​There are many critics of the Infrared Collective led by my comrade Haz Al-Din, but among them, Daniel Tutt stands out as my favorite.

To be clear, I strongly disagree with most of the conclusions in his recent article about MAGA Communism, which I believe are grounded in both a lack of evidence and Tutt's personal desire to mitigate criticism within "leftist" circles.

This criticism likely stems from his decision to engage in a conversation with Haz on his live stream, and for allowing his work to be publishing in the Midwestern Marx Institute's Journal of American Socialist Studies.

These actions, I'm sure, subjected him to backlash--similar to what I faced when my organization (Midwestern Marx) began collaborating with the Infrared Collective.

However, unlike the majority of the ACP's detractors, Tutt demonstrates a genuine understanding of what the Infrared Collective represents and why it resonates with so many alienated young Americans living under neoliberal capitalism.

I want to take this opportunity to respond to Tutt's recent piece on Infrared and MAGA Communism because, unlike the vast majority of attacks on the ACP, I believe his critique was written in good faith.

This makes it an excellent opportunity to explain why I chose to help Haz Al-Din found the American Communist Party, rather than simply taking the more traditional path of Western leftists by joining an organization like PSL, which explicitly promotes liberal cultural or "culture war" values alongside socialist and anti-imperialist politics.

An approach which has been the norm in the U.S. since the CIA's Congress for Cultural Freedom program began its work in the early 1950's.*

Let us begin with the parts of Tutt's essay that are simply incorrect or based on incomplete information.

First, he claims that Infrared's position on productive labor and baristas stems from an effort to pander to conservative culture war leanings, stating,

"Most detrimentally, this culture war pandering to the right leads Infrared to adopt a narrow empirical definition of what constitutes the working class, leading them to deny, for example, that service workers or baristas are part of the proletariat."

This is entirely incorrect, and I'm disappointed to see Tutt jump to such baseless conclusions without citing any evidence for his claim that Infrared's position is rooted in a desire to cater to culture war-obsessed conservatives.

The debate over what constitutes productive labor is as old as the labor theory of value itself--a question Marx frequently grappled with throughout his work.

A valuable insight into the nature of the service industry and productive labor comes from Marx's Capital, Volume III, chapter 16, on commercial capital--a point I have frequently raised in this debate.

I will give Tutt the benefit of the doubt and assume he has either not read my analysis or that of the ACP. In this chapter, Marx states:

"Commercial capital is, therefore, nothing but the producer's commodity capital--capital which has to undergo the process of conversion into money to perform its function as commodity capital on the market--the only difference being that instead of representing an incidental function of the producer, it is now the exclusive operation of a special kind of capitalist, the merchant, and is set apart as the business of a special investment of capital."

Here, Marx describes merchants who, rather than adding value to commodities through productive labor, solely facilitate the realization of commodity value through sale on the market.

This distinction is essential to understanding the role of service labor within Marxist economic theory.

In Marx's time, this function was carried out primarily by merchants who, as the sales and service industries had not yet expanded to the massive scale we see today under modern capitalism, where nearly 80% of the American workforce is employed in the service sector.

Most service and sales workers do not add value to commodities through labor but instead facilitate their sale on the market, accelerating the circulation and realization of capital value.

Meanwhile, the shareholders who control these industries derive the majority of their money from rents, speculation, and the value added to their products during production--long before this value is realized through its sale on the market.

Do Starbucks baristas add something to the product when they grind and pour the coffee? I would say yes.

However, this does not mean they hold the same economic power as workers who grow and harvest the coffee beans or transport them across the globe.

The labor involved in growing, harvesting, and transporting coffee beans represents the core of productive labor that drives the economy, whereas Starbucks baristas operate at capitalism's surface.

Their role is to help realize the value created during production by facilitating the sale of coffee to consumers.

This is not a moralistic judgment but a scientific and strategic assessment.

We fully support Starbucks workers in their efforts to organize; however, it is a reality that a strike by largely commercial laborers, such as Starbucks baristas, would not wield the same level of economic power as a strike by productive workers, like those in the rail industry.

For example, in 2022, Joe Biden and the Democrats went to great lengths to prevent a potential rail strike, even using the power of the state to intervene, while showing minimal concern about the unionization efforts at Starbucks in recent years.

Another critique Haz made of the Starbucks baristas is their pursuit of a craft union rather than an industrial union. A craft union, being narrower in scope, often fosters class collaboration between the company and the union's rank and file.

The ACP would fully support the creation of a coffee workers' union encompassing the entire industry, including major chains like Dunkin' Donuts or Tim Hortons up in maple leaf land.

However, history has shown that a craft union limited exclusively to Starbucks workplaces is likely to result in class collaborationism.

This is a dynamic that Walter Reuther and the UAW understood very well during the height of their power.

To characterize the critiques I've just outlined as mere "pandering to conservative culture warriors" is, at best, incorrect and, at worst, deeply dishonest.

This reflects a broader tendency within modern left-wing scholarship to sidestep the most complex and challenging debates of the Marxist tradition by dismissing those with opposing views as reactionaries.

Unfortunately, this is a pattern Daniel Tutt sometimes falls into, despite his apparent efforts to critique in good faith.

I'd like to assume that his assessment was based on incomplete information and hope that he will revise his understanding of the ACP's position in light of the arguments I've presented above.

Tutt makes two additional claims in his article that I believe are factually, or even objectively, incorrect.

These are the assertions that Infrared is inflaming the bourgeois culture war by promoting conservative cultural positions and that Infrared usually finds itself in a position of tailing the Republican Party.

Unfortunately, Tutt offers very little evidence to substantiate these claims or to identify specific positions taken by Infrared or the ACP that align with the Republican Party or its culture war agenda.

This lack of evidence makes it difficult to understand why Tutt believes Infrared is playing such a role.

He writes, "This idea that inside the onion of the Trump MAGA movement is the beating heart of the American proletariat leads Infrared to positions that effectively tail the Republican Party."

However, he fails to provide any concrete examples of these allegedly right-wing positions, apart from the previously addressed claim regarding baristas as unproductive laborers--a point we have already examined in detail.

As a Midwestern Communist, I don't disagree with the notion that the working class sections of Donald J. Trump's MAGA base, in many ways, represent the beating heart of the American proletariat.

I often revisit the 2016 Republican primary debates, where Trump galvanized widespread support by contrasting himself with Republican elites like Jeb Bush, repeatedly criticizing Bush for his brother's role in lying America into the Iraq war.

Trump captured the hearts and minds of many American workers by presenting himself as an antidote to the establishment politics of both parties--a system that most working class Americans are thoroughly disillusioned with.

Even more than the 2016 debates, though, my understanding of the MAGA phenomenon is shaped by my everyday interactions with the people who see themselves as MAGA--such as my beloved wrestling coach, who protested peacefully outside the White House on January 6th, while other Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, seemingly encouraged by a handful of federal agents.**

As I explained in detail in my article defending the MAGA Communism strategy, I was somewhat surprised to find that, during my political conversations with this coach, our positions overlapped far more than they contradicted.

He sees Trump as a sort of revolutionary figure--a redeemer fighting on behalf of the impoverished and indebted masses against a corrupt political establishment which he correctly believes has been exploiting working class Americans for years.

He also frequently criticized modern culture wars as a new weapon of the ruling class to keep Americans divided, now that the old weapon of racism had lost so much of its edge.

Notably, both my Trump-supporting and liberal coaches and teammates alike have been supportive of my work with the ACP in general.

From my perspective here in Iowa, the Infrared Collective was among the first on the Marxist left to accurately grasp the Trump phenomenon and understand why he resonated so strongly with the American proletariat--something I believe Daniel Tutt also recognizes to some extent.

Trump's rhetoric about bringing jobs back, controlling unregulated immigration that undercuts labor markets, and ending the endless wars was far more appealing to American workers than his more bigoted remarks or infamous Twitter tirades.

In fact, a common sentiment among Trump supporters all over the Midwest is that they like Trump but wish the Secret Service would take his Twitter account away.

It was Trump's populist and anti-imperialist messaging that flipped so many former Obama voters to his side--not his brash and inflammatory comments about various ethnic groups.

One of the things many leftists fail to grasp about MAGA workers in areas like the Midwest is that it would be entirely ineffective to suggest they listen to a more "traditional" western leftist like Hasan Piker.

The liberal culture war positions Hasan espouses in nearly every stream are off-putting to much of the Midwestern proletariat, who tend to hold more conservative cultural views.

Similarly, a thinker like Daniel Tutt would not resonate with many of the working class people I interact with here in Iowa--not only because of the academic tone of his writing, but also due to the liberal cultural values he both supports and expects all other socialists to openly and explicitly endorse.

The online Communist political personality I most often recommend to working class Iowans is Jackson Hinkle.

This isn't because I think Jackson is perfect or agree with everything he has ever posted, but because his tone and stance on social issues are unlikely to alienate them.

This doesn't mean I believe everyone needs to emulate Jackson's style or adopt his cultural positions, but I do see him as an incredibly effective figure for guiding conservative Americans who are eager to challenge the establishment toward a Communist perspective--one that frames class struggle as the solution, rather than relying on the demagoguery of Trump, who claims to oppose the owning class that he himself belongs to.

Haz Al-Din has used the revered culinary institution known as McDonald's as a metaphor to describe the MAGA Communism strategy, famously stating, "We are here for the burger - not the clown."

In other words, the goal is to connect with working class Trump supporters through Communism and Marxist ideology, not to follow Trump and support his every move.

Jackson Hinkle has exemplified this approach by being one of Trump's most vocal critics among influencers who maintain a large MAGA audience, openly criticizing Trump for appointing figures like Marco Rubio to shape his foreign policy.

I believe Tutt is overestimating the extent to which Haz and Jackson are inflaming the culture war while underestimating how he and other leftists contribute to it, exacerbating these divisions within the working class by insistently demanding that everyone adopt their liberal cultural values.

In his conversation with Haz, Tutt recounted a story about a transgender friend who called him in tears after seeing a meme they said was anti-trans posted by a member of the Infrared Community.

Tutt argued that such rhetoric harms the socialist movement, prompting Haz to discourage his audience from engaging in similarly divisive rhetoric.

While I agree that posting genuinely hateful memes is unnecessary and can create divisions within the working class and its movement for liberation, I also believe that it is entirely legitimate to critique modern gender ideology and the ways in which the LGBTQ+ movement and its symbolism have been co-opted and used as tools of the ruling class.

For example, corporations like Raytheon and Boeing now participate in Pride Parades and wave rainbow flags to signal their alignment with liberal culture war values--an act of performative solidarity that serves to obscure their role in imperialism and exploitation, implicitly pushing class collaboration based in identity over everything else.

It is both anti-Marxist and unfair to dismiss criticism of this phenomenon by claiming that your friend found something offensive or was crying about something.

What inflames the culture war more than anything is the insistence that all socialists must adopt the same positions as Raytheon on these issues--or else risk being stripped of their "socialism card" and labeled as a reactionary.

The use of woke-ism to promote imperialism and capitalism is a pressing issue that cannot be dismissed simply because some LGBTQ+ individuals may find such critiques offensive or emotionally distressing on an individual level.

Marxism is a materialist ideology rooted in the ruthless criticism of all that exists.

Declaring certain topics off-limits because they may upset someone is pure bourgeois moralism and individualism, which ultimately serves to alienate working class people from the movement.

While Tutt and the academic liberal left milieu he represents assert that all socialists must adopt liberal cultural positions, the ACP strives to find the "Golden Stalinist Center."

Although Tutt also criticizes the ACP's admiration of Stalin--an objection I can only roll my eyes at, as it likely stems from his position within the American academy, where praising Stalin is almost as taboo as rejecting liberal culture war positions.

The ACP does not expect all members to align with Jackson Hinkle's cultural views or Daniel Tutt's; instead, we advocate a position of tolerance.

This means we don't care about your sexual orientation or gender identity so long as you are committed to fighting for the working class and against the capitalist class.

Our position extends tolerance not only towards individuals' sexuality and gender identity but also towards those who critically examine the LGBTQ+ movement and its role in upholding bourgeois ideology.

Or perhaps those workers who feel these ideas are being pushed on their children at too young an age.

We are not inflaming the culture war; we are transcending it through practical action--a task made more challenging by figures like Tutt, who perpetuate culture war divisions by demanding that all socialists conform to the cultural views and values imposed on the American left by the CIA's Congress for Cultural Freedom.

To Tutt's credit, he understands what so many Western academic Marxists fail to grasp about Infrared and the nature of the internet itself.

He recognizes that, in the modern era, the internet and profile-building are dominant forms of communication, and that political ideologies often incubate online before manifesting more concretely in the real world.

Tutt's decision to write such an article reflects the fact that he takes the Infrared community and the American Communist Party seriously as a growing political movement.

This sets him apart from many would-be critics, who without reason dismiss us as terminally online fascists seeking power for its own sake or as participants in some far-fetched conspiracy to destroy the American left, as if it hasn't already been thoroughly co-opted and controlled by institutions like the CIA for decades.

I look forward to engaging further with Tutt's ideas and hope he continues to follow the work of the Party with an open mind about how Marxists in modern-day America can best navigate the culture war.

I also noticed that Tutt refrained from criticizing my organization, Midwestern Marx, which has taken a more tempered approach to critiquing the dominance of liberal cultural values within the left.

Interestingly, Tutt compares Haz to the self-help guru Jordan Peterson, rather than drawing parallels to me, even though my work is far more aligned with a "Communist Jordan Peterson" approach--focusing on self-help and the development of a socialist virtue ethic more than anything produced by the Infrared Collective.

But if Midwestern Marx and Infrared are unified in pursuing shared political goals under the program and constitution of the American Communist Party, does it make sense to criticize one while ignoring the other simply because we have differences in tone or our approach to analyzing the culture war from a Marxist perspective?

I believe that, in time, more and more people will come to understand what we at Midwestern Marx have always prioritized: advancing the class struggle and the cause of anti-imperialism, beyond the distractions of the culture war.

These are objectives that I can say with absolute certainty are deeply held by my comrades Haz Al-Din and Jackson Hinkle.

We are not here to attack individuals or exacerbate culture war divisions.

Our mission is to embed ourselves in our communities and workplaces, educate the masses on Marxist ideology, and advance the class struggle to transform America from a decaying capitalist empire into a socialist republic--one that cares for its people and respects the sovereignty of all nations.

To this end, we are making remarkable process. If you'd like to join us in this fight, visit acp dot us today!

Citations/Footnotes:
* Rockhill, Gabriel. "Article in Counterpunch: 'Lessons from January 6th: An inside job.'" Counterpunch, 18 Feb. 2022

** Smith, Edward Liger. "In Defense of the MAGA Communism Strategy." Midwestern Marx Institute, 25 May 2024

We live in an unprecedented era of politics. Today, every political faction needs to present itself as a radical alternative to the dominant order. Even the most “centrist” liberals are forced to construct an existential scenario where their “normality” has been highjacked by conservatives ushering in a “threat to democracy” they must radically challenge. Today the struggle to sustain the ruling class’s hegemony takes the form of an apparent loss of it; to sustain hegemony it is necessary to make hegemony seem counter hegemonic.

In the past I have ventured to call the forms this takes in Western “Marxism” “controlled counter hegemony.” However, what I have failed to note is how hegemony itself – not just one component of it – purports itself to be counter-hegemonic. The ruling ideas of our era enunciate themselves as contenders. It is like a boxing champion who sustains his title not through mandatory defenses, but as a mandatory challenger. The ideas upheld by dominant institutions of capital are simultaneously presented as a marginalized locus of subaltern thought.

This is, ultimately, a culmination of the purportedly “post-ideological” age the West enters into in the 1990s, with the so-called “end of history.” As Slavoj Žižek has noted, it is precisely when we think we have escaped or overcome ideology that we are the deepest within it. Is it not the case that, likewise, those who present themselves as the ultimate underdogs today – whether the liberals, the conservatives, or the leftists – are precisely in the same club of ideological frontrunners… all playing various essential roles for the ‘team’ as a whole?

The need to present all politics – even the politics which seeks to sustain the dominant political parameters – as revolutionary and radical, is often expressed through the metaphorical invocation of the film which captured and reproduced the paradoxical zeitgeist of the “post-ideological” age itself: The Matrix. Is not The Matrix a clear example of an ideological notion of how one could “escape” ideology? Taking the “red pill,” today, is precisely how we most efficiently receive the effect of the blue pill, that is, it is through the idea that taking a red pill will help us escape the world of the blue pill that we precisely anchor ourselves, knowingly or not, in the world of the blue pill.

The Tate brothers are perhaps one of the best examples of this. Their whole persona and brand (or profile) is centered around helping people “escape the matrix.” But how is that done, exactly? What is the path out of the matrix? The answer couldn’t be more rooted in “the matrix” itself: get together with your core group of friends and find ways to get rich. But is this ‘get rich’ mentality not precisely what the dominant ideology of the U.S. has been since its inception? Is it not precisely the stereotypical jargon about the “land of opportunities,” where, irrespective of background, hard work and discipline could make you rich? W. E. B. Du Bois would see nothing but a good ole return to the “American assumption” in this purported path to escape the matrix.

Today Plato’s cave can be rewritten as a labyrinth, where once one escapes and sees the sun, what one is actually in is another cave, one that is more complex and tangled. One stays in the cave precisely by thinking they have escaped. It is like that Peter Kay skit, "Max and Paddy Go to Prison,” where the prisoner is building a tunnel to escape his cell. The only small problem is that he’s digging into the cell next door. Today many of the attempts which purport themselves as pathways to leaving the ideological prison of the contemporary capitalist order, in reality simply lead us into the cell next door.

This does not mean, necessarily, that all hopes of escape are really – deep down – ways of remaining trapped. In fact, the abstract generalization of such false escapes into an ontological condition for our age its itself a form of controlled counter hegemony… what Keti Chuckrov called the “radicalization of the impossibility of exit.” It is archetypical of the postmodern condition to suspend oneself to the objective recognition of universal entrapment. It is its own form of epistemological escape which serves entrapment itself.

Escape is possible, but we must constantly reflect on whether we too fall into the escape routes which further entrap. While we should not be nihilists to the possibility of genuine escapes, we should be realists in the face of how ‘escaping the matrix’ has itself become an industry which serves to reinforce it further.

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By censoring voices that critique capitalism, question class divisions, or expose corporate malfeasance, the ruling class prevents the dissemination of ideas that could mobilize opposition. Dissenting voices, socialist literature, and revolutionary thought are thus labeled as "subversive" or "dangerous," enabling the ruling class to maintain a cultural monopoly that reinforces capitalist ideology.
​
The Revolution Report media outlet was recently forced to significantly reduce its operations due to escalating U.S. government actions against the Russian media outlet RT, the employer of TRR editor-in-chief, Donald Courter. These actions included sanctions, criminal charges, and allegations of covert propaganda. 

As a result, individuals associated with RT have faced raids, harassment, and legal threats, prompting many, including Courter, to flee the country. Under these pressures, The Revolution Report has since ceased operating as a formal entity and transitioned into a personal project led by Courter.

This tactic has been applied many times by capitalists to discredit leaders of the American Communist Party, including Jackson Hinkle, Haz al-Din, and others.

Canceling Livelihood

Canceling an individual’s livelihood is another weapon in the ruling class's arsenal. Workers who organize, speak out, or challenge the capitalist structure often face job loss, expulsion from institutions, or blacklisting within industries. In a capitalist society, where the means of survival are commodified, removing an individual’s access to these means effectively disciplines both the punished person and the broader workforce by demonstrating the risks of resistance.

This tactic underscores Karl Marx’s theory of the "reserve army of labor." By creating precarity among workers, the ruling class ensures that job security remains a privilege rather than a right. Fear of economic destitution becomes a powerful motivator for conformity, compelling workers to accept substandard conditions rather than risk reprisal. Canceling livelihood, therefore, is not merely about punishing dissenters but about reminding the working class of their dependence on capital owners, perpetuating the capitalist mode of production.

In recent days, Palestine advocates have faced significant challenges in expressing their views. After 18 years of teaching Latinx Studies and International Affairs at CUNY’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Danny Shaw was fired in April. He never received a clear explanation for his dismissal or evidence of any policy violation. Shaw believes the issue originated from his personal social media posts. He endured doxxing and threats for his solidarity with other terminated academics, including Lisa Hofman Kurda from CUNY, as well as Jairo Funez-Flores and Shellyne Rodriguez from Texas Tech University. ​

In the heart of one of America's most MAGA states lies an unexpected legacy of socialist experimentation that continues to influence life in North Dakota today. While contemporary political discourse might portray socialism as foreign to American values, North Dakota's unique history tells a different story—one of pragmatic farmers who embraced socialist solutions to combat economic exploitation and built institutions that persist today.

The roots of North Dakota's socialist movement run deep. The first North Dakota "socialist club" was established in 1900, born from the frustrations of farmworkers seeking economic justice. This wasn't the academic socialism of urban intellectuals but a homegrown movement emerging from the harsh realities of agricultural life on the northern plains. These early socialist organizers laid the groundwork for one of the most successful experiments in American socialism.

The movement's defining moment came in 1915 with the Nonpartisan League (NPL) formation. Founded by Arthur C. Townley, a former Socialist Party organizer, the NPL transformed North Dakota's political landscape by uniting progressives, reformers, and radicals behind a platform of state ownership of key economic institutions. Townley's genius lay in repackaging socialist ideas in a way that appealed to North Dakota's pragmatic farmers, focusing on concrete solutions rather than ideological purity.

The NPL's rise to power was meteoric. By 1919, the organization had gained control of North Dakota's state government and began implementing its ambitious agenda. Their crowning achievements included the establishment of two institutions that would have been unthinkable in most American states: the Bank of North Dakota (BND), which opened its doors on July 28, 1919, and the North Dakota State Mill and Elevator, the only state-owned milling facility in the United States. 

These institutions directly challenged the out-of-state banks and grain monopolies that North Dakota farmers correctly believed were exploiting them. The Bank of North Dakota, in particular, stands as a remarkable testament to the movement's success—it remains the only government-owned general-service bank in the United States, a "socialist" institution that has survived and thrived in a deep MAGA state.

Perhaps most surprisingly, North Dakota's socialist experiment has demonstrated remarkable staying power. The Bank of North Dakota has evolved from a 'controversial socialist enterprise' into a widely respected financial institution. As noted in recent assessments, the bank's success has inspired other states to consider similar public banking initiatives, particularly during financial crises that have shaken confidence in private banking institutions.

The State Mill and Elevator tell a similar story. What began as a socialist experiment authorized by the 1919 state legislature has become an integral part of North Dakota's agricultural economy. Today, it stands as the largest flour mill in the United States, proving that state ownership can thrive in our country. 

The North Dakota experience suggests that ideological labels matter less than practical results.

"Israel is our greatest ally." This phrase is commonly used by many in the American political establishment in instances in which tensions between Israel and its neighbors flare up to justify the large amounts of military aid the United States gives to Israel without addressing the reasons why America has the relationship with Israel that it does. Addressing such a topic would risk exposing inconvenient truths regarding the partnership between Washington and Tel Aviv.

Historical context is important to understand both why Israeli-American relations are the way they are and the consequences that have emerged due to such relations. After all, the United States and Israel didn't always have such a special relationship. The current relationship between the United States and Israel is the product of numerous events and decisions made over decades to bring about such a state of affairs.

​In 1896, Austro-Hungarian Jewish political activist Theodor Herzl published Der Judenstaat, in which he argued that the solution to the anti-Semitic sentiment faced by Jews in Europe was the establishment of a Jewish state. This idea of Herzl's was known as political Zionism. 1897 would see the World Zionist Organization founded and the First Zionist Congress proclaim its objective of establishing a nation for the Jewish people in the land known as Palestine.

However, it wasn't until after the Second World War that the Zionists achieved their objective. The genocide carried out against European Jews by the Third Reich caused many to flee to Palestine despite limits placed on Jewish immigration to the region by the British who administrated the area at the time. Eventually, conflict broke out between Zionist militias, Palestinian Arab fighters, and British troops.

In 1947, Britain announced that it would terminate its Mandate for Palestine and requested that the United Nations General Assembly handle the question of Palestine. That same year, the United Nations voted to partition Palestine. According to the partition plan, a little over half of Palestine was to make up the territory of the Jewish state, and the territory not allotted to the Jewish state would be considered the Arab nation of Palestine.

The United Nations failed to address how the new Zionist nation could be a Jewish state when half of its inhabitants were Palestinians. Unsurprisingly, the Palestinians and the Arab world, in general, rejected the partition plan. The Zionists, for their part, saw opportunities present themselves.

The British withdrawal from Palestine meant that there would be no one to stop the Zionists from seizing more territory than the United Nations had given them. It wouldn't be long until Zionist militias engaged in acts of terrorism, such as the use of car bombs and the launching of attacks on Palestinian villages to drive Palestinians out of their communities. By the time Britain terminated its Mandate for Palestine, nearly a quarter of a million Palestinians had fled.

The day before Britain terminated its Mandate for Palestine, Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion declared the founding of the State of Israel, the nation that emerged from the territory allotted to the Zionists and the territory that the Zionists seized from the Palestinians. Though President Harry S. Truman recognized the State of Israel, American policymakers took a moderate approach to relations with Israel for fear of alienating Arab nations. It wasn't until the Kennedy administration that the first large-scale arms shipment to Israel was authorized.

J.J. Goldberg, editor emeritus of the newspaper for Jewish-American audiences known as The Forward, states in his book, Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment, "Zionist influence increased exponentially during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations because the affluence and influence of Jews in American society had increased. Jews had become vital donors to the Democratic Party; they were key figures in the organized labor movement, which was essential to the Democratic Party; they were major figures in liberal intellectual, cultural, and academic circles. More than any of their predecessors in the Oval Office, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson counted numerous Jews among their close advisers, donors, and personal friends.” With this, one could say that the shift toward a more explicitly pro-Israel foreign policy where Middle Eastern affairs are concerned came about as a consequence of the rising influence of the Israel lobby in liberal politics.

Israel's victory in the 1967 Six-Day War saw American military aid to Israel increase to unprecedented levels. Before that conflict, American officials believed Israel was too weak to be used to counter Soviet influence. However, Israel's military victories were beginning to prove otherwise. Following the Six-Day War, American aid to Israel increased rapidly.

By 1971, American aid to Israel surpassed half a billion dollars a year, with eighty-five percent of that being pure military aid. This amount quintupled after the 1973 Yom Kippur War. By 1976, Israel had become the largest recipient of American foreign aid, a status that it has maintained into the present day as of the writing of this article.

Over the years, Congress has granted Israel certain privileges to receive more aid and more expediently than other nations. John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt explain in their book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, "Most recipients of American foreign aid get their money in quarterly installments, but since 1982, the annual foreign aid bill has included a special clause specifying that Israel is to receive its entire annual appropriation in the first thirty days of the fiscal year." In other words, the official policy of the American government is for Israel to receive special treatment.

What's more, the Foreign Military Financing program usually requires recipients of American military assistance to spend all of the money in the United States to help maintain the employment of American defense workers. However, Congress grants Israel a special exemption that authorizes it to use approximately one in every four American military aid dollars to subsidize its defense industry. In addition, a 2006 report for the Congressional Research Service noted that no other recipient of American military assistance had received this benefit, while a 2005 Congressional Research Service Report noted that due to American economic aid is given to Israel as direct government-to-government budgetary support without specific project accounting and the money is fungible, there is no way to tell for sure how Israel uses American aid.

With this, one might arrive at the question of why Israel receives this special treatment. Ultimately, this comes down to the influence of the Israel lobby. The Israel lobby is a term used to describe the coalition of individuals and organizations that work to shape American foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction.

The most important organization within the Israel lobby is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee or AIPAC. Part of what makes AIPAC such a powerful organization is its practice of grooming congressional candidates. According to former AIPAC president Howard Friedman, "AIPAC meets with every candidate running for Congress. These candidates receive in-depth briefings to help them completely understand the complexities of Israel's predicament and that of the Middle East as a whole. We even ask each candidate to author a 'position paper' on their views of the U.S.-Israel relationship so it's clear where they stand on the subject."

Another reason why AIPAC is such a powerful organization is its ability to punish those who stand in the way of its objectives. When President Ford's attempts at securing peace between Israel and Egypt stalled due to Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's refusal to cede strategic passes in the Sinai as well as oil fields which provided Israel with more than half of its oil, Ford sent Rabin a letter informing him that Washington would reassess its relationship with Tel Aviv. In response, seventy-six senators signed a letter opposing the reassessment of Israeli-American relations. After the letter, Senator Henry Jackson added an amendment to a defense procurement bill that allowed Israel to receive American weaponry at low interest rates. Not only did AIPAC mobilize policymakers to come out in defense of Israel by applying pressure on the administration, but they also managed to secure for Israel an arguably more advantageous position where American military aid to Israel was concerned.

Furthermore, the power of organizations like AIPAC is not limited to merely pushing the American government to give Israel special treatment. These organizations have demonstrated their capacity to drive the American government to sacrifice American citizens on Israel's behalf. In particular, the role of the Israel lobby was just as important as the American government's desire to maintain the hegemony of the U.S. dollar in pushing the United States to invade Iraq in 2003. To understand the role of the Israel lobby in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, one must have historical context. In particular, it is helpful to examine Iraq-Israel relations before 2003.

From Israel's beginning, Iraq had been a thorn in Tel Aviv's side. Immediately following the declaration of the State of Israel, Arab forces, including Iraqi forces, intervened against Israel. Following the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Iraq remained the only Arab nation not to have signed a ceasefire agreement with Israel. Over the years, Iraq would play a crucial role in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Iraq participated in both the 1967 Six-Day War and the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

During Saddam Hussein's rule over Iraq, tensions increased between Israel and Iraq as multiple clashes between the two nations occurred throughout the 1980s and 1990s. These clashes include the instance in which Israel bombed Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981 to stifle Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons development program and the incident that occurred during the Persian Gulf War in which Saddam Hussein fired Scud missiles into Israel in the hopes that Israeli entry into the conflict against Iraq might jeopardize the American-led coalition since the coalition included an assortment of nations that had complicated relations with Israel. To prevent the alliance from being jeopardized, the United States pressured Israel into not retaliating against provocations from Iraq. To satisfy Israel, coalition leaders sent special operations forces to seek out and destroy the mobile Scud launchers. During these decades, Israel regarded Iraq as a serious threat, and they longed for regime change in Iraq.

The opportunity for regime change in Iraq arrived following the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001. Not long after the towers came down, the administration of President George W. Bush falsely linked al-Qaeda, the terrorist network that carried out the attacks, to Saddam Hussein's regime. The political faction which led the Bush administration was known as the neoconservatives. Neoconservatism was born out of a sense of disenchantment that many foreign policy hawks felt with the political left during the rise of the counterculture of the 1960s. Neoconservatives favored using American might to reshape politically sensitive areas of the world.

Under the administration of President George H.W. Bush, some neoconservatives held high-ranking positions. Among the most defining moments of the one-term presidency was the Persian Gulf War. During that conflict, George H.W. Bush's administration decided against marching into Baghdad and overthrowing Saddam Hussein's regime, as doing so would have run the risk of destabilizing Iraq. Though the United States achieved victory in the Persian Gulf War, some of the neoconservatives within George H.W. Bush's administration, such as Paul Wolfowitz in particular, felt that by leaving Saddam Hussein in power, the administration didn't go far enough in waging war against Iraq. These neoconservatives would spend the 1990s advocating for regime change in Baghdad even before the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001.

It was under the administration of George H.W. Bush's son, George W. Bush, that regime change would come to Iraq. Some of the neoconservatives who held positions in George H.W. Bush's administration would hold positions in his son's administration. It would come as no surprise then that these neoconservatives would be among the leading voices calling for regime change in Iraq. Among the most prominent ways in which they pushed for regime change was the use of propaganda to drum up support for military intervention in Iraq. The terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001 provided neoconservatives the opportunity to feed the panicked American people propaganda, which falsely linked the terrorist network that conducted the attack to Saddam Hussein's regime.

Another untruth told to sell military intervention in Iraq was the myth of Iraq having weapons of mass destruction. Following the end of the Persian Gulf War, Iraq accepted the terms of United Nations Security Council Resolution 687. This resolution set the terms with which Iraq was to comply after losing the war. The resolution forbade Iraq from developing, possessing, or using chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. The United Nations Special Commission, or UNSCOM, was an inspection regime established to ensure Iraq's compliance with the destruction of their weapons of mass destruction.

Scott Ritter is a former United States Marine Corps intelligence officer who joined UNSCOM as an inspector. In 1999, he noted that Iraq no longer possessed a meaningful weapons of mass destruction capability. August of 1998 saw the Iraqis suspend cooperation with the inspectors entirely out of concern that the inspectors were collecting intelligence on behalf of the United States, an accusation that turned out to be true. The enactment of the Iraq Liberation Act in October 1998 made the removal of Saddam Hussein from power official American foreign policy. This act provided nearly a hundred million dollars for opposition groups in Iraq.

During the 2000 United States presidential election, the Republican Party's platform called for the full implementation of the Iraq Liberation Act. Running for the Republican Party was none other than George W. Bush. The Bush administration would get its chance to implement the Iraq Liberation Act in full following the September 11th terrorist attacks when it launched a propaganda campaign to motivate the American public to support a military intervention in Iraq. President Bush laid some of the groundwork for an eventual invasion of Iraq in his January 2002 State of the Union Address, in which he called Iraq a member of a so-called "axis of evil" along with Iran and North Korea and accused Iraq of pursuing weapons of mass destruction. Bush began formally making a case to the international community for an invasion of Iraq in an address he delivered to the United Nations Security Council on September 12th, 2002.

Before Bush's address to the United Nations Security Council, a September 5th report from Major General Glen Shaffer revealed that America based its assessments regarding Iraq and weapons of mass destruction on imprecise intelligence and assumptions rather than hard evidence. What's more, is that the British government was also unable to find hard evidence that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. America's ally, Britain, agreed with America's hawkish stance toward Iraq, while others, such as France and Germany, argued instead for diplomacy and more weapons inspections.

After much debate, the United Nations Security Council adopted a compromise solution, United Nations Security Council Resolution 1441, which authorized the resuming of weapons inspections and warned of dire consequences for non-compliance. France and Russia, members of the United Nations Security Council, made it known that they did not consider these dire consequences to include the use of military force to overthrow Saddam Hussein's regime, to which the American and British ambassadors to the United Nations publicly confirmed this interpretation of the resolution.

Despite the compromise resolution, in October 2002, Congress passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002, which authorized the president to "use any means necessary" against Iraq. While the United States was preparing to use military force against Iraq, Saddam Hussein agreed to United Nations Security Council Resolution 1441 on November 13th, and weapons inspectors returned to Iraq under the direction of lead United Nations weapons inspector Hans Blix. On February 5th, 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell appeared before the United Nations to present evidence that Iraq was hiding weapons. In his presentation, Powell included information from a defector from Iraq whom British and German intelligence had already deemed untrustworthy, and Powell also made sensational claims accusing Iraq of harboring and supporting al-Qaeda terrorists and alleging that al-Qaeda had been attempting to acquire weapons of mass destruction from Iraq. In March 2003, Blix stated that the weapons inspectors found no evidence of Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction.

As it became increasingly clear that most of the United Nations Security Council members would not support a resolution that would lead to a war with Iraq, the United States and its "coalition of the willing" began preparing to invade Iraq without authorization from the United Nations. On March 17th, 2003, President Bush made an address in which he stated that Saddam Hussein and his sons would have two days to leave Iraq. After this deadline passed, the invasion commenced. Baghdad fell to American forces in April 2003, but Saddam Hussein wasn't until December 13th, 2003, that American troops captured Saddam Hussein. His execution took place on December 30th, 2006.

The invasion resulted in the destabilization of Iraq, thereby allowing Iran to exert influence over its Arab neighbor, America becoming locked in a nearly decade-long conflict that cost the lives of five hundred thousand to a million people in a nation with complicated internal politics without a proper exit strategy, and the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant whose rapid takeover of areas of Iraq and Syria caused the return of American troops to Iraq. And there were no weapons of mass destruction found after the invasion. That was because Iraq no longer possessed them by 2003. The rationale for the war offered by the American political establishment was a pack of lies. And such as the case with most lies throughout history, one might ask who benefitted from the lies told.

As it turned out, it was Israel who benefitted from the lies that formed the basis for the invasion of Iraq. The fact of the matter is that the United States invaded Iraq in part to safeguard Israel's security. After all, Israel wanted Saddam Hussein's regime overthrown due to the security threat that they believed Iraq posed. The neoconservatives, who are staunch supporters of Israel, also wished to see Saddam Hussein's regime overthrown to safeguard Israel's security as well as other reasons. In this regard, the neoconservatives were doing the bidding of Israel.

The notion that Israel was a leading factor in the decision to invade Iraq has been controversial, and many have asked the question of how Israel could have been a leading factor in the decision to invade Iraq when the mention of Israel was often absent from the words of Bush administration officials in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. Evidence of Israel being a leading factor in the decision to invade Iraq exists not in the rhetoric of Bush administration officials but in the rhetoric of Israeli officials at that time and the methods used by the Israel lobby to prevent the American people from perceiving the war as being driven by Israeli interests. In the run-up to the invasion, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon praised President Bush for pursuing a war with Iraq while also attempting to disavow Israeli involvement. The Israel lobby sought to protect Israel's standing in American public opinion while the Bush administration pursued war with Iraq. An example of this is the way the Israel Project sent a memo urging pro-Israel leaders to keep silent on Iraq so that public perception wouldn't be that of Israel instigating the war with Iraq.

In addition, multiple Bush administration officials held membership in pro-Israel think tanks. John Bolton, who would serve as the United States Ambassador to the United Nations, had been a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and an advisor to the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. Furthermore, Bush's vice president Dick Cheney and former director of central intelligence James Woolsey have also served on the advisory board of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. There are many more examples of key figures from Bush's presidency having affiliations with pro-Israel organizations that collectively make up the Israel lobby. America's decision to invade Iraq at Israel's behest was the ultimate show of their loyalty to Israel.

Another pro-Israel organization that played a notable role in America's decision to invade Iraq was AIPAC. Though some claim that AIPAC did not advocate for war with Iraq, evidence to the contrary exists. Former AIPAC executive director Howard Kohr described in a 2003 interview with the New York Sun 'quietly' lobbying Congress to approve the use of force against Iraq as one of AIPAC's successes over that past year. Additionally, Jeffrey Goldberg of The New Yorker reported in a profile of Steven J. Rosen, AIPAC's policy director during the run-up to the Iraq War, that AIPAC lobbied Congress in favor of going to war with Iraq. It's also worth mentioning the fact that AIPAC generally supports what Israel wants; Israel wanted the toppling of Saddam Hussein's regime.

In summary, the American government sacrificed the lives of brave men and women serving in uniform and destabilized Iraq over the security concerns of Israel. The Israel lobby had the power to do this. Some might write this off as a product of the past, unable to affect us in the present. Others might ask why they should care about this in the present. The fact of the matter is that the current relationship that exists between Washington and Tel Aviv threatens to bring about future disasters comparable to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

As of the writing of this article, the Biden administration has announced plans to send a billion dollars in weapons to Israel as Israel continues its fight against Hamas, even though current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had previously propped up Hamas with Qatari money as a divide-and-conquer strategy and evidence has since come to light pointing to Israeli intelligence having ignored warnings about the attacks launched by Hamas which acted as the catalyst for the ongoing conflict in Gaza. It's also worth noting that Israel has been committing a series of atrocities against the people of Gaza, including the bombing of homes, mosques, schools, and hospitals in keeping with the Dahiya doctrine, a terrorist tactic employed by Israel in which the Israel Defense Forces disproportionally attack civilian areas in response to rocket attacks to terrorize Palestinian civil society into putting pressure on Hamas, the blocking of the delivery of water, food, and fuel to Gazans, the razing of agricultural land to deprive Gazans of food, the forced displacement of Gazan civilians by bombing their homes, and the punishing of families of alleged attackers with forcible transfers and home demolitions among other means of collective punishment. Even with the International Criminal Court's chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, having applied for an arrest warrant for Netanyahu, President Biden continues to defend the Israeli prime minister, describing the move as "outrageous" and claiming there to be no equivalence between Israel and Hamas. In addition to aiding Israel materially, the United States remains militarily engaged in the Middle East, often finding itself in confrontations with Israel's enemies. Now is the time for the American public to be made aware of the kind of influence that the Israel lobby holds over our leaders so they can equip themselves to tell Washington that the time has come for America to unshackle itself from the chains of Tel Aviv's interests and this unshackling may be a necessary stepping stone to a future in which the people of Palestine may enjoy the same level of sovereignty as the people of Israel.

Nicholas Reed

Dec 25, 2024

On December 23rd 2024, the American Communist Party (ACP) in joint effort with the Communist Party
of the Russian Federation (KPRF), sent a Humanitarian Convoy to Donbass. The American Communist Party considers it a patriotic duty to assist the people of Donbass in their time of need. People who have been humiliated by the criminal kleptocratic regime in Kiev. The sendoff point was at the V.I Lenin State Farm. Thousands of festive New Year’s gifts addressed to the children of Donetsk and Lugansk were included, along with warm winter clothing, footwear, pertinent medical supplies and of course much needed foodstuff.

​The American Communist Party collected donations from anonymous contributors and party members in the United States of America. The ACP is made up of mostly young members, some even as young as
twenty-one. Young patriots who wish to do their part, for what they see as standing up for freedom, liberty and the American way. Leading the effort was Jackson Hinkle, in cooperation with members of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, fifty-five boxes of humanitarian aid was prepared. Including canned meat, condensed milk, medical aid and toys for the people of Donbass. Comrade Jackson Hinkle made a statement upon disembarking at the state farm named after Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

“The American Communist Party donated a ton of humanitarian aid to the people of Donbass, along with the KPRF (Communist Party of the Russian Federation) we sent fifty-five boxes of condensed milk, canned meat, medical supplies and toys for kids this new years. There’s a lot of people here, a lot of supplies, I’ve never seen anything like this. The good people of Russia are winning, with this (humanitarian supplies) they will continue to be victorious.”

​References

Shawon, Ali Asif 2022. “Student politics at private universities: What you need to know” Dhaka Tribune. Published on September 10, 2022. Available at- https://www.dhakatribune.com/bangladesh/education/293873/student-politics-at-private-universities-what-you. Accessed on November 21, 2024

Harvey, David. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199283262.001.0001.
———. 2007. “Neoliberalism as Creative Destruction.” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 610 (1): 21–44. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002716206296780.
Hill, Dave, and Ravi Kumar. 2012. Global Neoliberalism and Education and Its Consequences. Routledge Studies in Education and Neoliberalism. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis.
Kabir, Ariful Haq, and Raqib Chowdhury. 2021. The Privatisation of Higher Education in Postcolonial Bangladesh: The Politics of Intervention and Control. Routledge Critical Studies in Asian Education. Abingdon New York (N.Y.): Routledge.
Kumar, Ravi, and Rama Paul. 2022. “State and Private Capital: Education, State and Capital.” In Encyclopaedia of Marxism and Education, edited by Alpesh Maisuria. BRILL. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004505612.
​

In an effort to bring the behemoth capitalist giant, Amazon, to the bargaining table for a contract, seven Amazon facilities went on strike on Thursday, December 19th at 6 AM. Workers at DBK4 in New York City; DGT8 in Atlanta; DFX4, DAX5, DAX8 in Southern California; DCK6 in San Francisco and DIL7 in Skokie, Illinois initiated the strike. Teamster President Sean O’Brien addressed Amazon owner Jeff Bezos: “If your package is delayed during the holidays, you can blame Amazon’s insatiable greed. We gave Amazon a clear deadline to come to the table and do right by our members. They ignored it.” Bezos is worth $238 billion dollars. The average Amazon worker takes home under $30,000 per year. Amazon generated over $620 billion dollars in revenue for the twelve months ending September 30, 2024, a 11.93% increase from last year, yet they refuse to recognize the workers’ unionizing efforts. The workers erected a giant pig to symbolize Bezos and the billionaires' anti-worker greed.

If ever there was one, this is a David versus Goliath struggle. 

​
A Sociological Snapshot of the New York City Proletariat

The workers are a snapshot of the proletariat of NYC. They are West Indian, Mexican, Dominican, Dominican American, Trinidadian, American etc. Many came here from one of the countries occupied by the United States, searching for a dream. What they found was more class struggle.

This is Sunnyside, where Queens blends into Brooklyn. The workers all have other jobs or side hustles. This is New York Motherfucking City. You survive or you don’t. Under capitalism, no one gives a fuck about you. The workers’ social media reflects this economic reality. Desmond sings calypso at clubs on the weekends. Others work security or drive Uber eats. Steve bounces at clubs on the side. Juan Luis is a Dominican hip hop artist. They invent ever more creative hustles to make ends meet. They need better salaries. They need insurance. They need sick days. They need workers’ comp. They need job security. As Pedro Pietri’s immortal poem “Puerto Rican Obituary” lays out: these workers have been fighting their whole lives and never got a break. They have family members to maintain here and others back in their home countries. Remittances are the lifeblood for their homelands, still in the grip of U.S. imperialism.

There are mothers and fathers on the picket line by day who bring their children and families. The children chant as enthusiastically as their fearless parents. The night crew has its own aesthetic. They pass the holiday coquito (rum-based eggnog) and spicy home-cooked food as the dembow (Dominican rap) and Bruce Springsteen blare out. Juan Carlos, Belinda and a crew crowd around small space heaters trading war stories from the inside of the Amazon facility which towers over us. They share music, chants and coffee. After sundown, Ramón passes out hot chocolate. Upon being released from jail, Tony, the most beloved of the Teamster organizers, starts dancing with a worker leader, Stacey. We chant: “Who are we? Teamsters!” and “What do we want? A union. When do we want it? Now!”

Only the NYC proletariat could maintain a certain level of Caribbean enthusiasm on a 20°F Queens night. Many daydream about being back home in 87°F lands with their families and fight the nostalgia, huddling closer to one another.

And here we were, on just another night in the N Y C, marching with working-class people of every skin complexion and accent, fighting to survive...

Survival until revolution...

On the Picket Line
​
On the first day of the strike, the police carted off workers in handcuffs who attempted to engage the scabs. A Dominican worker yells that the monos azules (the blue monkeys, Dominican slang for pigs) are closing in. We attempted to prevent the arrests but the phalanx of jakes (Queen’s slang for the pigs) and paddy wagons. Gustavo starts a chant, echoed by hundreds: “Fuck Be-zos! Fuck Be-zos!”

At the DBK-4 Amazon delivery facility located in Maspeth, Queens, the strikebreakers drove by, protected by the police. Some cover their faces because they feel shame; others because no one ever taught them to believe in themselves or the working class. Some told us they understand the need for this strike but they have to send back money to El Salvador or Barbados for the holidays. This is realpolitik. Objective facts are dogged; identity politics are dogmatic. This is Queens, the borough of “Get Rich or Die Trying.” Some workers are looking to be the next Nicki Minaj or 50 Cent, far fewer the next Joe Hill or Mother Jones. In Marxist lingo, we call this False Consciousness. This is individualist and consumer heaven, an anti-worker paradise.

The workers’ breath is visible as they condemn the elevation of Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and other oligarchs above us in this caste society. The fluorescent blue letters A M A Z O N light up the street. They blast dancehall reggae and a local DJ who moonlights as Amazon delivery driver pumps out music from every corner of the Americas. On Saturday, mysteriously there was a massive flood when giant hoses dumped an avalanche of streaming, freezing water on the sidewalk where workers were picketing.

Thousands of UPS drivers, teachers, and community members, including the American Communist Party, Infrared and Midwestern Marx, have come out across the country in support and stood on the picket lines. One NY state ACP member and labor organizer laid out the strategy: 

Buildup to the Strike

As both the bourgeois press and the Teamsters have emphasized, this is “the largest strike in Amazon’s history.”

The first recorded Amazon strike occurred in Minnesota in 2018 during Amazon’s Prime Day. The Awood Center, a nonprofit advocacy group in Minnesota for East African immigrants, organized the strike. Demands were for reduced workloads, better safety measures, higher wages, and improved job security, a running theme for the strikes that followed. The strike did not affect production because not enough workers participated out of fear and indifference. However, it did receive enormous attention from the bourgeois press, as it was the first significant protest at an Amazon site in the US.

Since then there have been small waves of protest, with Chris Smalls at the JFK-8 warehouse leading a strike in March 2020, due to the spread of COVID-19 at the warehouse. After this, due to the spread of information by social media and the bourgeois press, workers in several other locations, often with “the help” of nonprofits, launched small scale actions. The next major action was in April 2021, at the DIL3 Delivery Stations in Gage Park, Chicago. Delivery drivers walked out during the shift. This was followed in December 2021 by a walkout at the DIL3 and DLN2 delivery stations in Cicero, Illinois. The latter was the first multi-site walkout at Amazon and both were organized by Amazonians United. This was followed by the unionization of the JFK-8 facility in Staten Island, with the newly formed Amazon Labor Union(ALU) in April 2022.

We see a pattern here. There is hysteria from the bourgeois press with no major impact on output. Bernie Sanders and faux leftist politicians like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez gave it their full support, fawning over such victories. Liberals specialize in celebrating hollow, symbolic victories. Workers fight in the spirit of James Connolly: “For our demands most moderate are, We only want the earth...”

The ALU decided in June 2024 to affiliate with the Teamsters union. After internal struggle, the Amazon Labor Union split with Chris Smalls as leader and reorganized itself in late July 2024. With the partnership of the Teamsters and the ALU set, the Teamsters moved forward in their initiative to organize Amazon facilities. This introduced a large union with lots of organizers and funding into this struggle and led to the unionization of thousands of additional workers. Despite hundreds of thousands of Teamster dollars poured into this organizational effort, the results have been subpar to say the least. The true test of a union is its ability to organize the masses in collective action and thus far they have fallen short.

The hope of the organizers is that these actions will wake up the slumbering masses of Amazon workers into action and generate enough momentum to bring Amazon to the table. At a closing rally before a holiday break, the labor organizers informed workers of their Weingarten rights in case there is retaliation against them on the job. 

Late-Stage Capitalism: Its Challenges and Lessons

Marxist-Leninist Amilcar Cabral always said: “Tell no lies, Claim no easy victories...:

Output has barely been affected. In DBK4, where we were, most workers crossed the picket line, despite the incredible media attention that this effort had received from the bourgeois press. At midnight, Friday, December 21st, at the Staten Island facility where the Teamsters represent 5,500 workers, few workers came out to walk the picket line. There were significantly more leftists than workers, showing the disconnect at the heart of this struggle.
​
This is a minority strike against a capitalist behemoth that is hidden behind layers of legal subterfuges and subcontracting tricks. Bezos even claims the delivery drivers are not “his workers,” but are rather employees of Cornucopia and other subcontractors. The billionaires can now hide behind subsidiaries to distance themselves from the exploitation of the hundreds of thousands of workers who enrich them.

The key problem with this strike and the organization of transient workers like Amazon and Starbucks workers, is that the lead organizers, the paid staff of the union, have yet to listen to the wisdom of the masses. They attempt to inject a fighting spirit into the working class and substitute themselves for labor. Temporary workers don’t want to work for Amazon for the rest of their lives, stuck in this boring, repetitive, backbreaking work. As even Forbes, a chief mouthpiece of the billionaires admits, a high percentage of all workplace injuries in the U.S. occur at Amazon. The turnover rate is an astonishing 150 percent per year. These are some of the reasons there is little loyalty to the profession.

The Teamsters are attempting to bring Bezos to the bargaining table but there is a lack of unity among the base of the movement, the 750,000 workers, who are easily replaced and constantly moving in and out of the job. Over the past three days, Bezos’ The Washington Post, has run at least six different articles covering the strike from the perspective of the shareholders. They continue to pop champagne as their stocks go up and their own media companies glorify a struggle doomed to fail. Labor analysts explain the logic of the ruling class. They prop up unwinnable struggles, complementary to their aims of the continued occupation of the American people and the peoples of the world.

The bourgeois press is the enemy’s weapon and is used to mislead and misdirect revolutionary forces. Twitter, or X, is enemy territory designed to sap our militant energies. We cannot rely on social media to discover our duties to the American worker. We must deepen our independent investigation, utilizing our own forces, and become the decisive factor that ensures that workers not only fight, but win.

It is incumbent on us as communists to determine the concrete realities and the balance of forces within each particular labor struggle that emerges. It is not enough to simply support the striking workers, but we must also consider why it is that the vast majority did not strike, without simply writing them off as “scabs and traitors.” We must continue to reach out to them and hear their voices.

The ACP is engaging in more thorough investigation of labor in our regions and nationally. We seek to understand: What is the character of the proletariat in our particular areas? What are the most critical industries and where are the workers the strongest? What are the struggles that the bourgeois press is hiding? Which struggles are most likely to win and which ones need the most support? Which struggles advance the overall interests of the American proletariat and push them closer to the seizure of power? How can we drive up the “sensuous” immersion and practical participation of all cadres, particularly the terminally-online? 

​The ACP sees social investigation and active community involvement as absolutely essential to answer these questions and as the most honest measurement of who the emerging leaders are.

“I Got Your Back!”

For all the naysayers, who say the Bezos, Musks, Clintons and Trumps are
untouchable, we proletarians do not feel defeated.

24 hours before the most sacred of family holidays, workers stood their ground. These five days in December have taught us a great deal about the American proletariat, ourselves and our relationship to the working class. Over and over, those of us in the heat of class struggle, heard how much the Amazon workers had grown as friends, sisters and brothers and most importantly as comrades. A worker leader removed his Teamster Amazon skully to pledge his support for anyone who needed help moving forward. In this simple gesture, he was injecting optimism where the billionaires insisted on division, sectarianism and pessimism. Dozens of delivery men and women remarked how they had never spent so much time with their coworkers. Huddled around space heaters, they promised to have one another's backs moving forward, determined to bring more of their coworkers onto the picket lines. Teamster organizer Tony closed a final rally before Christmas Eve exclaiming: “This is just the beginning. None of us as individuals are heroes. Together we are all heroes. We are the spark. We will inspire tens of thousands of others to strike!” 

​ FREEDOM AND AUTHORITY: WHY SYRIA IS NOT FREE.
​
We have witnessed scores of celebrations in the streets of Syria's major cities, and across social media in the aftermath of the collapse of Syria's state. Such scenes are reminiscent of the original 'Arab spring' in 2011.

People have evidently since not learned the lessons of why liberalism is fundamentally incapable of achieving freedom for a people.

Of course, in the aftermath of the collapse of a state there is a great deal of catharsis, joy and reprieve that is felt.

States are definitely imperfect and full of flaws. When they collapse, all of the injustices, flaws, and imperfections of a state immediately feel like they have disappeared.

And they have in a sense: The key word is immediately. The pressure and fear felt by a state authority disappears. It's defects all suddenly disappear. All of its injustices appear to have been avenged immediately.

That is because what is still taken for granted are the necessities provided by the state - security, stability, and most importantly, centralized authority capable of operating at the scale of an entire country.

In the short and immediate term, these do not disappear right away. People acquire the illusion that only all the bad has disappeared - it takes a few weeks for them to realize that the good has been thrown out too.

In the case of today's Syria, this is days. Not days after this 'revolution,' Israel has invaded and destroyed all of Syria's military infrastructure.

Arab Spring style 'revolutions' feel very nice in the short term. The whole country can even feel united to an extent, as a modern state principally unites a country by, at minimum, inflicting upon it the trauma of indiscriminately enforcing universal submission to its authority.

But the number one problem with the liberal comprehension of what a state is, is that it is personalized. Everyone blames Bashar for every grievance. Everyone wants to give the state a face, and treat it like the slights committed against them individually are personal.

The brutal truth is that the state is not personal. It is an organ whose subject is an impersonal and collective reality that encompasses a scale that is simply beyond the comprehension of ordinary individual experience. It is no different than a force of nature.

States appear brutal and inhuman because they do not react to individuals, but masses. At the scale of tens of millions, encompassing geographies and territories that are too big for one person to possibly experience.

Think about how cold and inhuman surgeons can often appear. They cannot be emotional and personal when operating on someone - they are dealing with the impersonal reality of physiology, that is blind to our personal sentiments and subjectivities.

And none the less we need our organs to survive and be personal in the first place.

The same is true for states - a central authority that is blind to the individual, capable of enforcing the unity of a territory and its economic intercourse (via taxation, public works, etc.), capable of defending the people from foreign armies with a standing army, is a precondition for the possibility of a peoples free development.

Modern states are necessary for a given population to resist colonial slavery, debt and pauperization on a mass scale by unifying a country’s productive forces and supply chains.

Building modern infrastructure, investing domestically in industry, and ensuring access to electricity, water, and internet even for remote villages is only possible with a modern central authority.

The brutality of modern states like Syria's appear senselessly cruel. But such a cruel authority is what it takes to unite a people beyond tribal, sectarian, and ethnic differences.

To govern at the helm of a modern state is to occupy a very wide and long term perspective. This appears inhumane to people who cannot see beyond the scale of their personal and individual experiences.

To effectively govern at the helm of the modern state machinery requires making difficult choices that benefit your population in the long term, at the expense of the pain and suffering of some in the short term.

All of Syria's minorities had grievances with Assad. It just seems like Sunni Arabs hated him the most because they're in the majority. Only because of that did Syrias other minorities see him as the lesser of two evils - to oppose the majority.

All of Syria’s minorities resented the central state authority. They just resented each other more.
The truth is, the regime was keeping all these feuding sects at bay from destroying the entire unity of the nation. All of them were trying to assert their private and sectarian interests at the expense of national unity.

The truth is, all of the Syrian people had the same primitive, petty and backward tribalism that made them resent the modern state. The Ba’athist regime represented a step in advance toward elevating them to modern civilization.

Of course, the fact that it has collapsed has proven that it was full of inadequacies, corruption, defects and incompetence. Yet that doesn’t justify celebrating everything being thrown away.

In my opinion, part of the reason the Ba’athist regimes fell to feuding sectarianism (notwithstanding the obvious fact of foreign imperialist intervention) is that they did not fully disempower the landowning and bourgeois elites. These elites were the source of sectarianism - they acted as mafia bosses for their tribes and sects.

They should have been smashed. That is true socialist democracy. Say what you want about Enver Hoxha’s Albania, but sectarianism was the least of Albania’s issues. He smashed all the feudal, tribal and bourgeois authorities completely. That’s why Albanian Muslims and Christians don’t kill each other today.

Ironically, the problem with Bashar was not that he was a brutal tyrant, but that HE WAS NOT BRUTAL AND AUTHORITARIAN ENOUGH.

Recently, @yanisvaroufakis  wrote that anti-imperialists shouldn’t defend ‘tyrants,’ because tyrants are not competent anti-imperialists. In the case of Syria this appears like a compelling argument.

But the problem with Syria wasn’t that it was a ‘tyranny.’ Plenty of ‘tyrannies’ (from the liberal perspective) are immensely popular. Look no further than China, North Korea and today’s Russia.

The problem is not tyranny but incompetence. Liberal ‘democracy’ means the destruction of all sovereign state infrastructure in non-Western countries. I mean, democracy itself is a pure myth even in the West - it’s just that only the West can afford this expensive and wasteful pageantry to dupe its own citizens.

Everyone else, in order to be sovereign, has to contend themselves with the necessity of first of all building functioning modern states. And there is no time or energy for the silly mythology of liberal democracy. What comes first is establishing central authority, modern infrastructure, national industrial policy, and modern defense.

True ‘democracy’ is not hamstringing the decisive tasks of a state authority by putting everything to a vote. Only states whose popularity and democratic legitimacy are insecure have to do that. True ‘democracy’ is governing on behalf of the will of the broad majority of ordinary and common people.

Sometimes that will has to be measured through elections, referendums and votes. But that is not the popular FOUNDATION of the state, that is just another mechanism of the modern state.

The true popular foundation of the modern state, well, even the ancient states of Babylonia, lies in people acquiring an economic stake in the system, and a common existence through war.

The ‘people’ only become a subject when individuals are dying and risking everything for it. What determines the popular will is not elections - but war and struggle.

What makes ‘the people’ an authority is not when a populations’ votes are tallied up, but when they become something on behalf of which armies can be raised, mobilized, and materially sustained (by populations, being fed and quartered, etc.).

The foundation of popular sovereignty is not electoralism, but the ability for a state to facilitate and realize the social contract: An extent to which the impersonal reality of state power recognizes and is recognized by people.

It is true that anyone can falsely claim that their actions are being done in the name of the people. But for it to be proven, ‘the people’ actually have to materially tip the scales to your advantage over your enemies in war.

A true authority rises to power on the basis of recognition by the popular national subject (the people) - rather than tribes, oligarchies and cliques. This recognition is not proven by elections - but by war, and by its ability to respond to their existence, and by the ability for that response to somehow itself be communicated to individuals.

The Bolsheviks and the Chinese Communists did not need elections to prove their popularity. The fact that nearly all the Russian peasantry went over to their side from the strategic standpoint of a civil war, proved it in actual material reality rather than institutionally.

Without the Arab street, the fellaheen and the popular masses, there would never have been Ba’athist states nor Nasserism. Somehow, this fact got lost on all the discourse surrounding the ‘Arab spring’ in 2011. The liberal view was taken for granted over the socialist view regarding democracy and popular legitimation.

Obviously in their later years, Arab nationalist regimes like Bashar’s were deeply unpopular and so were other nationalist leaders. But is that because they were tyrants, or because they were weak? Think about it.

Was Hosni Mubarak a strong man? What was so strong about him? Who was stronger, Nasser or Anwar Sadat? Now ask - who was more popular? Who was more popular, Bashar or his father?

Arab nationalist modernism wasn’t perfect but that doesn’t mean it accomplished nothing. And while the Six Day war is remembered as having discredited the project, people forget just how close the then matured regimes got to defeating Israel in 73.

I believe Syrians, like today's Iraqis, will miss the cruelty of the regime most of all. They will see it for the impersonal and blind justice that it was, trying its best to keep everyone in line for the sake of the country's independence and sovereignty.

Ba'athism/Nasserism wasn't perfect. But it built military modernization, central state authority, modern infrastructure, and sovereign command economies.

Syrians should know if Syria is going to survive, it will have to build off the foundations that have been thus far developed.

Turkey will never accept Arabs as their brothers. Turkey has its own modern national state tradition in Kemalism.

I am far from saying it is impossible to achieve greater justice for the Syrian people than what existed before. Syrians are going to realize just how ‘Syrian’ they were - rather than how Sunni, Shia, Christian, Alawite, and Kurdish - when they face the reality that Turkey has no intention of integrating them as equals.

I am saying that liberal illusions must be cast aside and that a new, strong and tough state authority will still need to be built - it is a fundamental part of the infrastructure of modern civilizations.

Many Shias in Iraq today miss Saddams rule. And that is not because they personally forgive Saddam, it's because they understand that dismantling and destroying the sovereign state infrastructure of the Iraqi state was a huge mistake.

And that their grievances with Saddam did not justify that. The same is true for Syria.
The region as a whole must rediscover a form of regime politics far stronger than Ba'athism and Arab nationalism.

It is evidently the case that the Arab nationalist form of modernism was a failure. Its exclusion of Kurds and other ethnic minorities made it impossible. Such exclusions reinforced the very tribal parochialisms that the nationalists wanted to overcome.

However, ‘liberal democracy,’ and Jihadi-liberalism is a nonstarter. These lead only to the destruction of nations and peoples.

A form of regime politics evidently stronger than Ba’athism is called the proletarian dictatorship, and it is what prevented many parts of Asia from looking like the middle east today.

Communism is not just some pipedream or ideal. In practice, it addressed precisely the problems faced by countries like Syria today. The East has its own Red, democratic tradition. There is no need to look toward the rotten colonial West for a model of governance.
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That is my sincere advice to the people of Syria as Chairman of the American Communist Party.

The U.S. government is simultaneously (A) justifying Israel’s land grab in Syria by saying the nation has been taken over by terrorists, and (B) talking about removing those same forces from its list of designated terrorist organizations.

The people running the U.S. podium have pivoted seamlessly from celebrating the liberation of the Syrian people in the removal of President Bashar al-Assad to citing the fact that the nation is now overrun with terrorist factions in defense of Israel’s rapid move to militarily occupy large swathes of Syrian land while hammering Syria with hundreds of airstrikes.

At a Monday press conference, State Department Spokesman Matthew Miller said these moves by Israel “are temporary to defend its borders” and that Assad’s ouster “potentially creates a vacuum that could have been filled by terrorist organizations that would threaten the state of Israel and would threaten civilians inside Israel.”
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“Every country has the right to take action against terrorist organizations,” Miller added.

During a Tuesday press conference Miller further clarified the U.S. position on Israel’s land grab, saying,

​During the same Tuesday press conference Miller also stated that “there is no legal barrier to us speaking to a designated terrorist group” such as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham or HTS, the group which led the run on Damascus whose leader has been an official in both ISIS and al-Qaeda.

And as it happens the U.S. government has now taken a sudden interest in removing HTS from its listing as a designated terrorist organization, with Politico reporting that there is now “a furious debate playing out in Washington” as to whether or not the group should be removed from the list immediately. Somehow I doubt the debate is actually all that “furious”.

So according to one narrative Syria has been liberated by brave freedom fighters and that’s wonderful, but according to another concurrent narrative Israel obviously needs to invade Syria because the nation has just been taken over by evil terrorists, and by yet another concurrent narrative those evil terrorists aren’t evil terrorists anymore because they’re going to be running a U.S. puppet regime.

These are the kinds of contradictions you run into when your policies are guided by the blind pursuit of planetary domination instead of by truth and morality.

In reality, “terrorist organization” is a political designation, not a behavioral one. It has a lot less to do with how an organization acts and operates and a lot more to do with whether or not they advance the strategic interests of the U.S. empire. 

Pick any group of non-state actors who fight against the U.S. and its allies and you’ll find them on the U.S. government’s list of terrorist organizations. Hamas. Hezbollah. They’ll even put official state militaries on there like Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. 

They used to list the East Turkistan Islamic Movement as a terrorist faction back when the U.S. was expanding its global military presence under the banner of the “war on terror,” but they were removed from this listing at the tail end of the Trump administration because the Uyghur Islamist group was fighting Assad in Syria and could prove useful in the empire’s Cold War aggressions against China.
Even now the U.S. House of Representatives is moving to ban the U.S. government from using the statistics of Gaza’s Health Ministry to calculate deaths from Israel’s genocidal atrocities in the enclave on the basis that the ministry is run by Hamas, a designated terrorist organization. They need to do this because the Gaza Health Ministry’s death toll is considered so reliable that the U.S. State Department has been using those stats in their own reports.

The group that is committing the genocide necessitating such analysis is of course not a designated terrorist organization.

This is because the label “terrorist organization” is nothing more than a tool of imperial narrative control. In empire language it just means “disobedient population who need bombs dropped on them.” If they are determined to no longer be disobedient then they no longer need bombs dropped on them, so they are no longer considered terrorists. 
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You can kill all the civilians you want using whatever methods you want without being considered a terrorist organization, so long as you are a friend of the U.S. empire.

This article is produced by Consortiumnews.

Kiev has maintained close ties with the former ISIS and Al-Qaeda militants currently in control of Syria since the start of the war with Russia in 2022

​The Ukrainian government provided fighters from the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) extremist armed group with “about 150 first-person-view drones” and at least 20 experienced drone operators in the lead-up to the flash offensive that ended with the fall of the Syrian Arab Republic.

According to sources who spoke with Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, Kiev “sought to undermine Russia and its Syrian allies” by arming the UN-designated terrorist organization.

The drones were delivered “four to five weeks ago,” Ignatius reports.

As early as September, Turkish media reported on the presence of Ukrainian specialists in Syria training the former ISIS and Al-Qaeda militias in control of Idlib on the use of drones.

“A delegation from Ukraine went to Idlib in recent months and met with the leaders of the terrorist organization,” Turkish newspaper Aydinlik reported on 9 September, adding that the operatives from Kiev requested the release of several Chechen, Georgian, and Albanian militants held in HTS prisons in exchange for dozens of drones.

“HTS accepted the conditions … and some radical figures were released from their prisons,” Kurdish sources told Aydinlik.

Days later, Sputnik reported that 250 Ukrainian military experts arrived in Idlib to train the extremists in the use and manufacture of drones.

“The Ukrainian military is training militants affiliated with the Turkistan Islamic Party under the command of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham for the use of drones and technologies to develop them with regard to the ability to increase flight speeds, photography, and targeting,” the report highlighted.

“There is information that Ukrainian envoys, those of Ukrainian intelligence, are in the Idlib de-escalation zone on the territory of Syria, where they are recruiting militants of Jabhat al-Nusra, now called Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), to involve them in new hideous operations planned,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in September.

Collaboration between the extremist armed groups currently in control of Syria and the Ukrainian military has been ongoing since 2022, when Russian media revealed that scores of HTS and ISIS militants were being sent to Ukraine to fight alongside Kiev’s forces against Russia. 

Bashar al-Assad has fled Syria to Moscow, where he has reportedly been granted asylum by Russia. The al-Qaeda affiliates who drove him out have declared victory for the “mujahideen” in Damascus. Both Biden and Netanyahu have publicly taken credit for assisting in the regime change, and of course Turkey’s Erdogan deserves a heavy share of credit as well.

And yet there’s still a bit of a taboo in mainstream western discourse around calling this a regime change operation backed by the US and its allies. We’re all meant to pretend this was a 100 percent organic uprising driven solely and exclusively by the people of Syria despite years and years of evidence to the contrary. We are meant to pretend this is the case even after we just watched the US power alliance crush Syria using proxy warfare, starvation sanctions, constant bombing operations, and a military occupation explicitly designed to cut Syria off from oil and wheat in order to prevent its reconstruction after the western-backed civil war.

People get mad if you say this, but it’s true. It’s just a fact that major world events do not occur independently of the actions of the major world powers who have a vested interest in their outcomes. If my saying this makes you feel uncomfortable, that discomfort is called cognitive dissonance. It’s what being wrong feels like.

Maybe it bothers you when people point out the involvement of the US power alliance in Syria, and maybe you would prefer to believe that a plucky band of heroic freedom fighters bravely overthrew an evil supervillain dictator all on their own like some Hollywood movie. But real life doesn’t move in accordance with your preferences. In real life, the globe-spanning empire that is centralized around the United States will reliably be deeply involved in such events.

​https://x.com/AliAbunimah/status/1865834854404726991

When I say this you may want to believe I am “denying the agency of Syrians,” and that “denying agency” is the worst sin a person can possibly commit. But nothing I’m saying actually contradicts the idea that Syrians have their own agency. Obviously there were many Syrians who wanted Assad gone, and obviously there were many people who had their own reasons for fighting him which had nothing to do with the US empire. There is no contradiction between this obvious fact and the well-documented reality that the US-centralized power structure has been balls deep in Syria from the very beginning of the violence in 2011, and that its involvement led to the events we are seeing today.

The claim isn’t that the US empire controlled the minds of Syrians and forced them to turn against their government with no agency of their own. The claim is that the empire put a big fat thumb on the scale to ensure that one group of Syrians got their way instead of a different group.

You can argue that western regime change interventionism will lead to positive results this time (so long as you’re prepared to ignore mountains of historical evidence consistently demonstrating the opposite), but what you cannot do on any rational basis is deny that western regime change interventionism occurred in Syria.

Western liberalism is funny in that its adherents lean heavily on their ability to psychologically compartmentalize away from the actions of the western empire, and indeed away from the very existence of that empire. The western liberal lives in an imaginary alternate universe where western powers pretty much mind their own business and western leaders passively watch violence and destruction unfold around the world whilst pleading for peace and diplomacy from their podiums. They pretend the empire does not exist, and that it is only by pure coincidence that conflicts, coups and uprisings keep occurring in ways which favor the strategic interests of Washington.

In reality it is impossible to understand what’s going on in the world unless you understand that the US is the hub of an undeclared empire which has been working tirelessly to bring the global population under a single power umbrella over which it presides. The few countries who have successfully resisted being absorbed into this imperial blob are the Official Bad Guys we westerners are all trained to hate: China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and a few socialist states in Latin America. I used to include Syria in this list, but that’s over now. Syria has been absorbed into the blob of the empire.

And tomorrow the imperial blob will move its crosshairs on to the next unabsorbed nation. That’s the underlying dynamic behind all the major conflicts on earth. This dynamic gets redacted from the mainstream western worldview with the assistance of the western propaganda services known as the mass media, as well as the western indoctrination system known as schooling. This dynamic is redacted from our worldview and hidden from our attention by the plutocrats and empire managers who work to manipulate our information systems, because otherwise we would realize that the US empire is the most tyrannical and abusive power structure on this planet today.

And it unquestionably is. No other power structure has spent the 21st century killing people by the millions in wars of aggression while circling the planet with hundreds of military bases and working continuously to crush any group which opposes its dictates anywhere on earth. Not China. Not Russia. Not Iran. Not Cuba. Not Bashar al-Assad. Only the US empire has been tyrannizing and abusing the world to this extent in modern times.

And now the imperial blob rolls on to absorb its next target, having grown one Syria-sized increment larger after spending years digesting that nation via proxy warfare, sanctions, relentless bombing campaigns from Israel, and a military occupation designed to steal its food and fuel.

Our world cannot know peace as long as we are ruled by an empire that is fueled by endless rivers of human blood. Here’s hoping the end of that empire comes sooner rather than later.

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​On November 8, Syrian opposition forces captured the capital, Damascus, marking the end of President Bashar al-Assad’s government. On the same day, Voice of America Chinese quickly declared that “China has lost an ally,” claiming that China’s Belt and Road investments in Syria would suffer losses amounting to tens of billions of dollars.

However, Chinese strategist Professor Wang Xiangsui argues that VOA’s assessment is entirely wrong. He believes the Syrian crisis is instead offer new opportunities for the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in the Middle East and could even accelerate the collapse of U.S. unipolar hegemony.

Firstly, Syria’s strategic value to the BRI is overhyped by the Western Media.

Syria is not located along the overland route of BRI. Additionally, Syria is not a major oil-producing country. According to British Petroleum’s statistics, Syria accounted for only 0.05% of global oil production as of 2016. China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs reported that bilateral trade between China and Syria amounted to just $358 million in 2023. In comparison, China’s total import-export trade volume in 2023 was $5.94 trillion, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. This means Syria’s role in China’s foreign trade is negligible, with a direct impact of only 0.006%. Clearly, VOA has grossly exaggerated the implications of Syria’s situation for China’s overseas interests.

Secondly, the upheaval in Syria could strengthen Iran-China cooperation.

In March 2021, China and Iran signed a 25-Year Comprehensive Cooperation Plan. However, progress in certain areas, particularly the oil and gas industries, has been slow due to disagreements over pricing and infrastructure development.  

Three years ago, Iran was reluctant to engage in full-scale confrontation with the U.S. or military conflict with Israel. But the civil war in Syria has fragmented Iran’s sphere of influence, cornering it in terms of core national interests.  

As direct conflict with the U.S. and Israel becomes increasingly inevitable, Iran’s need for collaboration with China will grow, creating greater urgency for substantive cooperation. This is advantageous for advancing the Belt and Road Initiative. Previously, one of the biggest challenges for the BRI was that China needed to explain to the Middle Eastern countries that the benefits of changing the status quo outweigh the risks, leaving it in a passive position during negotiations. Now, if the turmoil in Syria heightens the sense of urgency among international communities, they will be more inclined to cooperate with China, which would significantly benefit the BRI’s expansion.

Thirdly, Israel’s opportunism in Syria will deepen U.S. entanglement in the Middle East, hastening the decline of U.S. hegemony.

According to Al Jazeera, on December 8, Israeli forces occupied the Syrian-controlled area of the Golan Heights. This marks the first open entry of Israeli ground forces into Syrian territory since the Yom Kippur War. Such a military venture is bound to exacerbate tensions between Israel and the Arab world. In the next four years, this could trigger more conflicts, creating additional aid burdens for the U.S. as it supports Israel. Meanwhile, the White House will have no choice but to foot the bill, as the Trump administration has been dominated by pro-Israel officials. Future U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are staunch Israel supporters, and even Trump’s daughter is married into a Jewish family.  

From Rome to Britain, every empire’s decline begins with a mismatch between ambition and capability. Trump recognized that spreading resources thin in Ukraine and Israel would weaken the U.S. in its competition with China and sought to refocus through his “America First” policy. However, Israel’s opportunism in Syria will make it impossible for him to realise this vision, as Israel will always take precedence over the U.S. in the current administration.

Prof. Wang points out that there will be no second “American Century.” What follows will not be a “Chinese Century” either but rather a truly multipolar world. What we are witnessing in Syria is an ulcer in the U.S.-led world order. With Syria now fragmented among various factions, we are witnessing the collapse of the old order, which has yet to give rise to a new one. During this transitional phase, nations have significant opportunities. However, it is evident that multipolarity will emerge as the dominant global trend.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken repeated the US government’s new position that Ukraine needs to start sending 18 to 25 year-olds to fight in its war with Russia, telling Reuters on Monday that “getting younger people into the fight, we think, many of us think, is necessary.” This comes even as polls have begun showing that Ukrainians favor making a deal with Russia to end this war as quickly as possible.
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This is one of those things that looks more evil the longer you stare at it. They’re pushing for teenagers to be thrown into the fires of an unwinnable war like it’s nothing — like a corporation saying they need to hire more staff to accommodate their growing business. And why? To tie up Russia so that Syria can be turned into a smoking crater and allow the US war machine to focus its crosshairs on Iran and China, with the end goal of total planetary domination. All because some swamp monsters decided after the fall of the Soviet Union that the US must maintain unipolar global hegemony no matter the cost.

Ukraine barely even has anyone in the country from ages 18 to 25 for various reasons (many of which predate this war), but the managers of the US-centralized empire are pushing to scrape out the few they do have and toss them into the landmines and artillery fire just to keep this unwinnable war going for a few more months. Whether they succeed or not, the fact that they even tried is so profoundly psychopathic it’s actually hard to wrap your mind around.

You won’t see anyone in Tony Blinken’s family headed to the frontlines in Ukraine. These freaks see the population of this planet as nothing more than pawns on their grand chessboard, and they will sacrifice them just as casually.
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Watching the internet light up with joy over the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson has been interesting. We don’t know what the motives of the actual shooter were as of this writing, but the disgust and rage the public holds toward wealthy exploitative parasites these days is becoming more and more incendiary.

Watching all this I keep finding myself thinking of that JFK quote “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable.” What are the people meant to do when predatory megacorporations ruin lives by the thousands? Write them sternly worded letters? Vote the corporations out of office? Their options have been closed to them.
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You can’t be anti-racist and pro-Israel; they are mutually contradictory positions. Israel is an apartheid state, arguably the most racist society on this planet. If you support Israel you support racism, whether you admit this about yourself or not.
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Al-Qaeda in Syria keeps changing its name for the same reason the military contractor formerly known as Blackwater keeps changing its name: it’s a rebranding to rescue its damaged reputation, stifle public outcry, and ensure further funding from the US government.
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The “left” is divided on Syria only in the same way it’s divided on Ukraine and other conflicts: Marxists, dedicated peace activists and opponents of the western empire on one side; shitlibs, NATO simps and anarkiddies on the other. The high level of leftish unity we’ve been seeing between those two groups on Gaza this past year is the exception, not the norm.
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You see this split pop up on issue after issue, and it basically boils down to a divide between those who recognize the US-centralized empire as the world’s most murderous and tyrannical power structure vs those who swallow western propaganda spin to some extent.

​On November 30, Donald Trump nominated Kash Patel to serve as FBI director. A staunch MAGA activist and loyalist with significant standing in Trump’s orbit, Patel aligns closely with the president-elect on both domestic and foreign policy matters. Indeed, he appears to struggle to pinpoint areas of disagreement with Trump’s agenda.

Patel has consistently advocated for a hardline approach to China and is an unabashed supporter of Israeli interests, often prioritizing them over U.S. considerations. On October 7, marking the first anniversary of the Hamas attack, Patel delivered a fiery interview on Fox News. During the segment, he vowed that the incoming Trump administration would intensify its crackdown on anti-Israeli elements.

We should be side by side [with Israel]…When we are back in power with President Trump…we will shut off the machinery that feeds money into Iran…We need America to wake up and prioritize Israel, and that is not what Kamala Harris is about, we need to bring home Americans and end this war, bring home Israelis, and stand by our number one ally in Israel, and people need to wake up on November 5.”

A relative political outsider who has never occupied high office, the media has been awash with profiles of Patel and fevered speculation about what his management of the Bureau could mean in practice ever since. In the process, he has been subject to a level of mainstream scrutiny and criticism that was entirely lacking over recent weeks, as Trump filled his cabinet with a rogue’s gallery of dedicated hawks, hardcore pro-Israeli elements, and characters both unknown and notorious with potential extremist ties and views.

For some, the composition of Trump’s cabinet is a crushing disappointment. On November 9, Trump caused shockwaves when he announced neither Nikki Haley nor Mike Pompeo would be invited to join his administration in any capacity. The news, coupled with comments he made in a late October appearance on Joe Rogan’s popular podcast, perked optimism in some quarters that the President-elect’s longstanding anti-war posturing could produce real-world results in Ukraine, if not elsewhere.

In his discussion with Rogan, Trump professed that “the biggest mistake” of his first term was he “picked a few people that I shouldn’t have picked” – “neocons or bad people or disloyal people,” among them John Bolton. Haley was the U.S. ambassador to the UN under Trump and perhaps the most ardent, outspoken Zionist ever to fill the role. She, Bolton and Pompeo – who personally orchestrated Iranian General Qasem Soleimani’s assassination, among other hostile deeds – were widely regarded as the administration’s leading hawks.

Yet, any slight hope that the pair’s absence from Trump’s new White House might herald an influx of some doves and, in turn, a more peaceful shift from the U.S. government was comprehensively dashed when the President’s transition team nominations began rolling in. Now the cabinet is fully stocked, countless millions around the world have urgent and grave concerns about what the future could hold for them, their families, countries, regions, and more.

In particular, Trump’s prospective government can already claim the mantle of the most fervently pro-Israel in U.S. history. This is despite replacing an administration that has done more than any before to accelerate, encourage, and facilitate Israel’s war on Gaza. The prospect that Tel Aviv’s deadly assaults on Gaza and Lebanon will escalate somehow further is now not only very real but seemingly inevitable. However, as we shall see, there are minor rays of hope among the mass doom and gloom.

‘Promised Land’
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New Secretary of State Marco Rubio hardly needs any introduction as one of the most pro-war members of the modern U.S. political class. Since his career kicked off in 2000, he has been consistently among the loudest voices on how America’s officially designated enemy states should be dealt with, be that China, Iran, Venezuela, or otherwise. Threats of sanctions, coups, and military intervention are almost a daily staple of his political oratory.

​A close friend of Benjamin Netanyahu, in 2019, Rubio cosponsored a Senate resolution condemning UN Security Council resolutions designating Jewish settlement expansion in occupied Palestine as a violation of international law. He has referred to Israel’s mass murder in Gaza since October 7, 2023, as legitimate self-defense, claimed Hamas is “100% to blame” for any civilian casualties inflicted by the horrific onslaught, and ominously declared Palestinian resistance must be “eradicated,” as Tel Aviv cannot coexist “with these savages.”

The media has reported that the Trump administration is already concocting plans to “bankrupt Iran” with “maximum pressure” upon taking office. Rubio, who has long called for tightening already crippling sanctions on Tehran, is reportedly at the forefront of this effort, alongside nominated National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, a Pentagon journeyman who previously sat on the House Armed Services Committee. At an event convened by NATO adjunct the Atlantic Council, in October, Waltz bragged:

Just four years ago…[Iran’s] currency was tanking, they were truly on the back foot…we need to get back to that posture.”

Neutralizing Iran has long been touted as a prerequisite for reclaiming Israel’s waning dominance in West Asia. Any measure that destabilizes Tehran—economically, militarily, or politically—diminishes its capacity to curb Israel’s actions, leaving Tel Aviv emboldened to act without restraint. The logic is stark: weakening Iran strengthens Israel. Within the Trump administration, with its hawkish alignment, policies serving this end will likely be met with uncritical endorsement.

Already, Trump has pledged to lift the few remaining restrictions and end delays in the supply of military equipment and ammunition to Israel immediately after his inauguration. This includes an embargo on certain weapons shipments and limitations on various combat-related equipment. This embargo reportedly impacts Israel’s war-fighting capabilities, as its forces struggle with multiple self-initiated active battle fronts, requiring “strict control” over ammunition supply and use.

The pro-Israel credentials of Senator Marco Rubio and Representative Michael Waltz are unquestionable. Yet their fervor for supporting Israel’s controversial policies pales in comparison to some of President-elect Donald Trump’s other nominees. Take Mike Huckabee, the ultraconservative former Arkansas governor and twice-failed presidential candidate, now tapped to serve as U.S. ambassador to Israel. Huckabee, an ordained Southern Baptist pastor, wasted no time declaring his intentions. He vowed to publicly refer to Israel in biblical terms, calling it the “Promised Land,” and proclaimed that Jews hold a “rightful deed” to Palestinian territory.

‘American Crusade’

Despite its unwavering consensus on Israel, Trump’s cabinet has been labeled “eclectic” by the mainstream press—and not without cause. Alongside establishment stalwarts like Huckabee and Rubio, Trump has tapped figures long considered political outsiders. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a polarizing figure in his own right, has been nominated for a senior post. Pete Hegseth, a Fox News host and U.S. military veteran, has also emerged from the fringes to claim a role in Trump’s cabinet. Hegseth, who quietly advised Trump during his first term, pushed for the pardons of American soldiers convicted of heinous war crimes—a campaign that, in some cases, was effective.

Hegseth, a contender for Defense Secretary, has made his allegiances to Israel unmistakably clear. He has described Israel’s settler population as “God’s chosen people.” He has openly advocated for transforming Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa Mosque into a Jewish-only recreation of the historic Temple Mount, framing such an act as a “miracle.” At a 2018 National Council of Young Israel gala in New York City, Hegseth left no room for ambiguity:

 "Zionism and Americanism are the front lines of Western civilization and freedom in our world today.”

Such disturbing comments have elicited little media interest since Hegseth’s nomination. However, NPR has chronicled his unsettling array of tattoos, including a Jerusalem cross—a Christian emblem with origins in the Crusades—and the Latin phrase deus vult, often interpreted as a call to reclaim the Holy Land through the slaughter of Muslims. Both symbols have been co-opted by Neo-Nazi groups. Perhaps predictably, Hegseth’s 2020 book, “American Crusade,” brims with incendiary Islamophobic rhetoric.

Another wildcard nomination is Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence. Concurrently a politician and serving U.S. military officer, for years she occupied a dissident, dovish space on the Democrat left, all along smeared as an Assad or Putin apologist for her anti-war positions. However, she acrimoniously quit the party in October 2022, slamming it as “under the complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers who are driven by cowardly wokeness” and for purportedly “stoking anti-white racism.”
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Gabbard had, by that point, been distancing herself from previously held progressive stances on issues such as abortion and LGBTQ rights, and she has rapidly grown ever more conservative since formally joining the Republican party. Despite her longstanding criticism of U.S. military interventionism, Gabbard effusively supports Israel, opposing any limits on its assaults on Gaza and Lebanon. She has slandered protesters critical of Israel as “puppets” of a “radical Islamist organization,” accusing them of supporting Hamas.

​‘Maverick Appointment’

Despite her inflammatory rhetoric and overt support for Israel’s most belligerent policies, Gabbard’s nomination as Director of National Intelligence (DNI) could be a silver lining in Trump’s cabinet. The position wields immense power, coordinating the work of America’s sprawling intelligence apparatus across 18 agencies. Since the announcement, deep anxiety has rippled through intelligence circles on both sides of the Atlantic, with veterans voicing fears about the potential consequences of her leadership.

Trump spent much of his first term at war with the U.S. intelligence community. The President and his supporters quite legitimately accuse the CIA, FBI et al. of seeking to undermine and sabotage his first term in office. On November 24, The Economist forecast—based on interviews with U.S. and European intelligence officials—a “likely” mass exodus from American spying agencies, as many operatives are “fearful of falling foul” of Trump and Gabbard, under whom “spies are on notice.”

Gabbard’s disdain for America’s spy agency alphabet soup was writ large in her April book, “For Love of Country.” She blamed the CIA, FBI, “and a whole network of rogue intelligence and law enforcement agents working at the highest levels” of the U.S. government, in conjunction with “the Democratic National Committee, propaganda media, [and] Big Tech” for America’s most egregious ills. She declared this shadowy nexus “so dangerous that even our elected officials are afraid to cross them.”

Gabbard reserves some of her sharpest criticism for the intelligence community’s role in fueling the Ukraine proxy war, accusing it of laying the groundwork for conflict to benefit defense contractors. “How would their friends in the military-industrial complex make trillions of dollars from the fear they fomented in America and Europe by stoking the fires of the new Cold War?” she wrote. American spies, it seems, are taking her seriously. “We are all reeling,” a “current intelligence official who’s worked through multiple administrations” told TIME magazine following the announcement of her nomination.

​Per The Daily Telegraph, the intelligence community in London is likewise “alarmed” by Gabbard’s nomination. The doggedly pro-Ukraine outlet quoted a number of “British defence figures” which slammed the move in the harshest possible terms. Disgraced former MI6 chief Richard Dearlove attacked the “maverick appointment,” lambasting her lack of “experience of intelligence and security.” Elsewhere, former British Army tank commander Hamish de Bretton Gordon angsted that the “special relationship” between Britain and the US “could be impacted.”

The perspectives of Dearlove and de Bretton Gordon are striking, for both have long histories of exploiting the “special relationship” to further London’s ends and bounce the U.S. intelligence and military establishment into war. MI6 chief Dearlove was responsible for cooking up false intelligence that formed the basis of the formal British and U.S. case for invading Iraq. The subsequent Chilcot Inquiry was completely damning of his activities in this regard.

Its report noted that Dearlove personally informed Prime Minister Tony Blair that Baghdad could definitively strike Britain with chemical and biological weapons within 45 minutes, and this information had been provided to MI6 by an Iraqi with “phenomenal access” to the highest levels of Saddam Hussein’s government. That false claim was central to London’s justification for war and much repeated in the media at the time. In reality, British spies were furnished with the claim “indirectly” by a taxi driver.

‘Perfect Nominee’

More recently, Dearlove was a central figure in Russiagate and a prominent advocate for the credibility of former MI6 operative Christopher Steele and his ‘Trump-Russia’ dossier in the media, despite the document’s self-evident falsity and concerns about its veracity within British and U.S. intelligence circles. Russiagate was clearly intended to ensure relations between Washington and Moscow didn’t improve under Trump, and were it not for the belligerent stance resultantly taken by his administration, the Ukraine proxy war could well have been avoided.

Hamish de Bretton Gordon also played a personal role in pushing for a U.S. war in Syria. He was part of an MI6 operation that smuggled soil samples out of Syria, purportedly to prove the Syrian government’s responsibility for chemical weapons attacks. These samples were later revealed to be falsified. A senior Western source acknowledged in August 2013 that the true aim of British intelligence was to pressure Washington into direct boots-on-the-ground military intervention, ala Iraq.

While that catastrophic outcome was avoided, a supposed government chemical weapons attack in Douma in April 2018 succeeded in pushing Trump to launch missile strikes against Syria. Leaked documents and independent investigations have since revealed that this incident was staged by British intelligence operatives and their assets. Notably, Gabbard publicly criticized Trump’s response, questioning whether Douma was a staged ruse by the opposition to prolong the conflict at a time when the White House appeared ready to de-escalate.

With Gabbard in the role of DNI, the sway of intelligence agencies over political decisions and the readiness of figures like Rubio, Trump and Waltz to act on dubious intelligence could be blunted. While this may not provide immediate solace to the Palestinians, who remain under constant threat of death and displacement, it could signal a positive shift in the unchecked influence of British and U.S. intelligence on the White House.

These tentative grounds for optimism are somewhat reinforced by Patel’s nomination as FBI director.
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As a committed Israel-firster, he comfortably aligns with the rest of Trump’s prospective cabinet, and one might expect that mainstream news outlets eager to advance a pro-Israel agenda would embrace him as a result. Yet the media’s response has been anything but supportive. The New York Times warns that Patel would bring “bravado and baggage” to the role, while The Washington Post branded him a “dangerous and unqualified choice” to lead the Bureau.

The Atlantic, run by long-time pro-Israel activist Jeffrey Goldberg, has intensified this scrutiny of Patel, publishing multiple hit pieces in recent weeks. A November 30 op-ed warned that senior FBI officials “would likely resign rather than serve under Patel, which would probably suit Trump just fine.” The article concluded, “If Trump’s goal is to break the FBI and undermine its missions, Kash Patel is the perfect nominee.” This may well be one of the administration’s core objectives—on top of galvanizing Israel.

Patel has vowed that a future Trump administration would “come after” government officials, intelligence agency leaders, journalists, and other establishment figures he associates with what he describes as the “Russiagate hoax.” It’s hardly surprising that these same factions view his rise—and the broader ascent of a new administration—with trepidation.

Like Gabbard, Patel’s combative disdain for the U.S. deep state offers little solace. His stance does not mitigate, let alone counteract, his Pro-Israel leanings or the Trump administration’s aggressive resolve to ensure that Israel’s actions in Gaza, which human rights groups characterize as a genocide, proceed to their grim conclusion.
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Yet, one might argue that the left could find itself in a stronger position to oppose the ongoing atrocities in Gaza under a Republican administration that makes no pretense of sympathy for the Palestinians. Unlike Democratic governments, which weaponize progressive rhetoric to attempt to shame solidarity activists and progressive dissidents into supporting its doggedly pro-Israel actions, the Trump administration’s overtly pro-Israel stance strips away such falsifications. And the possibility that entrenched institutions like the CIA and FBI—longstanding adversaries of progress and justice in America—might finally face accountability for their actions could be a potential silver lining. Watch this space.