry (Total South Africa) and e-Media (eNCA and e-Tv). The landless masses are kept in their squalor imposed by parasitic giants such as the Rupert family. The Rupert-controlled media, such as the eNCA, silences the EFF and opposes any media presenters who voice an independent perspective about South African politics. [44] The eNCA serving this role is favored by the South African presidency and rewarded with media access. [45]
​
What are the real opportunities for the common folk to challenge this oppression? The elections in South Africa are heavily influenced by these ultra-wealthy and powerful families, with the media in both the USA and South Africa used to prop up "choices,” which by and large serve to continue the ruling class’ agenda despite whatever aesthetic differences they may have. In South Africa, the Oppenheimer family is one of South Africa’s richest and most politically influential families. [46] It is by far one of the leading powers of the entrenched families in South Africa. During the Apartheid period in South Africa, the ‘Oppenheimer empire’ exploited resources not only in South Africa but also in Tanganyika and Swaziland; while acting in this role, they also financed the sham opposition in Parliament such as the United Party as well as white nationalist formations such as the Torch Commando. [47] The Oppenheimer family exerts its influence in South Africa through a number of means. Firstly by directly promoting the Democratic Alliance (DA) and ActionSA as part of the so-called “Multi-Party Charter,” and secondly by indirectly promoting the tribalist Zulu Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) (which basically supported apartheid in line with the Bantustan policy) through their ties dating back to the 1970s. Harry Oppenheimer also donated to the IFP President Mangosuthu Buthelezi to establish what is now Mangosuthu University of Technology, and the Oppenheimer family’s visible presence at his funeral solidified their clear alignment on opposition to land reform. [48] 

Furthermore, they also extensively involved themselves in local elections through their political puppets. [49] Their influence doesn’t stop there; the current President of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, is an Oppenheimer protégé. He was a representative of the Urban Foundation, which was a “brainchild of the business sector following the 1976 uprising in black communities, was formed with the inspiration of Harry Oppenheimer and Anton Rupert and Jan van der Horst from the Anglo American, Rembrandt and Old Mutual stables respectively.” [50] Cyril Ramaphosa, in the post-apartheid period, was director at the Anglo-American Corporation. [51] Thus, it should’ve been no great surprise when we saw the ANC under Ramaphosa’s leadership form a coalition government with the DA, the Patriotic Alliance (PA), Freedom Front Plus (this neo-apartheid party has the Ministry of Correctional Services) and the IFP. [52] [53] The coalition is called the Government of National Unity; except rather than uniting the country under a popular government, it places far more control in the hands of the powerful elite families of South Africa.
Not only does Ramaphosa have ties going back decades with the Oppenheimers, but as a puppet of the real power in South Africa, the entrenched families such as the Rupterts, the Bekkers, and yes, the Oppenheimers too, it is not in their interest to see land reform and redistribution occur, so they use all their assets and puppets to prevent this from occurring, This then neutralizes any elements that may have previously existed in the ANC by bringing it into a coalition government with it’s direct puppet, the DA, and the parties under its indirect control, such as the IFP and other collaborative interests like the PA. In modern South Africa, the Oppenheimer family still holds this same role as the entrenched wealthy families in America, doing the bidding of the deep state and the intelligence apparatus. We see in the US how the very same families mentioned in Ferdinand Lundberg’s America's 60 Families, which discussed how the powerful families, through their various foundations and funded NGOs, formed a plutocratic circle in the government, carrying out one of the State Department’s key functions: fomenting color revolutions and promoting the U.S. State Department's narrative. We see the activities of the Ford Foundation and of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in promoting the U.S. ruling class’ agenda. [54]
​
In South Africa, also not yet sovereign and free from the slavery of financial capital, the families that own the natural resources and land, like the Ruperts, Oppenheimers, and Guptas. Despite whatever disputes you may see in the media between them, when it comes to what is in the critical interest of finance capital, all unite to attack the threat posed by the EFF and Julius Malema. A perfect example of this is with the uMkhonto weSizwe Party (MK Party), formed by ex-president Jacob Zuma, who’s connected to the Gupta family. [55] The MK Party puts on a progressive veneer, but in reality, their purpose was to attack the EFF and attempt to bring about its collapse. [56] As EFF Central Command Team member Matumba Anthony said, “The EFF is the only opposition party in South Africa with a proper foot print in all provinces.” [57] This is true. The MK Party is a party that practices what is called “Home Boy” politics (in other terms, tribalism), much like the IFP before them. The EFF receives more votes than the MK Party in all provinces except KwaZulu-Natal and Mpumalanga. [58] This is because Zulu-speaking voters reside in KwaZulu-Natal, southern regions of Mpumalanga, and Gauteng (where EFF still got more votes). Furthermore, the MK Party had people in the EFF sabotaging its campaign from the inside (Floyd, Dali, Jimmy Manyi, Mkhwebane). [59] With the political forces of the Guptas, Oppenheimer, and Ruperts all mobilized against the EFF, it is remarkable that they survived this effort at initiating a total collapse of the party. The EFF survived because they have a solid popular base of support among the landless South Africans across all provinces with no reliance on tribalism.

The EFF has reached out to all South Africans of good character in all provinces. And contrary to what the Western slander of the EFF says, this includes working-class South Africans who are White. Despite what the media attempts to portray, the EFF does not actually tolerate racism; in 2015 they expelled race identitarian and Gupta family apologist Andile Mngxitama and his associates from the party as his stances contradicted the EFF’s platform while also engaging in slander of the party’s chairman Julius Malema. [60] Mngxitama then took similarly minded people to his new split-off party, Black First Land First (BLF), which rejects Marxist analysis in favor of racial identitarianism, banning White members from joining. [61] The EFF never had a policy like this in place. In fact, it has thousands of supporters [62] who are South Africans of White ancestry, and Julius Malema has encouraged White EFF members to run as candidates, [63] saying the EFF is home to everyone, “a fighter is a fighter.” [64] The EFF supports inclusive recruitment campaigns across racial lines; [65] consequently, we’ve seen a rise in prominent student EFF activists [66] as well as South Africans of White ancestry, such as anti-apartheid veteran Carl Niehaus, who was elected to an EFF seat in the National Assembly and occupies a very visible role as an EFF activist. [67] Of course, the BLF allied with those who sought to sabotage the EFF, forming an electoral pact with the MK Party. [68] The EFF is not even close to the identitarianism of the BLF. The EFF has gone out to the neglected and impoverished settlements of South Africa, some of which have both Black and White inhabitants, helping to restore buildings and clean up the area. 

One White South African from a mini-shantytown helped by the EFF, stated that the ‘White-led party’ (DA) governing the area had just used them for votes and discarded them like garbage, saying the following: “When the DA took over Ekurhuleni, we never heard from them again. My next vote, and the vast majority of everyone living here, will be for the EFF next time. They see us, they hear us, and they do not care about race. Just about poor people.” Yet people will still believe, based on coordinated media efforts, that the EFF is who we should be scared of; the EFF, not the elites and defense contractors shipping weapons to bomb children in Gaza, not the Silicon Valley billionaires itching to take more of our rights away, and not the duopoly in America that seeks to stifle independent thought supplemented by censorship. Working-class Americans (including those of White ancestry) have infinitely more in common with the folks supporting the EFF and the South Africans struggling for land ownership than the wealthy landholding families and massive corporations.

To argue that the material interests of any working-class American are the same as the latter's would be the equivalent of saying that a working-class American has the same material interests as the Gates’, Elon Musk (who is currently attempting to increase imported foreign labor into the US), [69] or Larry Fink. This is an obviously laughable and easily debunked claim. So why is it that many people who are aware of the political actors in South Africa continue to fall into this line of thinking? As mentioned earlier, there is an extensive propaganda campaign designed to funnel criticism against the EFF. AfriForum is dedicated to shaping public opinion against both land reform and Julius Malema (going as far as organizing a “Stop Malema” campaign) [70] under the guise of minority rights, much like how other “minority rights” organizations, such as Uyghur international organizations abroad, serve reactionary goals and the US ruling class’ soft power, though now hampered with the recent US budget cuts. [71] [72]

AfriForum has ties to the US State Department. As stated earlier, AfriForum CEO Kallie Kriel met and talked with US National Security Advisor John Bolton in 2018, [73] who was simultaneously planning the Venezuelan coup d'état. [74] Furthermore, the presence of multiple emigrant South African tech elites [75] seems to play the role of a Gusano-like pressure group [76] advocating for specific and targeted negative coercive policies toward their country of origin without real regard for the well-being or sovereignty of the vast majority of the populations of these countries. [77] [78] The difference between South Africa and Cuba is that the latter underwent comprehensive land reform, levelling the Gusano landholding elite and expelling them to the US, whereas in South Africa, the land of these elite families was not seized, nor were their holdings touched, and they (like what Errol Musk admitted about Elon Musk’s shares of apartheid-era industries in African mines) did not form their respective companies in South Africa; instead, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and David Sacks seek to prevent a real land reform (like the EFF proposes) from occurring. These people are not looking out at all for the interests of the American people in their actions here; no foreign lobby ever does.
​
While that explains the particularities of the current administration's relationship to the situation, why would people like John Bolton, who have strong ties with the Deep State apparatus, involve themselves with AfriForum and promote an agenda against Julius Malema? The answer is simple: Malema threatens the American ruling class's interests in South Africa; he threatens the powerful bankers and their interests in looting the nation, and he threatens the large landowners who oppose any effort at land reform. The EFF and Malema threaten American imperialism in Africa; they oppose all efforts of the US to change or coerce the policies of African nations. [79] Furthermore, they oppose the lucrative Western-driven extraction of Africa’s natural resources away from the people they belong to. For example, the EFF has taken a vocal stance against the Kagame government in Rwanda, which has served as a launchpad for American influence in the region since Kagame came to power in 1994, which occurred after he was trained by the US at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. [80] [81] Kagame’s regime not only fills a valuable security role [82] for the US but also a financial role, utilizing their occupation of Eastern DRC to exploit more natural resources, which are in turn sold to the Western nations. [83] This and the other reasons stated earlier are why Silicon Valley billionaire and now-government official Elon Musk (whose family is tied to the apartheid period in South Africa, with Musk’s grandfather being a vocal supporter of apartheid and his father, Errol Musk, stating they owned shares in a mine) [84] [85] has called for Julius Malema to be sanctioned and declared an international criminal. [86] Musk has gone further and posited that President Cyril Ramaphosa should ‘disallow’ the EFF. [87] In a controversy that figures like Musk, Trump, and others claim is fueled by the Expropriation Act—a legislative measure on land reform opposed by the EFF—it appears the act will not function as a genuine instrument of land reform. Given the way it is stirring debate, it seems more likely aimed at pressuring South Africa to reject the EFF and take action against it.

In light of all this, it is clear that the fight of the EFF is the same fight of the American working class. The concentration of land and resources in the hands of a few perpetuates despair and hopelessness among the American people. Rather than dismissing movements like the EFF based on prevailing narratives that are peddled by dubious personalities and media, Americans should find inspiration in the EFF’s resolve to confront entrenched power in South Africa.

The current political landscape in the U.S. is currently seen as limited to a binary choice between Republican and Democrat; they are ultimately the same and neither will change anything concretely for the better. Americans must look to the EFF for inspiration to unite under a collective movement—a universal army of Americans committed to advocating for a real change in America to end this inhuman system operating here and to build a new one focused on social ends. Instead of the Gates, [88] the Morgans, [89] the Rockefellers, [90] the Fords, [91] [92] [93] or powerful corporate powers like BlackRock and Vanguard which dominate the Federal Reserve, [94] who are buying up houses, making it harder for the average American to own a home through large stakes in real estate companies [95] and deciding policy in the US and pushing the American people toward landlessness. Instead of the entrenched ruling class and intelligence agencies using our nation’s resources for their foreign wars and efforts, what if the American people were in charge? If you agree the American people should lead this nation and not unaccountable deep state interests, then you in effect have the same mission as the EFF in South Africa, who are struggling for their country to be free from the domination of monopoly capital and from the current ruling class apparatus.
​
Drawing on Jameson’s notion of the universal army, in An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army, as a vehicle for dual power, we can view the EFF in South Africa as embodying a similar transformative impulse. The universal army is not merely a fighting force but a mass mobilization apparatus—a re-nationalized institution that provides essential services and stands as a counterweight to an unrepresentative state. As Jameson puts it, the project calls for a “popular mass force capable of coexisting successfully with an increasingly unrepresentative ‘representative government’ and transforming it into a vehicle for mass democracy rather than the representative kind.” [96] 

The EFF operates on a similar principle. Since its formation in 2013—born out of a rejection of neoliberal policies, rampant corruption, and lack of land reform—the EFF has mobilized a broad base, with chapters in every province, and reaching out directly to the neglected masses. This mass mobilization is the universal army, which transcends traditional party politics by directly engaging with the people, providing daily services, and reconfiguring power.

For instance, in informal settlements like Lulu’s Place in Bredell, EFF members have not only campaigned for votes but have actively cleaned up, repaired, and supported local residents. One resident, Charon Uys, noted, “While other parties just pass through during voter registration and election campaigns, the EFF decided to include us in their efforts—and they never left.” [97] While the government allows illegal dumpings in places like Bredell, the EFF takes on the work to keep these places livable. [98] Such initiatives illustrate the formation of dual power: a parallel structure that steps in where traditional state and party apparatuses have failed to serve the basic needs of the people.

Moreover, by addressing issues like land reform and nationalization, the EFF shifts the political discourse—forcing mainstream parties like the ANC, DA, and others, as shown earlier linked to entrenched oligarchies and corrupt networks, to contend with demands that originate from the grassroots, exposing these parties’ lack of will to carry out change to the public. Dual power emerges when alternative institutions provide tangible services that directly contest the monopoly of state power. During the floods in KwaZulu-Natal, the EFF’s rapid deployment of food parcels and blankets not only provided immediate relief but also symbolically asserted their capacity to govern and care for the people in ways that conventional political structures have neglected. [99] [100]
The EFF’s broad national presence, its consistent engagement with the neglected sectors of society, and its commitment to issues of economic justice and land reform, collectively construct a form of dual power. The EFF represents the will of the landless masses. They operate within the existing state framework while simultaneously carving out an alternative sphere of social and political organization. It is through this popular mobilization that the stranglehold on the land can be challenged.

Just as the EFF seeks to empower the landless and dispossessed in South Africa, acting as a universal army, a similar movement in America could work toward breaking the stranglehold of powerful interests and bringing about justice for Americans. In fact, in America we do see the beginning of this, with the formation of the American Communist Party (ACP). While still a burgeoning young party, the ACP has pushed forward to fill the gaps left by the American government. In the aftermath of the 2024 hurricane season that hit the southern states, the ACP spent weeks delivering generators, distributing children's diabetes supplies, mobilizing thousands of dollars worth of essential supplies, and cleaning up debris. [101] [102] [103] [104] Furthermore, the ACP has provided food to the hungry in their communities, restored homes, and they have helped their communities in other ways, such as building a public library box to promote access to educational materials. [105] [106] [107] [108] [109] While the ACP has not reached the mobilization levels of the more than one million-strong EFF, they are pushing forward to develop an American universal army to uphold the sovereignty of the American people and to foster working-class power.
​

Though the media will try to tell you that the EFF are racists or fascist extremists who have nothing in common with Americans, nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, it is through analysis of their approach to the South African land struggle and their development of a popular base for mobilization that we can seek to free ourselves from the tyrannical oligarchy in our own country.
​
Like Jackson Hinkle, a member of the Executive Board of the ACP, said in a conversation with EFF host Titus Tshungu: “A lot of people say that the biggest enemy of America is Russia or they’ll say America’s biggest enemy is China. . . . Now Elon Musk is saying our enemy is Julius Malema. But the truth is the biggest enemy of the US government is the American people.” [110]

Author

Louie of RTSG, edited by Seraph. RTSG is an international research collective that brings reality to a world of Fake News. We prize our independency, reliability, and discipline. We will only post the truth, and nothing but the truth.

References
​

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4. Yet they spend an exorbitant amount of time attacking Communists and attacking the most successful Communist movements, such as that of the Communist Party of China, as well as supporting Western efforts against countries such Russia (Reuters Fact Check. “CNN Did Not Tweet a Story about ‘the Kharkiv Kid Finder.’” Reuters, 8 Mar. 2022, https://archive.ph/PCwht. “Kochinski is a self-described ‘libertarian socialist’ and ‘anti-fascist’, and he has posted a wealth of content expressing disapproval of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine”).
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11. Ibid.
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13. Ibid.
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30. Was tased multiple times by BLM officers during the struggle. Ammon Bundy was the one who made the call for protesters to gather to rally against the BLM. He commented on the 2014 struggle, stating, “We the people got together and made something right.“ He said public figures who don’t agree with this struggle should “be kicked out of office,” regardless of their position, he added. https://web.archive.org/web/20150320232543/http://insider.foxnews.com/2014/04/14/%E2%80%98we-people-have-spoken%E2%80%99-bundy-family-responds-nevada-standoff-over-grazing-fees
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49. Ibid.
50. Esterhuyse, 2011
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58. Ibid.
59. Ibid.
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    "It is Kagame who killed our soldiers. The support he gave to M23 and the M23 acting in a disrespectful manner to South African soldiers, they knew they got the backing of Rwanda. Why do you want to treat Rwanda like it’s a friend and progressive? Kagame has the blood of South Africans on his hands. Nothing is going to change."
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87. Ibid.
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    “An influx of American exploiters arrived in South Korea, including agents, representatives of powerful U.S. monopolies, and confidential operatives. Previously, a Japanese colonial monopoly, known as The Eastern Colonization Society, had operated in Korea, later rebranded as New Korea. Through this entity, large portions of land, as well as South Korean mining and other enterprises, fell into the hands of American monopolies. The Morgans and Rockefellers became the real powers behind South Korea’s economy, controlling over 60 percent of its industry.”
90. Roy, Arundhati. Capitalism: A Ghost Story. Haymarket Books, 2014, pp. 27–28. ISBN 9781608463855."By the 1950s, the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, funding several NGOs and international educational institutions, began to operate as quasi-extensions of the U.S. government, which at the time was toppling democratically elected governments in Latin America, Iran, and Indonesia. (That was also around the time it made its entry into India, then non-aligned but leaning toward the Soviet Union.) The Ford Foundation established a U.S.-style economics course at the University of Indonesia. Elite Indonesian students, trained in counterinsurgency by U.S. Army officers, played a crucial role in the 1965 CIA-backed coup in Indonesia that brought General Suharto to power. He repaid his mentors by slaughtering hundreds of thousands of communist rebels."
91. Ibid.
92. Papert, Tony. "Moscow Conference Exposes 'Color Revolutions' as Warfare." Executive Intelligence Review, vol. 41, no. 24, EIR News Service Inc., 13 June 2014, p. 22, https://larouchepub.com/eiw/public/2014/eirv41n24-20140613/07-25_4124.pdf.
93. Myers, Steven Lee. "Russian Probe Shuts Media Foundation." The Washington Post, 29 June 2007, https://archive.ph/RDnbR.
94. Massa, Annie, and Caleb Melby. “In Fink We Trust: BlackRock Is Now ‘Fourth Branch of Government.’” Bloomberg, 21 May 2020, https://archive.ph/DzWON.
95. Fijalkowski, Tanja. “Vanguard and Wall Street Are Pumping Global Housing Markets.” Upside Chronicles, 28 Apr. 2022, https://archive.ph/1PqAi.
96. Jameson, Fredric. An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army. Edited by Slavoj Žižek, Verso, 2016, p. 28.
97. Kaiser, Hein. "‘The EFF cares for us whites,’ Bredell residents put their faith in red berets." The Citizen, 15 May, 2023, https://archive.ph/kvBD5.
98. Tshabalala, Nobukhosi. "EFF and locals clean up illegal dumping in Bredell." The Citizen, 1 May, 2023, https://archive.ph/G4iQD.
99. Economic Freedom Fighters. “EFF Member of Parliament, Commissar Mama Khawula donating food to the community of Ward 54 eNhlungwane, in KZN.” X, 18 Apr. 2022, https://archive.ph/oOBRd.
100. Economic Freedom Fighters. “EFF Member of Parliament, Commissar Mama Khawula visiting the affected families in KZN, donating food and blankets.” X, 18 Apr. 2022, https://archive.ph/IuHgL.
101. ACP North Carolina. “We have been working hard to provide Hurricane Helene relief in NC.” X, 5 Nov. 2024, https://archive.ph/FQbuI.
102. ACP North Carolina. “Hurricane relief continues!” X, 5 Nov. 2024, https://archive.ph/ZXtMf.
103. ACP Main. “Amidst the Federal government’s woeful negligence of its own citizens, our comrades at ACP North Carolina have mobilized to provide thousands of dollars of essential supplies to hard-hit communities.” X, 5 Oct. 2024, https://archive.ph/ptNMR.
104. ACP Florida. “The American Communist Party Florida Chapter, worked in a rural section of East Collier county, in response to hurricane Helene.” X, 22 Oct. 2024, https://archive.ph/12NND.
105. ACP Maryland. “We prepared and donated meals for 50 people to Annapolis Light House.” X, 28 Jan. 2025, https://archive.ph/aPiLa.
106. ACP Texas. “The ACP Texas chapter met up in Austin to restore the home of Florence, an 81-year-old cancer survivor and life-long local community volunteer.” X, 4 Oct. 2024, https://archive.ph/d0wFe.
107. ACP Texas. “A few weeks ago, a violent storm swept through Austin causing a MASSIVE tree to fall on the home of a great friend of our chapter, Florence.” X, 22 Dec. 2024, https://archive.ph/5mvvk
108. ACP Minnesota. “In December, ACP MN worked with a couple struggling with bills to renew a collapsed and neglected roof before winter.” X, 6 Jan. 2025, https://archive.ph/ztc1O.
109. ACP New York. “Buffalo, NY: Our comrades took action by building a mini public library box on a community member's lawn near a park and school.” X, 23 Sept. 2025, https://archive.ph/WiHoG.
110. EFF Podcast Episode 58. Economic Freedom Fighters, featuring Titus Tshungu and Jackson Hinkle, 14 Feb. 2025, YouTube, (11:42 / 34:10)

Domenico Losurdo's Stalin: The History and Critique of a Black Legend (2020), translated by David Ferreira, shines as a paradigmatic contribution in Joseph Stalin historiography, restructuring the Soviet leader's legacy through a perspective of Marxist historical materialism.

​This review goes beyond the conventional bounds of a historiographical review, acting as an epistemological rupture that questions the reified narratives of Stalin as a hellish aberration. Losurdo uses a dialectical technique to examine Stalin's "black legend," which he claims is an intellectual machinery favoring bourgeois hegemony and intra-communist factionalism. This essay uses Losurdo's work as a cognitive catalyst, employing Marxist concepts such as class struggle, contradiction, and ideological mystification to prompt a shift in historical awareness. It seeks to rethink the reader's epistemic assumptions by emphasizing the intricate interaction of material conditions, geopolitical imperatives, and revolutionary practice that defined the Soviet experiment under Stalin's leadership.
 
Epistemological Deconstruction: Illuminating the Black Legend

Losurdo's approach is basically an exercise in dialectical critique, razing the ontologized portrayal of Stalin as a pathological dictator, which was culminated in Nikita Khrushchev's 1956 Secret Report. From a Marxist standpoint, this article illustrates ideological mystification by abstracting Stalin from the historical context and reducing him to a willing agent of horror. Losurdo claims that Khrushchev's speech, rather than unveiling the truth, was a performative activity of legitimation, consolidating the post-Stalin leadership's authority while agreeing with Western anti-communist propaganda as the Cold War intensified. This maneuver, Losurdo argues, effaces the collective agency of the Soviet proletariat and obfuscates the structural imperatives which is imperialist encirclement, economic backwardness, and intra-party contradictions that conditioned Stalin’s policies.
 
The black legend, as an epistemological construct, functions inside what Althusser (1970) refers to as the "ideological state apparatus," perpetuating bourgeois rule by condemning socialism's historical manifestations. Losurdo's dialectical technique addresses this by situating Stalin within the lengthy history of Russian socioeconomic development and the worldwide context of the "Second Thirty Years' War" (1914-1945). This time, marked by imperialist rivalry and revolutionary upheavals, was a condition of exception that required exceptional measures to ensure the Soviet state's existence. By emphasizing the material conditions, semi-feudal agrarian structures, external aggression, and internal sabotage, Losurdo reorients the historiographical gaze from moralist individualism to the dialectics of class struggle, in line with Marx's dictum that "men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please" (Marx, 1852).
  
Contradictions of Socialist Construction: A Political-Economic Analysis

Losurdo's argument is particularly compelling in its examination of the difficulties inherent in socialist creation under conditions of underdevelopment and imperialist antagonism. Drawing on Marxist political economy, he demonstrates the need of fast industrialization and collectivization as processes of primitive socialist accumulation. The Soviet Union, inheriting a semi-feudal economy, had the challenge of changing its production forces in order to resist fascist assault and solidify proletariat rule. Losurdo's explanation is consistent with Lenin's (1917) idea of the "dictatorship of the proletariat," which holds that the state, as an instrument of class rule, must destroy counter-revolutionary elements in order to establish socialist production relations.
 
The purges of the 1930s, a cornerstone of the black mythology, are similarly reframed. Losurdo contends that these repressions, while extreme and rife with bureaucratic distortions, were reactions to actual and perceived challenges inside the Bolshevik Party and society. To negotiate the interwar period's existential problems, party unity was required due to the factionalism of Trotsky's Left Opposition and Bukharin's Right Deviation, as well as foreign spying and sabotage. This viewpoint is consistent with Gramsci's (1971) concept of "hegemony armoured by coercion," in which revolutionary nations must use coercive means to maintain intellectual and political unity against counter-hegemonic forces. Losurdo does not exonerate the purges' excesses, but rather emphasizes their dialectical context, contradicting idealist history that assigns them entirely to Stalin's libido dominandi.
  
Dismantling the Totalitarian Paradigm: An Analysis of Ideological Convergence

Losurdo's critique of the Stalin-Hitler equivalency, a cornerstone of Cold War sovietology, is a masterful work of Marxist intellectual analysis. Losurdo sees the liberal and Trotskyist amalgamation of Stalin's Soviet Union and Hitler's Third Reich under the label of "totalitarianism" as a type of intellectual convergence that erases the class antagonisms that divide the two regimes. Despite its bureaucratic flaws, the Soviet Union was a proletariat state dedicated to eradicating private property and promoting internationalist liberation. In contrast, Nazi Germany was a regressive imperialist agenda centered on racial supremacy and capitalist restoration. Losurdo's deconstruction of this equivalency draws on Marx's technique in Capital, which reveals ideological formations as representations of underlying class relations.
 
This critique extends to Western intellectuals' role in the development of the totalitarian worldview. Losurdo examines how people such as Hannah Arendt and Harold Laski, who were initially sympathetic to the Soviet project's anti-colonial and egalitarian goals, shifted to anti-communism as the Cold War intensified. This move, he claims, shows the bourgeoisie's desire to negate socialism's revolutionary potential by linking it with fascism, thereby legitimizing imperialist incursions against socialist governments. Losurdo's interpretation here is consistent with Lukács' (1923) idea of "reification," in which historical processes are abstracted into static categories, hiding their class meaning and aiding bourgeois ideological rule.
  
Stalin and the Global Conjuncture: Anti-Imperialist Praxis

Losurdo's internationalist stance places Stalin within the worldwide anti-imperialist fight, emphasizing the Soviet Union's role in opposing fascist aggression and assisting national liberation movements. The Great Patriotic War is depicted as a massive class battle that brought together the Soviet proletariat and peasantry against the Nazi objective of colonial servitude in Eastern Europe, rather than a failure due to Stalin's ineptitude. Losurdo draws similarities with Mao Zedong's theory of the Chinese resistance against Japanese imperialism, highlighting the dialectical unity of national and class conflicts on the global periphery. This framework questions Eurocentric historiographies that separate Stalin's policies from the larger processes of imperialist dominance.
 
Losurdo contends that the Soviet Union's existence and victory in World War II were critical in breaking down the colonial system and igniting decolonization in Asia and Africa. This is consistent with Lenin's concept in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, that imperialist problems produce revolutionary chances in the periphery. Losurdo reclaims Stalin as a world-historical person rather than just a Russian ruler by emphasizing the Soviet Union's anti-imperialist legacy, rejecting the historiographical provincialism that separates Soviet socialism from worldwide emancipatory battles. 
 
Epistemic Tensions and Praxis-Oriented Reflections
 
Losurdo's book, while a magisterial addition to Marxist historiography, has epistemological conflicts that warrant examination. The focus on the possible subjection of Soviet working-class initiative to structural and geopolitical limits risks idealizing proletarian spontaneity, which Leninists would oppose. The proletarian dictatorship, as manifested in the Soviet state, required a vanguardist centralization to discipline and lead class forces in the face of counter-revolutionary challenges. The notion that more proletariat democracy could have alleviated bureaucratic deformations is a petit-bourgeois dream that undervalues the imperatives of socialist building in a hostile imperialist environment. Drawing on Lenin's State and Revolution, the state's enforced machinery must stay prevailing until socialism's universal victory, making calls for wider democracy premature and potentially disruptive.
 
The book's acceptance of Losurdo's polemical tone as a shortcoming that may exclude dialogic participation would also enrage Leninists. From a Leninist standpoint, the need of doctrinal fight against bourgeois and revisionist misconceptions demands a confrontational stance. Losurdo's critiques of Trotskyist and liberal narratives are more than academic mistakes; they are actual challenges to the proletariat cause, needing a polemical zeal that favors clarity above compromise. This perspective is shown by Stalin's own publications, such as Foundations of Leninism, which saw intellectual battle as an extension of class conflict. A Leninist criticism would thus defend Losurdo's tone as an essential tool in the armory of Marxist historiography, dismissing pleas for dialogic pluralism as a capitulation to bourgeois eclecticism. 
 
Conclusion: Toward Dialectical Historiography.

Stalin: The History and Critique of a Black Legend is an epistemological watershed moment, prompting readers to examine the difficulties of socialist formation through a Marxist lens. Losurdo's dialectical method exposes the ideological errors that have reified Stalin as a terrible Other, providing a nuanced understanding of his role in negotiating the contradictions of revolutionary practice. Losurdo confronts both bourgeois and ultra-left orthodoxies by locating Stalin in the global class struggle and the imperatives of anti-imperialist resistance, advocating for the reappropriation of historical materialism as a weapon for cognitive liberation.
 
For Marxist thinkers and activists, this essay is a wake-up call to view history as a dialectical process rather than a moralist tableau. It emphasizes that revolutions are evaluated not on their adherence to abstract principles, but on their ability to overcome actual tensions in the furnace of class struggle. Losurdo's essay, dedicated to David Ferreira, demonstrates the lasting power of Marxist theory in deciphering the past and guiding the present toward revolutionary possibilities.
 
References
Althusser, L. (1970). Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. [online] Marxists.org. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1970/ideology.htm.
Gramsci, A. (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Edited and translated by Q. Hoare and G. Nowell Smith. New York: International Publishers.
Lenin, V.I. (1917) 'The State and Revolution: The Marxist Theory of the State and the Tasks of the Proletariat in the Revolution', in State and Revolution, ch. 1. [Online]. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/ch01.htm (Accessed: 29 April 2025).
Lukács, G. (1923) 'Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat', in History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. Translated by R. Livingstone. London: Merlin Press, pp. 83–222.
Marx, K. (1852). 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Karl Marx 1852. [online] Marxists.org. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm.

Author
​
Harsh Yadav is a student of International Relations at South Asian University, New Delhi. He possesses a diverse academic background which includes a Bachelor’s Degree in Chemistry (Hons) from Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh. His interdisciplinary inquisitiveness lies in Chinese Studies, International Political Economy, Political Philosophy, and Critical Theory. Harsh’s academic pursuits gravitate towards the labyrinthine global power dynamics which is economically and politically shaped by modern imperialism. He is interested in engaging with the contemporary systems of domination which have transcended national boundaries, evolving into decentralised networks of influence and control that are exercised through international financial institutions and multilateral corporations. Harsh is riveted by the cultural, economic, and political forces that operate in tandem to uphold the global hierarchical setup. His interest lies in analysing the critical rapport between capitalism and urbanisation by acknowledging the exploitation perpetuated by not just direct domination but by subtle methods involved in our daily lives. In synthesizing these intricate ideas, Harsh wants to offer a nuanced perspective on global hegemony and the ideological underpinnings of modern imperial structures, constantly seeking to uncover the intersections of power, economy, and philosophy.

Our government’s criminal actions, and its schemes to commit future crimes, are of a nature that’s going to require a new strategy from our popular movements. Some time ago, I came to the conclusion that it’s no longer enough to speak truth to power, because at this point our rulers are acting too brazenly for journalistic exposure to have a sufficient impact. In the last week, it’s become clear just how true this is. The president is posting direct evidence of the U.S. military blowing up crowds of civilians, and bragging about it on the basis that these crowds were supposedly enemy fighters.

This was an extremely weak cover story, and it was easy for observers to clear up that the U.S. had actually bombed a Yemeni tribal gathering. But as far as those in power are concerned, that does not matter. They’re now fully comfortable with sharing proof of war crimes that they would have tried to hide in the past; the imperial system has reached a new stage, where it seeks to go on the offensive without any restraint. And this shows that to fight back against the imperial system, we’ll need to come to a new stage in our revolutionary practice. A stage where journalistic or commentary sources, like my own platform, adopt a role of facilitating mass organization and mobilization.

Exposing power is secondary to the work we must do within the class struggle. That’s always been true, but up until the recent developments in global conflicts, our movements had for a long time been largely detached from the struggle’s practical aspects. The communist movement, at least in the USA, had been just talk; then with the Ukraine war, our geopolitical clash reached a critical stage, and suddenly the world’s socialist orgs had an opportunity to impact history’s direction. If they were to be principled in opposing NATO, and in supporting Russia’s anti-fascist war, then they would be able to truly break from liberal reformism. And a great deal of these orgs failed the Ukraine test; which makes it totally unsurprising that they then failed to combat the Gaza genocide.
Now, as the empire and its proxies expand their offensive, we face another decision point.

We can choose to tail behind the ruling class, de-mobilize on Palestine, and forsake the class struggle; or we can wage the next stage of this fight, refusing to be compromised by reformism and opportunism. So much momentum is building for the global proletarian movement, and we could soon bring about unprecedented workers gains. Pambis Kyritsis, general secretary of the World Federation of Trade Unions, has assessed how much strength we’re seeing emerge from the working masses:

The encouraging and hopeful element in the depressing picture of today’s world, is the fact that workers do not passively accept the neoliberal capitalist, anti-popular, and anti-labor offensive. Millions of workers around the world are choosing the path of struggle to defend their trade union, social, and political rights. With militant mobilizations in every corner of the globe, they are demanding work with rights that ensures the satisfaction of their contemporary needs. The WFTU members or friends are always on the frontlines of these struggles. The response of bourgeois governments to the just popular demands is the sharpening of state repression and authoritarianism…But we also have weapons. Strategically much more powerful than theirs. We have our ideology and our class orientation, our history and our action, our militant spirit, and our moral advantage. But to utilize these weapons, we need good organization, enlightenment, and ideological and political education.

The effort to crush worker struggles is intertwined with the effort to persecute Palestine supporters. This is one reason why the pro-Palestine movement’s only viable future is in organized labor: for our free speech to survive, we’ll also need to preserve the right of the workers to defy their employers. The deportations and disappearances of pro-Palestine activists are partly about making labor defenseless; about establishing a precedent for targeting labor organizers through the same means. In this new phase of repression, the only labor figures who aren’t at risk are the ones which side with capital.

With the White House’s campaign to dismantle unions, there is growing potential for polarization inside organized labor; for the labor elements which support the imperial state to expose themselves, and for the principled elements to revolt. More unions keep speaking out for Palestine, and now they’re voicing solidarity with the students who’ve been targeted by ICE. The anti-imperialist movement, the civil liberties movement, and the other parts of our revolutionary struggle have a significant pull within unions, because the most advanced among the workers are not fooled by ruling class propaganda. The question is whether we’ll be able to build an independent workers force; one that can keep agitating for the revolutionary positions inside the unions, leading and assisting the workers in their struggles, and defending the workers against the crackdown.

This is where we come to the pivotal question in this era of our political practice: how to respond to the state’s efforts at crushing us? How can we keep our operations going as the repression gets worse, and more organizers get subjected to the fate that Mahmoud Khalil has? The history of counterrevolutionary violence shows that to overcome this threat, we’ll need to avoid relying on any wing of the ruling class. It’s the working masses who are our most important friends amid this crisis, and we have to lead the masses towards defeating the state.

——————————————————--

Ernest Mandel, one of the authors of the 1966 book The Catastrophe in Indonesia, diagnosed why Indonesia’s communist party had failed to defend against the previous year’s political mass murder campaign. It was because the party felt it could depend on the allyship of President Sukarno, and on the national bourgeoisie that Sukarno represented. Mandel observed the ineffectual nature of the warnings the party had issued about the coup, which didn’t come with the actions that would have given the people a real chance for fighting back:

These warnings, voiced on the very eve of the country’s counterrevolutionary coup, then already in full preparation, came without any previous or accompanying measures for broad mass mobilizations, without preparation for a general strike, without preparation for arming the masses, without concrete warnings about the impending army coup. The warnings could only heighten the determination of the counterrevolutionaries to strike immediately. They could not create adequate means to prevent or to reply to the counterrevolution. It is not surprising that under these conditions the only response this belated warning evoked was the desperate action of a small group around Lieutenant Colonel Untung and not a mass uprising…they relied on Sukarno instead of mobilizing the broad masses in defense of the revolution and the PKI, not only before the reactionary coup of October 1-2, but even after the coup.

In today’s USA, there are plenty of political actors who want to get dissident organizers to subordinate ourselves towards a certain wing of the ruling class. Among these actors are the leftists who tail after the Democratic Party, and who’ve been trying to build an “anti-Trump” movement. These radical liberals do pose a threat, in that they’re working to advance the NGO infiltration of the pro-Palestine movement. But this element lost its cultural relevance a while ago, when the Obama-style political brand collapsed. At this stage, by far the biggest ideological threat is the “dissident right,” which tails behind the Elon Musk wing of monopoly capital.

The message this element puts forth can be summarized as: “trust the plan.” Which is the same attitude that was held by Indonesia’s complacent socialist leaders: supposedly, the people will be able to gain victory if we put our faith within a specific procedure, one whose success depends on the goodwill of those in power.

It’s a mechanistic way of thinking about political struggle, where somebody believes everything will simply fall into place if we stay on a predetermined path. And as our rulers keep going on a rampage, it’s becoming clear that not too many people are willing to embrace this kind of thinking. This is what I saw when I found a recent Tucker Carlson interview with Steve Witkoff, Trump’s Special Envoy to the Middle East. Witkoff tried to present Trump’s uncritical appeasement of “Israel” as being the guaranteed route to peace; and he avoided answering Carlson on the question of what Israel’s long-term plans for occupation are. Witkoff insisted that if we can just get rid of the “terrorist” groups which are resisting Zionism, then all countries will normalize with the Zionist entity, and “peace” will be achieved. This level of lying was too much for the majority of viewers to overlook; the video’s comments were filled with people who saw how absurd these arguments are.

Across the ideological spectrum, the people are realizing the malign nature of their government. They’re seeing that our rulers are determined to carry out an ethnic cleansing, and to destroy entire countries for the sake of protecting this crime’s perpetrators. They see more and more opponents of this plan being disappeared, putting everyone’s freedoms under threat. They’re also experiencing the economic catastrophe that’s come about from Washington’s war provocations. A consciousness shift has occurred; there already is a widespread mass will to fight back against these schemes. Now we must give the people the means to overcome the crackdown’s next stage, and overthrow their imperialist dictatorship. We will need a collective, mass organizational force, one that can keep going forward no matter how severe the repression gets.

The parts of the U.S. communist movement that have broken from liberalism are making good progress in building this force. The American Communist Party has been meeting the practical needs of the masses, and leading the struggles of the workers, in ways that have gained it great momentum since its founding last summer. And given the African People’s Socialist Party’s success in beating federal charges, the ACP will be able to defend itself should the state target its members in the same way. There will come a point, though, when the ruling class runs out of patience for years-long legal efforts, and tries to destroy us through swift violence.

There are forces in our government that don’t want to wait another moment until they can attack freedom in unprecedented ways. Forces that are even more dangerous towards liberty than the Trump officials behind the ICE detentions. In the long term, the Trump wing is not the biggest threat we’re going to face; the even bigger danger comes from the liberal wing, which is right now planning its revenge. There is a growing conflict within the ruling class, and though we can take advantage of this conflict, it’s leading the most aggressive and powerful elements of the bourgeoisie to carry out recriminations. Recriminations that will be vastly bigger than the Russiagate censorship, which was how the liberal monopolists reacted to Trump’s first term.

They’re much madder now, because the tariffs have broken the neoliberal doctrine’s cultural grip. The guardians of the traditional liberal order see this as unforgivable; and their wrath isn’t even mainly directed at Trump himself. Their biggest fear is that the people will take advantage of the possibilities Trump has helped open up, and replace neoliberalism with socialism. As the ACP’s chairman Haz Al-Din has written:

TRUMP TARIFFS ARE THE BIGGEST ASSAULT ON NEOLIBERAL ECONOMIC DOCTRINE in American history. They have begun a REVOLUTION in economic thinking. Regardless of your views on them, they have now opened the door to all manner of heterodox, unconventional economic theories that lack 'expert' approval. The institutional academic 'experts' are reeling, crying, panicking. They are broken and humiliated. It is good to see them brought down, broken, and trampled underfoot popular political will…There must be immense short-term sacrifices to make our country industrially self-reliant. It is time to stop plundering developing countries, and work ourselves to make our country great…While the neoliberal 'experts' lie defeated on the ground with a boot on their neck, the door is open to begin advocating construction of Socialism with American Characteristics. Trump will not do it. What America needs is a mass popular movement that will push this revolution to its conclusion, toppling the neoliberal hegemony entirely.

This development has empowered the people, while driving the most zealously liberal elements of the deep state insane. Or rather more insane than they already were; we can’t forget that they tried to assassinate Trump twice, which could have sparked a civil conflict and vastly accelerated the country’s collapse. These two attempts failed because they weren’t organized by the dominant parts of the deep state; only by certain rogue actors, who were willing to defend neoliberal dominance at any cost. As the security apparatus mobilizes to crush the people, it will be much more unified. When these forces next hit back, they’ll hit back in ways we can’t imagine. We can guess large parts of how the counter-attack is going to look, though, and we must prepare accordingly.

——————————————————--

There are dozens of countries that the U.S. empire has invaded, destabilized, and kept under dictatorships or occupations; therefore, we can look at these countries to get a sense of how our ruling class will treat us. We can study Indonesia, and Palestine, and Yemen, and Iraq, and numerous other cases. It’s essential for us to study these things, and to take seriously the prospect that our government will apply the same methods from these foreign projects to the United States itself. There’s another aspect of this history, though, that we can’t afford to overlook. This is the part where the U.S. government has used psychological tactics, from propaganda to actual mind control, in order to proliferate ultraviolent mindsets among Americans.

These types of manipulation don’t just have the potential to mobilize anti-communists towards violence. They can also draw members of the struggle into the same perilous state of mind, where somebody has been persuaded to wantonly use violence or promote violence. There’s a difference between this kind of foolish behavior, and doing something like voicing support for Luigi Mangione; when communists support Luigi, or Hamas, or anyone else who’s used violence to combat oppression, it’s for principled reasons. Our class enemies want us to use the idea of revolutionary violence in an unprincipled way, and embrace ultraviolent practices that will alienate the masses from us.

Great numbers of the masses already support Luigi; that’s part of why we should support him. If a group that claims to represent the masses starts embracing behaviors which are objectively anti-social, though, and entertaining elements which don’t have the proletariat’s interests in mind, then this group lose. The danger is that in our desire to fight back against the state’s violence, we’ll fall into these self-destructive habits.

One of these habits is the act of fetishizing gang culture, and acting like the lumpenproletariat’s interests are synonymous with those of the workers. Another one is the glorification of drugs, which is quite prevalent within the New Left. Another one is to simply say things that you cannot say, and make threats of terrorism. The ACP has fostered a culture that firmly rejects all of these left-wing deviations, so in that area our movement has already won. But there are plenty of ostensibly communist orgs in this country that absolutely help cultivate such dangerous stupidity. It’s within the PSL’s membership where we’ve seen individuals who are willing to post some of the most explicit threats of violence that ACP has been subjected to. Though the left has become irrelevant in terms of its potential for mass pull, its ultraviolent elements continue to pose a security threat, and we need to pay close attention to this danger.

As we keep building this movement, and working to keep ourselves safe, the strategy we must adopt is one of maintaining a balance. A balance in all areas of how we think and act, where we avoid falling into any counterproductive pitfalls. It’s easy to react to something you experience in a way that ends up hurting you, at least if you haven’t yet been trained in how to stay grounded. Both the left-wing and right-wing deviationists have done this. And as our ruling class reacts to today’s crises by spreading ever-more chaos and fear, many people will be susceptible to this error. But when one has come to understand the nature of this conflict, and the role that revolutionaries have within it, they can gain clarity in what their task is. And they can stick to this task, via the guidance and support which a party provides.

What we are fighting against, in strategic terms, is the effort by our rulers to bring civil war upon the USA’s people. A civil war in which chaos and violence become ever-more prevalent, and the people are made into the victims of this engineered insanity. Our class enemies are mobilizing all the different ultraviolent societal elements, from radical liberals to neo-Nazis to criminal elements, as part of a project to terrorize and paralyze the masses. They see that the system is collapsing, and they want to inject reactionary violence into this process so that any revolutionary effort gets thwarted.

Part of this involves manipulating leftists into exacting violence against their fellow organizers; part of it involves recruiting alienated men into assassination efforts, like happened with the 20-year-old who put a bullet through Trump’s ear. Whichever elements the feds are targeting with this manipulation, the goal is to bring strategic chaos, which the state hopes it can manage.

We can make this project backfire, but we must be willing to change our tactics as the conditions keep evolving. We cannot be mechanistic, which means we can’t treat the chaotic events our society is experiencing as simply being all bad. It’s quite possible that the killing of Brian Thompson will be an early part in an American Years of Lead, where the country experiences a series of political attacks. Should a Years of Lead come, we won’t be able to stop it from happening; we’ll only be able to take advantage of it, and rally the masses as it further disrupts the liberal order.

Another development that we can’t overlook the value of is the tariffs, which have come precisely because the ruling class thought it could create managed chaos. Trump was allowed to win because the elites wanted to enact radical reforms, ones that could save the system. Now that they’ve gotten these reforms, it’s come with costs they didn’t anticipate, and the country’s revolutionary progress has been accelerated. It doesn’t matter that Trump has backed down by temporarily pausing most of the tariffs; there’s no reversing these gains they’ve brought for our cause.

Now the elites are going to unleash hell upon this country’s working class, pursuing even greater economic shock policies and carrying out an ever-more violent purge. We can overcome these attacks, but we can’t let the enormity of our task lead us to lose our balance. We will outmaneuver our class enemies, if we can navigate the next crises with flexibility. Like our allies abroad have done, we have to turn the tools of our enemies against them; this is how we must respond as the onslaught gets directed towards us.

Republished from Rainer’s Newsletter

​When Euripides asked Socrates his opinion on the book On Nature by Heraclitus of Ephesus (c.535-475 BC), Socrates answered that the part he understood was excellent, as was the part he did not.

These are the two faces of Heraclitus. On the one side is the obscure philosopher, the ‘Dark Riddler’ whom even Socrates had trouble comprehending. On the other side is the profundity of a work worth exploring, a work that is rewarding in its depth. This duality is expressed in the lyrics of the ancient tragical poet Scythinus:

Do not be in too great a hurry to get to the end of Heraclitus the Ephesian’s book: the path is hard to travel.
Gloom is there and darkness devoid of light.
But if an initiate be your guide, the path shines brighter than sunlight.
(Diogenes Laertius IX, 16)

Hard and rewarding is Heraclitus, but also mystical, since an initiation into his work by an acolyte is required. In this regard, G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831) is similar: an undoubtedly difficult, often inaccessible philosopher, whose secrets can best be revealed through a proper introduction.

Hegel himself also felt the attraction of Heraclitus. That is made explicit in Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy (1830), where he notes: “Here we see land; there is no proposition of Heraclitus which I have not adopted in my Logic” (trans. E.S Haldane, p.278). However, Hegel’s reading of Heraclitus in his Lectures is not that of a historian studying a historic persona; it is a tribute to a spiritual predecessor to whom the foundations of his own philosophy can be traced.

One problem with this spiritual descent is that it entails a lot of anachronistic speculation. It is very doubtful that Heraclitus really meant things the way Hegel interpreted them. Moreover, the work of the Ephesian today survives only in fragments retrieved from the works of Greek, Roman, and Christian authors who also often distorted the meaning of the original. Hegel doesn’t really tackle this issue at all, and often takes the fragments out of their original context, offering at best ambiguous interpretations.

Yet despite the issues of how he interpreted the fragments, Hegel’s lecture on Heraclitus conceives the spirit of the Greek philosopher in a unique manner. Behind the multiple layers of Hegel’s ideas, the Heraclitean logos (λόγος) or ‘divine principle of reason’ still shines brightly. Furthermore, Hegel was one of the few, if not the first, Western philosopher in centuries to properly understand the Heraclitean principles of constant flux and the unity of opposites, which ideas also form the basis for Hegel’s dialectic. This means that Hegel’s lecture on Heraclitus is a good introduction to the Greek’s most complex concepts, and an even better introduction into Hegel’s own philosophy. This is akin to the way Homer’s epics are more useful in understanding Homer’s own time than understanding the later Greek Bronze Age they were read in, in which they were already regarded as ‘classics’.

Heraclitus According to Hegel

‘Dialectic’ means an interpretive process incorporating contradictory ideas to reach a conclusion. Let’s look first at dialectic as Heraclitus uses it.

The dialectical method is comprised of three moments. In the first, the ‘moment of understanding’, one idea (for example, Being) is firmly defined. In the second moment, called ‘the dialectical’, we pass on to the completely opposite idea (Non-Being). The third moment is the ‘speculative’, and it leads to a understanding of the unity of the two previous ideas, which are now reconciled (in this case, in Becoming).

Heraclitus’s dialectic is a positive one: it does not aim at proving what does not exist (like the Eleatics), or that all opinions are relative (like the Sophists). Instead it searches for what exists, what is true. Hegel credits Heraclitus with conceiving the developed dialectic form. According to Hegel, Heraclitus was the first to formulate that the ‘Absolute’—the all-inclusive whole or unity that underlies everything—exists in the unity of opposites, first as a ‘Being’, and secondly as a constant ‘Becoming’. The main philosophical adversary of Heraclitus was Parmenides. Against Parmenides’ aphorism that ‘‘the one… is, and it is not possible for it not to be’’, Heraclitus believed that everything is in flux—that everything is Becoming—and so in a certain sense what is, at the same time, isn’t.

For Hegel, with Heraclitus, philosophy reaches the high plateau of ‘speculative form’—a kind of thinking that is able to explain everything without gaps. For him, previous thinkers, such as Parmenides and Zeno dwelt with an ‘abstract understanding’ of, presumably, lower value. Additionally, Hegel thinks that Heraclitus is unjustly called obscure. Given that complex language is needed to describe complex ideas, Heraclitus is instead a master of complex concepts. Those unable to fully grasp them confuse complexity with obscurity in order to justify their own failure in understanding. Here, Hegel again invokes Socrates’ saying that ‘it would take a Delian diver’ to get to the bottom of Heraclitus; the process reminds him of fishing for pearls.

The Logical Principle

For Heraclitus, two opposing things unite in one to create harmony, and everything that exists is constituted through the struggle of its opposing parts. This is expressed in multiple fragments of his writing, such as the following:

Men do not know how what is at variance agrees with itself. It is an attunement of opposite tensions, like that of the bow and the lyre
(B51, trans. T.M. Robinson, 1987).

Another formulation of this principle is found in his statement that honey tastes sweet to the healthy and bitter to the sick. In this case, honey is one thing with two opposite qualities, just like seawater is both death for humans and life for fish: “The sea is the purest and the impurest water. Fish can drink it, and it is good for them; to men it is undrinkable and destructive” (B61).

Interpreting these fragments, Hegel deducts that “the truth only is as the unity of distinct opposites and… of the pure opposition of being and non-being… Being is and yet is not” (Lectures p.282). This is the primary Hegelian logical principle (his version of the logos): the unity of Being and Non-Being which together constitute ‘the Absolute’. Furthermore, in Hegel’s Science of Logic (1816), after a first examination, pure Being and pure Non-Being are found to be notions void of meaning if viewed independent of each other (§132-134). Instead, it is only in terms of the transition from a state of nothingness to a state of existence that they can both be properly defined and understood. This movement from one state to another is Becoming. This is the only constant, and it is becoming which logically synthesizes nothingness and existence.

The principle of constant movement, of Becoming, is also key in understanding Heraclitus. Plato encapsulates it perfectly in his dialogue Cratylus (402a): “Heraclitus says, you know, that all things move, and nothing remains still and he likens the universe to the current of a river, saying that you cannot step twice into the same stream.” But the most famous examples, by far, are Heraclitus’ own river aphorisms:

You cannot step twice into the same river; for fresh waters are ever flowing in upon you. (B12)
We step and do not step into the same river; we are and are not. (B49a)

The world is in flux, nothing remains the same, everything is changing, everything is becoming: Panta rhei—‘Everything flows’—is the philosophy of Heraclitus concentrated in two words. This constant movement of Being requires the activity of Being dividing itself into opposites that are both distinct entities and parts of Being.
In his lecture on Heraclitus, Hegel takes these ideas a step further to explain identity. Subjectivity is the opposite of objectivity, and since “each is the ‘other’ of the ‘other’ as its ‘other’, we here have their identity.” The point is that without the ‘other’ and its implications there is no subject, since the subject can only be defined by something other than itself. So the identity of a thing is the result of a dialectical process. This is exactly why in the Phenomenology of the Spirit (1807, Φ 178) Hegel writes that self-consciousness exists only by being recognized by another self-consciousness. But this illustrates well how for both Heraclitus and Hegel the universe is not definite and stable but moving and changing. Being is a process—that of Becoming.

Time & FireThe German goes on to interpret two more basic Heraclitean concepts: time and fire.

Time for Heraclitus is the very embodiment of Becoming, and its first form. It is pure Becoming, and the harmony of the opposing Being and Non-Being. Hegel opines that “in time there is no past and future, but only the now, and this is, but is not as regards the past; and this non-being, as future, turns round into Being” (Lectures, p.287).

For Heraclitus, fire is the elementary principle out of which everything is created and to which everything returns. It can take the shape of everything and everything can take the shape of fire, in a process of continuous creation and destruction. Hegel argues that Heraclitus didn’t really believe that everything is made from fire in the way that Thales thought that everything came from water; rather, he chose fire as a metaphor of a force that constantly shifts its form. Fire never stays still and is always in unrest. Unlike earth, air, or water, which often appear static, fire is itself a process. In these senses, fire can be viewed as representing the idea of Becoming in terms of the natural process of material transformation—as opposed to time, which is the abstract representation of the process.

The natural processes represented by fire destroy and create matter. These are two distinct paths; indeed, in Heraclitus we encounter a ‘way downwards’ (ὁδός κάτω), where fire becomes moisture, which then becomes water, which then condenses to become earth; and a ‘way upwards’ (ὁδός ἄνω), where earth becomes water, then water gives form to everything else. Like everything else, this is a process that never ceases. Hegel says that the way upwards is the process of differentiation and creation that leads to Being; and the way downwards is the process of destruction, leading to Non-Being. “Nature is thus a circle” concludes Hegel.

Consciousness & Truth

Expressing his admiration for Heraclitus’s ability to explain the dialectic using simple analogies drawn from daily life, Hegel says that he has “a beautiful, natural, child-like manner of speaking truth of the truth” (p.293). There’s something deeply entertaining in reading one of the most incomprehensible philosophers of all time claiming that Heraclitus, a.k.a. ‘the Obscure One’, has a ‘child-like manner’ of speaking the truth. Hegel also sees in Heraclitus the origins of other concepts central to his system of thought, such as the unity of object and subject, the omnipresent nature of the Absolute Spirit (Geist), and the unity of experience. These ideas are thoroughly explored in the third section of his lecture, which answers the questions: ‘How does logos come to consciousness?’ and ‘How is it related to the individual soul?’ Hegel believes that the Greek rejected sensuous reality as the area where one can find the truth. If for Heraclitus everything that is also is not, that means that all we observe as real is also not real. Following this path, Hegel concludes that “not this immediate Being, but absolute mediation, Being as thought of, Thought itself, is the true Being” (p.294). In other words, it is not through observation, but only through reason, that one can discern the truth.

Hegel gives another interesting interpretation to some Heraclitean fragments about sleep, learning, and reality:

All the things we see when awake are death, even as all we see in slumber are sleep. (B21)
Eyes and ears are bad witnesses to men who have barbarian souls. (B107)
The learning of many things teacheth not understanding, else would it have taught Hesiod and Pythagoras, and again Xenophanes and Hekataios. (B40)

Hegel interprets these fragments to show a distinction between particular and universal reason—between the thought of the individual (or subjective consciousness) and the Idea (objective or Absolute consciousness) or as Heraclitus names it, the logos. ‘Consciousness’ here refers to cognitive awareness, and it is often used interchangeably by Hegel to denote both the subject’s consciousness of an object, and also the subject’s self-awareness. According to Hegel, Heraclitus first established the unity of the subjective and objective consciousness—a key Hegelian idea—when he implied that the waking man is related to things universally. Sextus Empiricus expresses some relevant ideas on this issue in Adversos Mathematicos, VII.127-133. Here he relates that for Heraclitus, sleep is a state where our senses, our anchors to the world, stop functioning. The subject stops communicating with the logos, the objective consciousness, and this isolation makes what we experience in our sleep a dream. The only connection with the world in this sleeping state is our breath, which is likened to a root keeping us attached to reality. In contrast, when we are awake, we establish a fragmented but real conscious relationship with reality and the logos. If Sextus correctly understands Heraclitus, Heraclitus is also rejecting those who claim to have received wisdom from God in their sleep.

In another fragment, Heraclitus seems to advocate that we can reach objective knowledge of the logos. This may appear to go against his doctrine of constant flux, which implies that empirical knowledge is meaningless since things change all the time. However, here Heraclitus advocates using changing empirical observations to come to an unchanging knowledge of reality:

Though this Word [Logos] is true evermore, yet men are as unable to understand it when they hear it for the first time as before they have heard it at all. For, though all things come to pass in accordance with this Word, men seem as if they had no experience of them, when they make trial of words and deeds such as I set forth, dividing each thing according to its kind and showing how it truly is. But other men know not what they are doing when awake, even as they forget what they do in sleep. (B1)

Commenting on this fragment, which is thought to be the introduction to Heraclitus’s book, Hegel says (pp.296-97):

Great and important words! We cannot speak of truth in a truer or less prejudiced way. Consciousness as consciousness of the universal, is alone consciousness of truth; but consciousness of individuality and action as individual, an originality which becomes a singularity of content or of form, is the untrue and bad. Wickedness and error thus are constituted by isolating thought and thereby bringing about a separation from the universal. Men usually consider, when they speak of thinking something, that it must be something particular, but this is quite a delusion.

Hegel concludes his lecture on Heraclitus with a modification of the words of Socrates he used for his introduction:

What remains to us of Heraclitus is excellent, and we must conjecture of what is lost, that it was as excellent. Or if we wish to consider fate so just as always to preserve to posterity what is best, we must at least say of what we have of Heraclitus, that it is worthy of this preservation.

Author

​Antonis Chaliakopoulos is an archaeologist from Athens interested in the reception of classical art and philosophy.