Western imperialists are attempting to systematically dismantle Burkina Faso through a multi-front war designed by imperialist intelligence services. The Western fairy tale — that a spontaneous wave of jihadism and “bad governance” explains the crisis — is cover fire for a real operation: proxy warfare synchronized with fifth-generation information ops to fracture national unity and pry open resource corridors.
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Terrorist insurgencies in the Sahel did not sprout from the soil; they were shaped, trained, and supplied through long-standing counterinsurgency doctrine repackaged as “counter-terror.” France, the U.S., and their junior partners embedded “security cooperation” infrastructure across the region while cultivating irregulars to function as forward agents of chaos. These units move strategically, not spiritually — always toward gold, phosphate, and transit nodes; always where sovereignty and socialist construction begin to take root.

Phase One is the feed. In the Sahel, disinformation is not an afterthought — it is Phase One. Fake accounts and bot swarms flood WhatsApp and Telegram with anti-Pan-African propaganda, recycled atrocity tales, and manufactured ethnic narratives timed to coincide with army reconsolidation. When the Burkina Faso Armed Forces stabilize an area, the feeds light up: “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing,” “dictatorship” — all unverified, all designed to split the people from the state and open a lane for armed proxies to re-enter.

The state names it plainly. Burkina Faso’s Information Ministry has repeatedly warned of “psychological warfare” targeting the population: deepfake images, falsified massacre reports, fabricated anti-government audio — often traced to IPs outside West Africa — deployed to demoralize, delegitimize, and divide.

The so-called Islamist factions — kitted with NATO-pattern rifles and trained in tactics mirror­ing U.S. SOF instruction in Niger and Mali — reappear precisely where foreign “counter-terror” teams previously scouted. As Kémi Séba of Urgences Panafricanistes has put it: every French or U.S. “anti-terror” intervention multiplies the very instability it claims to fight. The more they intervene, the more Burkina Faso burns.

What regional analysts and Pan-African media describe as “Afrancaux News” is now standard kit: user-generated propaganda pipelines that launder imperial talking points through sockpuppets, meme farms, and NGO-aligned “fact-checkers.” The content mix is deliberate: deepfakes, staged “massacre” clips, AI-composited anti-government videos, and even absurd celebrity-style fluff to personalize and distract, all calibrated to mask real territorial losses as mere incompetence or internal rot. The goal is constant: isolate anti-imperialist leadership, inflame suspicion along identity lines, and pre-justify external “stabilization.”

From feed to field. What’s lost in the info war isn’t just clarity — it’s ground. As disinformation splinters the popular base and blurs the chain of command, armed formations trained by foreign special forces step through the vacuum. This is not “terrorism” in any organic sense. It is counterinsurgency by other means — counterrevolution in insurgent dress.

The blueprint, spelled out by practice:

• Train irregulars in neighboring destabilized zones (Libya, Mali) and cycle them back across porous borders.
• Seed disinformation to fracture national unity and discredit self-defense efforts at the moment of reconsolidation.
• Fabricate ethnic violence and humanitarian crises to invite “international concern” and intervention.
• Weaponize NGO and “civil society” logos as operational cover for counterrevolutionary narratives and logistics.
• Let proxies hold strategic zones to exhaust the state economically, militarily, and politically — especially around mineral belts and corridors.

This isn’t chaos; it’s command. It’s not insurgency; it’s occupation — managed at arm’s length.
Every time Burkina Faso asserts autonomy — closing foreign bases, proposing state enterprises, coordinating with anti-imperialist partners — a wave of violence follows like clockwork. The enemy is not “tribal” or “spiritual”—it is geopolitical and class: monopoly finance capital and its state instruments, operating through mercenaries, bots, and hashtags.

And here's the punchline: you're likely helping imperialism. Every story that breaks about Traoré attacking the LGBTQ you react to, every culture war report that baits you into outrage at the liberation government of Burkina Faso is a concession to imperialism which is not only engineered to destabilize their sovereignty and national security, but to manufacture consent or disinterest in the freedoms Burkina Faso reclaimed in their war for independence from the U.S., France and the entire Western imperial bloc.

Author
Wade T. Paton is a U.S. Army veteran and former intelligence analyst who became a dedicated anti-imperialist upon leaving military service. A qualified paralegal specialist, he has applied his legal training in direct support of labor struggles, offering both legal assistance and strategic coordination to working-class campaigns. His activism spans multiple sectors, with a particular focus on organizing logistics and transportation workers, and he has contributed significantly to unionization efforts and the formation of worker-led cooperatives. As an entrepreneur, he's led multiple disaster relief efforts to the victims of Hurricane Katrina and most recently helped deliver critical aid to the areas of North Carolina hardest hit by Hurricane Helene.
Wade was elected to the Central Committee of the American Communist Party (ACP), where he helps shape national political strategy and contributes to the development of dual power initiatives. As both a cadre organizer and theoretician, he bridges practical struggle with revolutionary discipline, rooted in Marxist-Leninist principles. Prior to joining the ACP he was a minor contributing author to Midwestern Marx. He is a proud husband, a father of two, and an unwavering advocate for working-class internationalism.

Carlos L. Garrido, in an insightful commentary published in his Substack column “Philosophy in Crisis” on August 1, emphasizes the need to develop in theory and practice a US form of Marxism and socialism. The commentary is a transcript of a speech given at the Subversion Summer Camp in the Bridgeport community of Chicago. The Camp was criticized in a national segment on Fox News, which highlighted the presence of Garrido and the American Communist Party. Garrido is a professor of philosophy, the director of the Midwestern Marx Institute, and the Secretary of Education of the American Communist Party. The Midwestern Marx Institute is an American Marxist-Leninist thinktank founded in 2020, which has become the largest Marxist thinktank in the United States, with a following of over half a million and with hundreds of millions of views annually.

Philosopher that he is, Garrido defines commonly used terms and addresses the question of how we arrive to insight or correct understanding. He defines a leftist as someone who is committed to moving the arc of history forward to social justice. And he maintains that most leftists are not reared with a leftist orientation. Rather, they come to the Left through an event that ruptures their everyday assumptions and forces then to think, in order to make sense out of something that has happened, something that appeared to be impossible. Leftists, he maintains, do not evade the significance of the event, as most people do by forcing it back into the rationality of their established worldview. Leftists possess the courage to accept what has happened and to pursue with fidelity the significance of the event, until they arrive at the truth that the event reveals.
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Garrido reports that the event in his case was the unanimous recommendation by his Cuban-American extended family that his mother ought to go to Cuba for free surgery, inasmuch as the necessary medical procedure was available in the United States only at a prohibitively expensive price. This recommendation ruptured Garrido’s everyday reality, because these were the very same folks who always were maligning Cuba and socialism as catastrophic, and characterizing the Cuban government as authoritarian.

Garrido was only ten at the time, but the event planted a seed in his developing understanding, which the Bernie Sanders campaign nourished, inasmuch as Sanders explained that profits were central to the healthcare system of the United States, unlike other advanced countries that placed people over profits. When the Sanders campaign failed and revealed that it was not a true political revolution, Garrido ended his alignment with social democratic politics. But he continued with the will to fight for social justice that had been nourished by the Sanders campaign, driving him on a road toward communism.

Garrido here is speaking, of course, of true leftism, and not the toxic and superficial leftism that has emerged during the last decade or two. I would suspect that many of today’s superficial leftists have arrived at their current beliefs through everyday processes of socialization in academic and online environments that are infected by leftist ideological distortions and incivility.

I like Garrido’s emphasis on mind-blowing experiences. In my case, such an event occurred in 1966, when I was twenty years of age. It involved the careful reading of an assigned 100-page book on Vietnam, which explained the colonialist character of US military involvement in Vietnam, debunking the official narrative. This led me to a center for black nationalist studies, which had nothing in common with today’s anti-racist ideology, where I learned a colonial analysis of the world. I was well on my way in my quest for understanding social justice when I arrived in Cuba in 1993, and I discovered to my great surprise that there are elections in Cuba and that the Communist Party does not participate in them. Events in my personal experiences were prompting me to ask questions about the worldwide phenomenon of US and Western imperialism, the structures and functions of colonialism and neocolonialism, and the alternative political process of people’s democracy. Increased understanding emerges from addressing relevant questions that have been discovered in life’s experiences, especially mind-blowing events.

§

In the Subversion Summer Camp speech, Garrido presents the key ideas of his recent book, The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism, which describes the obsession of Western Marxists with the need for Marxist organizations that are “pure,” that is, that live up to an abstract ideal of socialism, an ideal that unfortunately is not based in observation of existing socialist projects in nations of the real world, which unavoidably are developing in the context of political and economic contradictions. The idealist obsession with purity leads to simplistic condemnation of States that are constructing socialism, which Garrido identifies as the first of three manifestations of the purity fetish. With unusual insight, Garrido further observed that the abstract ideal fetish is “rooted in an American exceptionalism, since it says that the whole global south has failed at socialism, but we, the virtuous Americans, are the ones that will succeed.”

I recently came across an example of the abstract ideal purity fetish in an article on the London-based website, In Defence of Marxism, which is the organ of the Revolutionary Communist International. I wrote about it in my commentary of June 13, 2025, “Western Marxism against Cuban socialism.”

Garrido rejects the negative attitude of many leftists toward working-class supporters of MAGA, which is the second manifestation of the purity fetish. He maintains that he was able to move beyond caricatures and develop a more accurate understanding of working-class supporters of MAGA, as a result of his having lived in Iowa and Southern Illinois for ten years. He arrived to understand “that some of these people have a righteous anger toward the system—the deep state, as they call it—and a general mistrust of all established institutions.”

Accordingly, the working-class sector of the MAGA movement should be seen as fertile ground for recruitment to socialism. Garrido maintains that the task of socialism is to show the working class that America can be made great again only through socialism. The task is to show that Trump’s rhetoric against endless war in distant lands, against the autonomous bureaucracy known as the deep state, and in support of the revitalization of American industry cannot be realized under Trump or in the system of two-party duopoly. Garrido argues that socialists must work to delink the MAGA working-class sector from Trump.

Although I am in agreement with Garrido’s positive evaluation of the working-class sector of the MAGA movement, I submit that he appears to underestimate the historical significance of Trump. In the Republican presidential primaries of 2016, Trump called the MAGA political movement into being, with a conversational style discourse that improvised on the headlines and that identified the key concerns of the working class and middle America, who already had developed a deep sense of estrangement from mainstream American institutions. Trump marshalled this negative energy, initially toward voting for and supporting one person, which evolved to a phenomenon that includes a MAGA brand of conservative thinktanks and a second Trump administration with a well-defined program that is obtaining the support of the other branches of government.

In said political context, a delinking of Trump from the MAGA movement is impossible to imagine, except for a situation in which the second Trump administration is widely perceived as a failure by its social base. On the other hand, if the MAGA movement is consolidated during the second Trump administration on the basis of a successful implementation of its economic and political project, it would be possible that Trump will retire from the scene while the MAGA movement continues to evolve with strength on the political landscape. In this scenario, the delinking of Trump from the MAGA movement would occur in a natural form.

With awareness of the ultimate delinking of Trump from the MAGA movement in one way or another, new questions emerge. Will the MAGA movement continue to maintain control of the Republican Party? Will the post-Trump Republican Party continue its evolution toward a Party opposed to the premises of the American political establishment from 1948 to 2024? Will it continue to be a Party strongly supported by the industrial working class, small towns, and rural America? If such questions are ultimately answered in the affirmative in practice, then this would imply that the two-party duopoly is being transformed by Trump into a genuine two-party system, with partisans of the people in one party, and lackeys of the corporate elite in the other. If this possibility were to become a reality, then socialists and all those committed to making social justice the arc of history would confront an option between a people’s Republican Party and an alternative political party, with the American Communist Party having much to recommend it.

Garrido’s speech makes a strong concluding statement in defense of a personal decision for the American Communist Party. He maintains that the Party collectively is able to develop an advanced form of American Marxism, necessary for understanding the form of class struggle in the nation; that the Party offers an organized collective of disciplined individuals, turning people away from shallow and hedonistic individualism; and that the Party provides a collective group of support with respect to local union and unionizing activities and service to the people in response to natural disasters and other types of community service.

Of course, the option need not be reduced to an either-or proposition. The Party could form an alliance with a people’s-controlled Republican Party, with clearly defined and politically intelligent strategies.

The need for socialism with a national form
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A third manifestation of the purity fetish, Garrido maintains, is “the attitude of condemning your country wholeheartedly because of its past evils.” He cites Georgi Dimitrov, the Hungarian anti-fascist leader of the Communist International, who called the phenomenon “national nihilism.” Dimotrov maintained that socialist content has to be given a national form, by appropriating the concepts and proposals that have been put forth by progressive leaders in national history, seeing them as the foundation for the building of socialism in the nation. He argued that it would be political folly for the socialist movement in the United States to turn against George Washington and the values of the revolution of 1776 or against Abraham Lincoln and the concept of government of, by, and for the people. The correct strategy involves putting forth the argument that socialism is the way to make real the dreams of the American experiment in democracy.

Garrido notes in this vein an irony, which I also have commented upon in previous commentaries. The US Left seeks to erase from the people’s consciousness the progressive elements of the American Revolution, by portraying the nation as having been founded on racist and patriarchal assumptions. On the other hand, the greatest revolutionaries of the Global South, including Ho Chi Minh and Fidel, were inspired by the American Revolution and appropriated its principal concepts.

​Consciousness of the need for socialism to take national forms, Garrido maintains, has especially emerged with importance in the neocolonized region of the world, which has confronted various forms of imperialism. The movements in said region emphasize, as they must, national liberation and the achievement of true sovereignty. Therefore, the struggle for the attainment of sovereignty is “one of the central forms of the class struggle in the age of imperialism,” a struggle, I would note, in which formally independent States are the principal actors.
Garrido mentions important examples of socialist projects taking national forms, including Cuba, Bolivia, China, and Venezuela. These socialist projects of the Global South and East are included in the scope of Garrido’s empirical investigations, functioning as the political practice that grounds his theoretical reflections with respect to the necessary characteristics of socialism in the USA.
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Garrido, therefore, wants to rewrite American history from a perspective that sees the progressive unfolding of the promise of democracy put forth by the American Revolution, culminating in socialism. His article mentions a number of progressive intellectuals and leaders integral to this project, many of whom are not presently included in our consciousness. Especially important are Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who expressed support for a democratic form of socialism in 1966 and 1967; and WEB DuBois, whom Garrido considers to be the father of American Marxism, inasmuch as DuBois viewed the struggle against racism to be the form that the class struggle took in the United States in the period following abolition and Reconstruction. A stage that was ended, I would add, by the great reforms in civil and political rights in 1964 and 1965.

The concept that socialism must take a national form in each nation, forged by the leaders and intellectuals of each nation, is consistent with common-sense and political intelligence. It sets aside dysfunctional abstract assertions that are not based on empirical observations, whether they be assertions for or against socialism. It calls upon those who have decided for socialism in a general sense to develop the form of socialism appropriate for their particular nation.

In identifying the progressive foundations of socialism in the United States, I would emphasize the African-American movement from 1917 to 1972 as well as the women’s movement from 1848 to the 1970s. The black movement stressed full political and civil rights for all and equality of opportunity in education and employment, regardless of race; and it called upon the State to take decisive measures in defense of these rights. The movement proclaimed these principles as the fulfillment of the founding principles of the American Republic; it thus constituted itself as a social movement within the ongoing and evolving American Revolution.

Similarly, the first two waves of the women’s movement emerged as a revolution within the American Revolution. The first wave was initiated with the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, which declared the self-evident inalienable rights of men and women, thus basing the movement on the Preamble of the Declaration of Independence. The second wave erupted during the social turmoil of the late 1960s and continued for two decades. Going beyond the legal equality demanded by the first wave, the second wave of the women’s movement envisioned broader social and political equality, including a rethinking of women’s roles in the home and in the workforce.

However, during the 1990s, in the context of the fall of American capitalism into decadence, and the historic failure of the various strains of the Left to attain maturity, both the black and women’s movements lost their way. Black intellectuals and “activists” began to construct non-empirical theoretical concepts like systemic racism and white privilege, which functioned to defend the interests of the black middle class as against the interests of the black proletariat and lumpenproletariat. I have written about this phenomenon in previous posts. See, for example, “Postmodern wokism destroys the foundations: Provoking confusion and division among the people, to the benefit of a few,” September 5. 2023; “The rise and eclipse of black power: The abandonment of the black community by the black middle class,” November 26, 2024; and “The ideology of anti-racism: The negation of black empowerment,” November 29, 2024.

A similar phenomenon occurred with respect to the women’s movement. A third wave emerged in the 1990s, which, among other characteristics, rejected the American Revolution, because of its patriarchal assumptions. It turned to French post-modern assumptions, which led, in the fourth wave that began about 2012, to a separation of “woman” from biology, such that “woman” is no longer a sex, but a gender, and as such, it is a cultural construction, which can be claimed by biological men on a basis of a subjective sense of identification. These notions stood against the philosophical conceptions of the American Revolution as well as various Western philosophical and religious currents of thought, which continued to have resonance among significant numbers of the American people. Thus, beginning in the 1990s, the women’s movement divorced itself from the previous political practice of a revolution within the American Revolution.

These recent tendencies in the principal progressive movements have divided the people and have served the interests of the corporate elite. Therefore, in developing American socialism with national characteristics, we must return to the sources of these progressive movements, appropriating their principles, and formulating a national narrative that discerns the progressive movement of the American Republic, initiated at its founding and progressively moving toward and culminating in socialism.

Author 
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Charles McKelvey ​is influenced by black nationalism, the Catholic philosopher Lonergan, Marx, Wallerstein, anti-imperialism, and the Cuban Revolution. Since his retirement from college teaching in 2011, he has devoted himself to reading and writing on world affairs.

Below is the speech I gave about my book, Why We Need American Communism, and the American Communist Party at the Subversion Summer Camp in Bridgeport, Chicago. The camp was the subject of criticism in a recent national segment on Fox News, where the presence of the party and me in the event was highlighted. 

America is not a hub for red diaper babies. Most people on the American left come to that position, they’re not thrown into it at birth. Coming to the left as Americans usually requires what philosophers call an “event,” an often-traumatizing rupture of our everydayness. We are navigating through our normal life and something happens that breaks the routine, that forces us to think. It is an experience that grips us, keeps us up at night, chipping at it to try to make sense of what it was.

The philosopher Alain Badiou says that it is in these events that truth hits us. What we are forced to tarry with isn’t just a chaotic and contingent predicament – it is the rupture of the symbolic order of everyday life. It shows us the impossible Real – the truth – which everydayness attempts to hide and obscure from sight. This reality always presents itself as impossible precisely because it cannot be made sense of within the coordinate system of our dominant understanding, even though it is the conditions for the possibility of it. It shatters even the basic categories through which we have come to know the world – the categories that condition our subjectivity, our desires, our fantasies, and even our aesthetic appreciation. It forces us to reckon with the fact that the world we live in is constituted through such impossibility – that it is that which presents itself as an external obstacle which – in reality – constitutes what it is an obstacle for.

Everyone has these events occur at various moments of their life. Most people try to evade their significance, to distort and force their meaning back into the very coordinate system it shattered. This is how most people cope with it. Their worldviews never actually recover; they remain as fractured as Simon Berger’s broken glass art.
Historically, leftists are the people who accept that something has happened, and who have fidelity to the process of figuring out exactly what has occurred.

This is a frightening process, considering that what is implied in it is a loss of self – of your old self, which understood itself in light of the pre-event predicament. It requires courage to pursue the significance of the event, to inquire into the truth it reveals. All of us know that such a quest will only lead to a rebirth of the self, a spiritual baptism.

For me, this occurred around the age of ten. My mother had just given birth to my sister. The birth caused tremendous difficulties – my dad was asked that question which no father would like to ever be asked: ‘if worst comes to worst, which one would you like us to save’? Thankfully, both survived.
But in the aftermath of this traumatic event, we discovered that my mother had been growing internal tumors. The doctors said she must be operated on to guarantee survival. The options seemed obvious. Get the operation and guarantee survival, or roll on with it.

I was perplexed to find out at this youthful age that the options were not as simple as I thought. Operating came with a cost, a great financial strain on the family, which would have surely led to crippling medical debts – like so many Americans today face.

While ten years old, I still found it odd that having a life-saving procedure in the wealthiest country on earth could immerse you in unpayable debt, as if one had committed some sort of heinous crime.
Little did I know that it would get much more confusing.

With such a predicament on the table, my parents did what most families would – consult their friends and family for advice. I remember listening to the conversations in our old home. Maybe twenty people were in the house. All of us Cuban.

This was when the real event occurred. When consulted for their advice, these friends and family said something I simply could not understand. It was outside of the cognitive map my young mind had.
The friends and family told my mother that she should go to Cuba, that the operation there would be free.
How could it be, I thought, that the same people who I’ve only ever heard malign Cuba, socialism, the Cuban government, while simultaneously accepting the most fervently American exceptionalist ideas and narratives, how could they sit there with a straight face and tell this hard working woman to leave the wealthiest country on earth – a country she’s a citizen in – to get an operation in a dirt poor island, an island they’ve only ever described as authoritarian and catastrophic?
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You can see, my friends, why such a predicament was world-shattering for me. All the assumptions I held about Cuba, the U.S., and the values aligned with both were now up in the air. I didn’t become the communist I am today right then and there, but the seed of doubt of the narratives I held as true and of the values I considered superior, was planted.

It was in 2015 when I began to find answers for this enigma. The campaign of Bernie Sanders was central for me. Here was this adorable old man explaining lucidly the role of profits in our healthcare system, and how different it was in other advanced countries. I came to understand that the experience I had at ten years old was rooted in the fact that we have a system that puts profit over people, and that Cuba, irrespective of its limitations, had one that puts people over profits. On this basis I was able to remap myself in the world. To develop new categories through which to engage in everyday life. And, most importantly, to develop a new sense of purpose – tied to a new system of values – that could give my life meaning.
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While the failure of the Sanders ‘political revolution’ brought to an end my alignment with the social democratic politics that politicized me, it left me with a bug to fight for social justice that I could not shake. This might sound silly, but I knew very early on that my life’s purpose was tied to sacrificing whatever necessary to fight for change.
I am sure that just like I have my story, all of you have many stories of what brought you here, of what traumatic break in your everydayness caused you to consider yourself as part of the left – as part of those committed to moving history forward, those whose agency is tied to ensuring that the arc of history, as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. used to say, continues to bend toward justice.

It is in this light, on the basis of this recognition of the fundamental unity we all have, as people who came to realize – at different points, in different ways, and for different reasons – that something fundamentally has to change in America, that I would like to propose some ideas from my recent book Why We Need American Marxism – where the title for this talk was taken from.
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I felt the need to write the book shortly after a trip to Mexico, where I gave a conference on my previous book, The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism. In this book I argued that the U.S. left had to overcome its incessant obsession with only supporting or working with those entities which they considered pure, that is, which they felt lived up to the ideal they had in their head. With this framework, I critically interrogated three forms I thought were most harmful for the American left.

First was the outright condemnation of what’s often called actually existing socialism. I felt that such a rejection was premised on these real states not living up to the ideal of what they thought socialism would be like in their heads. This was a completely faulty approach, since it starts with an abstract ideal and not reality itself. Instead, I argued that we must remember the difficult conditions socialism is forced to develop in – conditions of siege, as Michael Parenti would say. No socialist project has ever been allowed to develop peacefully, without hybrid war waged on it by US imperialism and its proxies. Whatever imperfections and contradictions these states might have, they must be understood in this context.

They must also be understood, not as reified entities, existing the same across time, but dialectically, that is, in a constant process of contradiction-ridden development. As Samir Amin used to say, we could not blame a state like China for not looking like the socialism of the year 3000 – when the Jonas Brothers tell us we’ll be living under water (that was a millennial joke).

In any case, this was a position I considered to be rooted in an American exceptionalism, since it says that the whole global south has failed at socialism, but we, the virtuous Americans, are the ones that will succeed.
The second form of the purity fetish I explored in the book was rooted in the attitude many leftists took to the working-class part of MAGA.

While hardly ever saying it explicitly, many accepted the Clinton categorization of them as a basket of deplorables. I was one of them before I moved to Iowa, and then Southern Illinois, for ten years to work on my bachelors, masters, and doctoral degrees. But in the MAGA heartland I very soon realized that the conception I had of them was a caricature – that some of these people have a righteous anger toward the system – the deep state, as they call it – and a general mistrust of all established institutions. It is on that basis that dissidence starts, and such a pool of workers were primed for organizing toward socialism. The task was, in my view, one of delinking them from Trump, and showing them that America could only ever be great if it is socialist - that the stuff they like in Trump (the rhetoric of being anti-war, pro-reindustrialization, anti-deep state, etc.) will never be realized under Trump nor the two-party duopoly.
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The left’s condemnation of them, I felt, was rooted in a caricature of who they are crafted by the hegemonic liberal media. But nonetheless, even if they were as problematic as the media said they were, the task of communists and socialists had always been to organize people – not on the basis of their ideas – but on the basis of their objective class positions. Condemning a large chunk of the working class because they don’t share the more liberal and cosmopolitan social values that many leftists have was – in my view – archetypical of the purity fetish. They were not deemed pure enough and hence considered not organizable. This was not a mentality, I felt, that was in line with the history of how dissidents from the capitalist system organized. And to be clear, when I say MAGA here I am speaking of our working-class neighbors and coworkers, not the deep state monsters at the head of the movement, who have fooled our brothers and sisters into thinking they’re actual political outsiders.

The last form of the purity fetish I felt was harming the American left was rooted in what Georgi Dimitrov, the great Hungarian anti-fascist leader of the Communist International called national nihilism – the attitude of condemning your country wholeheartedly because of its past evils and imperfections. Dimitrov argued that socialism was a content that needed to be given a national form. This was a position which was standard for the 20th century communist movement. It was rooted in the recognition that socialists around the world needed to position themselves as those who will actualize the most progressive elements of the national traditions their country’s people identify with. He urged Americans to not give up figures like Washington and Lincoln to the right – to utilize them for the purposes of the left, showing our countrymen and women that the values of the 1776 revolution, that the conception of government of, by, and for the people, cannot be fully actualized under the capitalist dictatorships in which we exist – that only socialism could make real the democratic dreams of the American experiment.

This perspective felt so foreign to how most of the American left conceived of the U.S. Many of the leftists I saw would write America with three K’s, burn the flag, or describe socialism as the process of destroying America itself.
I considered this to be not only factually incorrect – since for me America had a rich history of struggle not reducible to genocide, slavery, and imperialism, but also politically futile – how are you going to organize the American people on the basis of telling them you want to abolish all of the traditions they have been socialized in? To destroy all of the symbols and values they have grown up with?
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To my surprise, this last form of the purity fetish was the one that perplexed the audience in Mexico the most. I remember some Cuban comrades coming up to me and asking how could leftists reject American revolutionary heroes from 1776 onwards when people from across the global south, from Ho Chi Minh, Mao, Lenin, and Fidel and Che themselves, were tremendously inspired by the revolution against Britain, and then the revolution against the planter class in the U.S. south? They told me – and this was something I was already aware of – that even in his defense after the assault on the Moncada barracks, his famous ‘History will absolve me’ speech, that Fidel was citing the right to revolution in the American declaration of independence.

And thus, after such engagements, I decided to write a book which teased out a bit further the third form of the purity fetish, and which charted a course for overcoming it.

Marx and Engels had already written in the Manifesto of the Communist Party that although not in substance, but in form, the working-class struggle against capitalists is national. This quote has been completely misread by the national nihilist left. They treat form and content in the traditional philosophical medium, where the goal is to pierce through the form (a distortion of sorts) to arrive at what is truly important – the content. But this whole understanding of form and content is critiqued by both Hegel and Marxism. For these traditions of dialectical thought, form is not simply a distortion of the content, it is the particular manner through which the content manifests itself. The goal is not to pierce through the form to get to the content, but to understand – as Marx says of the commodity – the secret of the form itself – that is, why did the content need this form?

So, when Marx and Engels talk about the struggle being national in form – this doesn’t mean, as most leftists today interpret it, that it is only superficially national, or that it is in reality not national and something else – something deeper. Instead, for Marx and Engels, as well as for the traditional communist movement of the 20th century, socialism needed to take on a national form primarily because it was the social context – that of modern nation states – in which the class struggle was situated. This becomes even more the case when imperialism develops, and wars of national liberation – aiming to achieve sovereignty – are shown as one of the central forms of the class struggle in the age of imperialism.

To understand that every socialist country has had to give the content of socialism a particular national form (as a concrete universal), and then to say that we cannot do this because America is uniquely evil – is to participate in the utmost form of American exceptionalism – it is like saying that ‘everyone can root their socialism in their national context but we, the uniquely evil Americans, will not – we will have the pure content of socialism devoid of a national form.’

But to remember this important lesson about socialism taking a national form is not enough. After all, the book is titled Why We Need American Marxism – not why we need American socialism. I pose the following question at the beginning of the text – if socialism must take on a national form, then, does Marxist analysis need to also take on a national form, that is, do we need something like ‘American Marxism,’ which understands the specific and particular form and history of the class struggle in our country through the Marxist framework? The answer I provide in this book is yes!

Basing myself on the research I’ve done into Chinese, Latin American, and other socialist experiments, what I found was that conjoined with a unique path and development of socialism, was also a unique framework of Marxism that could account for those particular differences in histories and traditions, all which shape and are also shaped by the class struggle.

In Cuba, Marxism was integrated as the most advanced stage of their leading revolutionary thinkers – Martí especially.

In Bolivia, Marxism is combined with the unique conditions of indigenous communities, and with the historical insights which have arisen from such communal realities.

In China they have developed, from very early on, a Sinified Marxism which includes not only the explicitly Marxist thinkers in China’s history, but also progressive thinkers from its pre-Marxist past, and also – and here is the most controversial one – the most progressive aspects of thinkers which have been central to its civilizational reality, like Confucius.

In Venezuela, the same is true with the figure of Bolivar and others. The rational kernels of these world-historic individuals are captured and integrated into the framework of the National form their Marxism takes.
In the U.S., therefore, how would this look? While I don’t seek to get into the nitty gritty here, I think it is clear that American Marxism needs to integrate into its understanding of the specificity of class struggles in the U.S. not just the Marxists of the past, but also all of the traditions that have stood on the side of progress in American history, starting perhaps even before 1776 and going up to our current day.

We can start, for instance, with the many first nations tribes (e.g., Iroquois) which were existing under conditions of what is called primary communism. The American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan (very influential for Marx and Engels) would describe their form of life as “communism in living.” Their influence would go well beyond just first nations. As the historian Mitchell K. Jones has argued, “by the 18th century, their primary communist system inspired settlers from Europe who came to the New World seeking refuge from religious persecution.”

Or we can perhaps turn to thinkers like Roger Williams, the mid-17th century theologian who rejected African slavery and the genocide of the indigenous on the basis of his Christianity, which he felt compelled us to accept all as equal and dignified under god’s eyes.

It also forces us to tarry with 1776 as a progressive event in world history, a revolution against the British empire – the first anti colonial revolution in the hemisphere, as Herbert Aptheker put it. This revolution was described by none other than Lenin in the following form, as, I quote:

“One of those great, really liberating, really revolutionary wars of which there have been so few compared to the vast number of wars of conquest… That was the war the American people waged against the British robbers who oppressed America and held her in colonial slavery.”
​
The Declaration of Independence was such a radical document for its time that teachers all across Europe could be barred from their post for teaching it. This was a country borne out of a call of people to have not only a right – but the duty – to overthrow oppressive conditions. It is not lost on history the great paradox of the country which was founded on the right to revolution turning into the empire that prevented and squashed others trying to exert such a right for themselves.

But, nonetheless, the spirit of the democratic creed of 1776 provides fertile ground for development into a socialist sentiment. Jefferson himself distinguished between the democratic and aristocratic man. The democratic man is for the people; he is the man of the revolution. The aristocratic man is the man who prioritizes profit, wealth, and privilege – such a man, Jefferson argued, could be fatal to the implementation of the ideals of the revolution if they came to power. Historical hindsight has shown he was correct.

Many of these figures, perhaps excluding Paine, are not free of contradictions. The opposite is true – they could say the most liberating words, push forth the most emancipatory ideals, while in practice being oppressors themselves – as, of course, was the case with Jefferson, Washington, and others. But the ideals they develop – or better yet, how the form they developed it in reached people, cannot be lost sight of.
​
Very few people know this, but an attempt to develop scientific socialism (basically what we would later call Marxism) was already underway in the mid-1820s in America! Two decades before any prominent writings from Marx and Engels! In figures like Langdon Byllesby, Cornelius Blatchley, William Maclure, Thomas Skidmore and others, the utopian experiments in communism that arose all across the U.S. were studied and critiqued. All of these thinkers held that a socialist society – which they conceived of as the society that expanded the democratic creed of 1776 to the sphere of economics and social life – could only arise by going through capitalism, not by trying to step out of it – as the utopian communities hoped. Through their scientific studies of the political economy of capitalism, these thinkers held that on the basis of the very contradictions of the system itself, a new communist society was possible.

While, of course, none of them outline this with the clarity and refinement of Marx decades after – how absurd is it that Americans were developing scientific socialism before Marx and none of us know who they are? There are perhaps 2-3 people, besides myself, whom I know have written about these individuals. Isn’t this a sad state of affairs?

How absurd is it that today we hear socialism being spoken of as uniquely anti-American (both by the right and by the national nihilist on the left), when we have such an advanced – but yet ignored and forgotten- homegrown tradition of socialism?

Even the two main philosophical currents that arise out of America – transcendentalism and pragmatism, have been leftist in orientation, and thoroughly critical of capitalism.

The Harvard scholar F. O. Matthiessen, describes the founder of transcendentalism, Ralph Waldo Emerson, “as an ancestor of American Communism.” It is also well known that other transcendentalists like Henry David Thoreau frequently wrote for the New York Daily Tribune, the same leftist paper Marx and Engels were publishing articles at the time. The leftist historian Staughton Lynd, in his Origins of American Radicalism book, takes a few pages to cite Marx and Thoreau, and forces the reader to guess who is who. The critiques of capitalist alienation in each are virtually impossible to tell apart when put together in such a manner.

American pragmatism, on the other hand, has always stood on the side of socialism, a homegrown American variety of it. Charles Sanders Peirce developed a logic that was intimately social, critical of capitalist individualism (which he called the gospel of greed), and promotive of agapism (a communal Christian love), upon which he felt society and the quest for truth should be based.
​
The other two major pragmatists were also on the left. William James identified with socialist anarchism and John Dewey considered himself a democratic socialist – one more radical than most who call themselves that today considering he actively participated in movements to create a third party outside of what he saw as the two capitalist parties – a third party that united the working class, socialist, and radical liberal sectors of the American political horizon. In this way, John Dewey, who is literally called Americas philosopher of democracy, is far, far to the left of someone like Bernie Sanders, which is considered the utmost left point in the acceptable American political spectrum today.

Few people’s thought has shaped contemporary America more than Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the head of the civil rights political revolution of the 1960s. Dr. King, as is well known now, was a socialist! For him the question of racism, war, and poverty were intertwined, and rooted in the capitalist system itself.
​
I can go on and on showing how some of the most prominent and influential thinkers in America’s past have been socialists or general critics of capitalism.

In general, I would like to make the bold claim that all Americans are already socialists, they just do not know it yet.
​
You can’t tell me that someone believes in government of, by, and for the people, and that they don’t believe in socialism. At its most basic level – this is precisely what socialism is. It is, as Fred Hampton used to say, the people. If you are afraid of socialism, you are afraid of yourself.

In this way, much of the lingering anti-communism our compatriots have is nothing more than an unrecognized form of self-estrangement. They have been convinced to hate that which they already agree with, just because they do not know that they agree with it yet!

There was a dream Trotsky wrote about in his memoirs where Lenin visited him, well after Lenin had already died, and in the dream the conversation gets to a point where Trotsky almost blurts out ‘and that was shortly after you had died.’ He omitted it out of fear that Lenin was alive in his dream only because he didn’t know he was already dead. Likewise, most Americans are anti-communist only because they don’t know that they’re already communists.

To propose the development of an American Marxism, then, is to uphold the historical recapturing of the progressive elements of our past – it is to give voice to the unique form the class struggle has taken in our country’s history, and how that struggle has been thought of by the most progressive minds of their time. It is to give historical legs to those of us fighting for a new world today. Our fight is for the future, but it is also for the past. It is a struggle which prevents previous struggles from having died in vain.

The most important thinker to have given expression – in Marxist terms – to the unique form of the class struggle in the U.S. was WEB Dubois – which is why I call him the father of American Marxism. He was the first to see that, for most of U.S. history, the struggle against the color line – against the racism which Marx called the secret through which the capitalist class sustains its power – that this struggle was not just a race struggle, it was the form the class struggle took. And no event in this struggle is more significant than the civil war, which he saw as the second American revolution, an event he equated in significance to the Russian and Chinese revolution. Here, he argued, 4 million enslaved proletarians – he also calls them the black proletariat – freed themselves from the chains of chattel slavery through a general strike that won the war. By fleeing from the south to the north, the black proletariat effectively waged a ‘strike’ against the southern economy, which produced a dual blow when they joined the north as workers, spies, and soldiers who knew the terrain better than anyone else.
​

Out of this struggle arose the period of reconstruction, which Dubois categorizes as a dictatorship of the working class. Here the freedman’s bureau would govern in defeated southern states, backed by the military might of the north. This was an experiment, then, in modern socialism which is neither talked about in such terms, nor celebrated anywhere near as much as the Paris commune, which occurred years after, and which lasted a tenth of the time as reconstruction. It was a socialism not inspired from abroad, but immanently arising from within the soil of the country’s foundation. As Dubois said, there are no truer believers in the spirit of 1776 than the black proletariat that freed itself in the civil war, and which led a dictatorship of the working class for a decade in the U.S. south before the counterrevolution of property in 1876. With such a Duboisian, American Marxist understanding in mind, isn’t it silly to talk about how essentially “anti-socialist” America is?

At a time when less than 20 percent of Americans think their representatives actually represent them, and when less than a dozen percent of Americans trust the mainstream media – that is, the dominant ideological apparatus of the ruling capitalist class, we find ourselves in the midst of a comprehensive crisis of legitimacy. Neoliberalism has hit American workers hard, forcing most people to live paycheck to paycheck, to be drowned in unpayable debts, and live in utter desperation. We are the first generation of Americans to not be guaranteed a better living standard than our parents. For most of us fighting today is not even an option, it is a necessity.
​
As a Marxist, I think that half of the fun of trying to understand the world is ruined if we don’t try to change it. Developing an advanced American Marxism, in my view, is essential. We need to know how the class struggle has brought us here, and how we can utilize the progressive elements embedded in our people’s common sense to move them to socialism. But this requires a lot more than writing a book or theoretically trying to make sense of something.

It requires getting your hands dirty with actual work. It requires building an organized collective of disciplined individuals who can put the struggle, the principle we all operate under, above petty self-interest. It requires turning people from the shallow and hedonistic individualism our society promotes to tried-and-true communists. You don’t do this through debates. You don’t do this through nice words and sophistic discourse. You win people through actions, through consistent deeds.

Americans will only come to recognize socialism as a real alternative when they see the communists are the most upstanding people in their workplace and community. We need to try our best to be the men and women of the future society we are striving for. To lead by example in work. To win the trust and sympathy of our people by serving them. After all, once again, socialism is nothing if not putting working people, the masses, as the highest principle.
​
This is what my party, the American Communist Party, fights for. All around the country the cadre of the ACP are doing works of community service to integrate themselves into pre-existing American communities, to show them what communists are actually like, and debunk the myths our people have been spoon fed since birth about communism.

All around the country our cadre are organizing workers, helping workers unionize, and joining in on picket lines with them. In New Jersey we have spearheaded the effort of organizing the drayage truckers – these are thousands of essential workers, workers who can shut down a whole regional economy, being organized into the Teamsters by the American Communist Party. This is work we are doing in virtually every state, helping unorganized workers combine and win a voice for themselves. Work of this kind is going on in many other industries around the country, where our party’s cadre is helping to lead unionization efforts.

After every natural disaster, when the local and federal government fail communities, our party has been there – with what little resources we have – to help our people. The work we have done in central Texas after the floods has impacted the lives of many Americans who were left behind by a government that is always ready to spend money for war, but never for American communities.

It is high time that we put whatever secondary or tertiary differences aside for a second and focus on the fact that our people keep getting squeezed to their last pennies by a class that continues to grow richer and richer… a class whose puppets are sending us to war around the world to die or lose limbs fighting against people whom he have more in common with than the parasites who sent us there. To paraphrase MLK, every bomb thrown on Gaza lands in Chicago. The empire feeds off the republic, as Parenti used to say.
​
You can either sit on the sidelines and let things get worse, all because you won’t join a fighting organization over mean tweets one or another member posted before the party’s founding, or you can join us, judge us through our work, and be a part of fighting for the construction of a new, socialist America.
I hope you choose the latter. Thank you.

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

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

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

Illegal Immigration and Corporate Slavery

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

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

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

Wage Slavery and Labor Dumping

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

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

The Political Complicity

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

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

What Needs to Change

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 Endnotes

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

Photo: USDA (CC by 2.0)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Republished from Rainer’s Newsletter

This article is based on America’s Protectionist Takeoff, 1815-1914: The Neglected American School of Political Economy (ISLET, 2010), my review of the political dynamics and economic theory that guided America’s rise to industrial power.

Donald Trump’s tariff policy has thrown markets into turmoil among his allies and enemies alike. This anarchy reflects the fact that his major aim was not really tariff policy, but simply to cut income taxes on the wealthy, by replacing them with tariffs as the main source of government revenue. Extracting economic concessions from other countries is part of his justification for this tax shift as offering a nationalistic benefit for the United States.

His cover story, and perhaps even his belief, is that tariffs by themselves can revive American industry. But he has no plans to deal with the problems that caused America’s deindustrialization in the first place. There is no recognition of what made the original U.S. industrial program and that of most other nations so successful. That program was based on public infrastructure, rising private industrial investment and wages protected by tariffs, and strong government regulation. Trump’s slash and burn policy is the reverse – to downsize government, weaken public regulation and sell off public infrastructure to help pay for his income tax cuts on his Donor Class.

This is just the neoliberal program under another guise. Trump misrepresents it as supportive of industry, not its antithesis. His move is not an industrial plan at all, but a power play to extract economic concessions from other countries while slashing income taxes on the wealthy. The immediate result will be widespread layoffs, business closures and consumer price inflation.

Introduction

America’s remarkable industrial takeoff from the end of the Civil War through the outbreak of World War I has always embarrassed free-market economists. The United States’ success followed precisely the opposite policies from those that today’s economic orthodoxy advocates. The contrast is not only that between protectionist tariffs and free trade. The United States created a mixed public/private economy in which public infrastructure investment was developed as a “fourth factor of production,” not to be run as a profit-making business but to provide basic services at minimal prices so as to subsidize the private sector’s cost of living and doing business.
The logic underlying these policies was formulated already in the 1820s in Henry Clay’s American System of protective tariffs, internal improvements (public investment in transportation and other basic infrastructure), and national banking aimed at financing industrial development. An American School of Political Economy emerged to guide the nation’s industrialization based on the Economy of High Wages doctrine to promote labor productivity by raising living standards and public subsidy and support programs.

These are not the policies that today’s Republicans and Democrats advise. If Reaganomics, Thatcherism and Chicago’s free-market boys had guided American economic policy in the late nineteenth century, the United States would not have achieved its industrial dominance. So it hardly is surprising that the protectionist and public investment logic that guided American industrialization has been airbrushed out of U.S. history. It plays no role in Donald Trump’s false narrative to promote his abolition of progressive income taxes, downsizing of government and privatization sell-off of its assets.
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What Trump singles out to admire in America’s nineteenth-century industrial policy is the absence of a progressive income tax and the funding of government primarily by tariff revenue. This has given him the idea of replacing progressive income taxation falling on his own Donor Class – the One Percent that paid no income tax prior to its enactment in 1913 – with tariffs designed to fall only on consumers (that is, labor). A new Gilded Age indeed!

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Federal_taxes_by_type.pdf

In admiring the absence of progressive income taxation in the era of his hero, William McKinley (elected president in 1896 and 1900), Trump is admiring the economic excess and inequality of the Gilded Age. That inequality was widely criticized as a distortion of economic efficiency and social progress. To counteract the corrosive and conspicuous wealth-seeking that caused the distortion, Congress passed the Sherman Anti-Trust Law in 1890, Teddy Roosevelt followed with his trust busting, and a remarkably progressive income tax was passed that fell almost entirely on rentier financial and real estate income and monopoly rents.

Trump thus is promoting a simplistic and outright false narrative of what made America’s nineteenth century policy of industrialization so successful. For him, what is great is the “gilded” part of the Gilded Age, not its state-led industrial and social-democratic takeoff. His panacea is for tariffs to replace income taxes, along with privatizing what remains of the government’s functions. That would give a new set of robber barons free reign to further enrich themselves by shrinking the government’s taxation and regulation of them, while reducing the budget deficit by selling off the remaining public domain, from national park lands to the post office and research labs.

The key policies that led to America’s successful industrial takeoff

Tariffs by themselves were not enough to create America’s industrial takeoff, nor that of Germany and other nations seeking to replace and overtake Britain’s industrial and financial monopoly. The key was to use the tariff revenues to subsidize public investment, combined with regulatory power and above all tax policy, to restructure the economy on many fronts and shape the way in which labor and capital were organized.

The main aim was to raise labor productivity. That required an increasingly skilled labor force, which required rising living standards, education, healthy working conditions, consumer protection and safe food regulation. The Economy of High Wages doctrine recognized that well educated, healthy and well fed labor could undersell “pauper labor.”

The problem was that employers always have sought to increase their profits by fighting against labor’s demand for higher wages. America’s industrial takeoff solved this problem by recognizing that labor’s living standards are a result not only of wage levels but of the cost of living. To the extent that public investment financed by tariff revenues could pay the cost of supplying basic needs, living standards and labor productivity could rise without industrialists suffering a fall in profit.

The main basic needs were free education, public health support and kindred social services. Public infrastructure investment in transportation (canals and railroads), communications and other basic services that were natural monopolies was also undertaken to prevent them from being turned into private fiefdoms seeking monopoly rents at the expense of the economy at large. Simon Patten, America’s first professor of economics at its first business school (the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania), called public investment in infrastructure a “fourth factor of production.” 1 Unlike private-sector capital, its aim was not to make a profit, much less maximize its prices to what the market would bear. The aim was to provide public services either at cost or at a subsidized rate or even freely.

In contrast to European tradition, the United States left many basic utilities in private hands, but regulated them to prevent monopoly rents from being extracted. Business leaders supported this mixed public/private economy, seeing that it was subsidizing a low-cost economy and thus increasing its (and their) competitive advantage in the international economy.

The most important public utility, but also the most difficult to introduce, was the monetary and financial system needed to provide enough credit to finance the nation’s industrial growth. Creating private and/or public paper credit required replacing the narrow reliance on gold bullion for money. Bullion long remained the basis for paying customs duties to the Treasury, which drained it from the economy at large, limiting its availability for financing industry. Industrialists advocated moving away from over-reliance on bullion by the creation of a national banking system to provide a growing superstructure of paper credit to finance industrial growth.2 Classical political economy saw tax policy as the most important lever steering the allocation of resources and credit towards industry. Its main policy aim was to minimize economic rent (the excess of market prices over intrinsic cost value) by freeing markets from rentier income in the form of land rent, monopoly rent, and interest and financial fees. From Adam Smith through David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, to Marx and other socialists, classical value theory defined such economic rent as unearned income, extracted without contributing to production and hence an unnecessary levy on the economy’s cost and price structure.

Taxes on industrial profits and labor’s wages added to the cost of production and thus were to be avoided, while land rent, monopoly rent and financial gains should be taxed away, or land, monopolies and credit could simply be nationalized into the public domain to lower access costs for real estate and monopoly services and reduce financial charges.

These policies based on the classical distinction between intrinsic cost-value and market price are what made industrial capitalism so revolutionary. Freeing economies from rentier income by the taxation of economic rent aimed at minimizing the cost of living and doing business, and also minimizing the political dominance of a financial and landlord power elite.

When the United States imposed its initial progressive income tax in 1913, only 2 percent of Americans had a high enough income to require them to file a tax return. The vast majority of the 1913 tax fell on the rentier income of financial and real estate interests, and on the monopoly rents extracted by the trusts that the banking system organized.

How America’s neoliberal policy reverses its former industrial dynamic

Since the takeoff of the neoliberal period in the 1980s, U.S. labor’s disposable income has been squeezed by high costs for basic needs at the same time as its cost of living has priced it out of world markets. This is not the same thing as a high-wage economy. It is a rakeoff of wages to pay the various forms of economic rent that have proliferated and destroyed America’s formerly competitive cost structure. Today’s $175,000 average income for a family of four is not being spent mainly on products or services that wage-earners produce. It is mostly siphoned off by the Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) sector and monopolies at the top of the economic pyramid.

The private-sector’s debt overhead is largely responsible for today’s shift of wages away from rising living standards for labor, and of corporate profits away from new tangible capital investment, research and development for industrial companies. Employers have not paid their employees enough to both maintain their standard of living and carry this financial, insurance and real estate burden, leaving U.S. labor to fall further and further behind.

Inflated by bank credit and rising debt/income ratios, the U.S. guideline cost of housing for home buyers has risen to 43% of their income, far up from the formerly standard 25%. The Federal Housing Authority insures mortgages to guarantee that banks following this guideline will not lose money, even as arrears and defaults are hitting all-time highs. Home ownership rates fell from over 69% in 2005 to under 63% in the Obama eviction wave of foreclosures after the 2008 junk-mortgage crisis. Rents and house prices have soared steadily (especially during the period the Federal Reserve kept interest rates low deliberately to inflate asset prices to support the finance sector, and as private capital has bought up homes that wage earners cannot afford), making housing by far the largest charge on wage income.

Debt arrears also are exploding for student education debt taken on to qualify for a higher-paying job, and in many cases for the auto debt needed to be able to drive to the job. This is capped by credit-card debt accumulating just to make ends meet. The disaster of privatized medical insurance now absorbs 18 percent of U.S. GDP, yet medical debt has become a major cause of personal bankruptcy. All this is just the reverse of what was intended by the original Economy of High Wages policy for American industry.

This neoliberal financialization – the proliferation of rentier charges, inflation of housing and health-care costs, and the need to live on credit beyond solely one’s earnings – has two effects. The most obvious is that most American families have not been able to increase their savings since 2008, and are living from paycheck to paycheck. The second effect has been that, with employers obliged to pay their labor force enough to carry these rentier costs, the living wage for American labor has risen so far above that of every other national economy that there is no way that American industry can compete with that of foreign countries.
Privatization and deregulation of the U.S. economy has obliged employers and labor to bear the rentier costs, including higher housing prices and rising debt overhead, that are part and parcel of today’s neoliberal policies. The resulting loss of industrial competitiveness is the major block to its re-industrialization. After all, it was these rentier charges that deindustrialized the economy in the first place, making it less competitive in world markets and spurring the offshoring of industry by raising the cost of basic needs and doing business. Paying such charges also shrinks the domestic market, by reducing labor’s ability to buy what it produces. Trump’s tariff policy does nothing to address these problems, but will aggravate them by accelerating price inflation.

This situation is unlikely to change any time soon, because the beneficiaries of today’s neoliberal policies – the recipients of these rentier charges burdening the U.S. economy – have become the political Donor Class of billionaires. To increase their rentier income and capital gains and make them irreversible, this resurgent oligarchy is pressing to further privatize and sell off the public sector instead of providing subsidized services to meet the economy’s basic needs at minimum cost. The largest public utilities that have been privatized are natural monopolies – which is why they were kept in the public domain in the first place (i.e., to avoid monopoly rent extraction).

The pretense is that private ownership seeking profits will provide an incentive to increase efficiency. The reality is that prices for what formerly were public services are increased to what the market will bear for transportation, communications and other privatized sectors. One eagerly awaits the fate of the U.S. Post Office that Congress is trying to privatize.

Neither increasing production nor lowering its cost is the aim of today’s sell-off of government assets. The prospect of owning a privatized monopoly in a position to extract monopoly rent has led financial managers to borrow the money to buy up these businesses, adding debt payments to their cost structure. The managers then start selling off the businesses’ real estate for quick cash that they pay out as special dividends, leasing back the property that they need to operate. The result is a high-cost monopoly that is heavily indebted with plunging profits. That is the neoliberal model from England’s paradigmatic Thames Water privatization to private financialized former industrial companies such as General Electric and Boeing.

In contrast to the nineteenth century’s takeoff of industrial capitalism, the aim of privatizers in today’s post-industrial epoch of rentier finance capitalism is to make “capital” gains on the stocks of hitherto public enterprises that have been privatized, financialized and deregulated. A similar financial objective has been pursued in the private arena, where the financial sector’s business plan has been to replace the drive for corporate profits with making capital gains in stocks, bonds and real estate.

The great majority of stocks and bonds are owned by the wealthiest 10 percent, not by the bottom 90 percent. While their financial wealth has soared, the disposable personal income of the majority (after paying rentier charges) has shrunk. Under today’s rentier finance capitalism the economy is going in two directions at once – down for the industrial goods-producing sector, up for the financial and other rentier claims on this sector’s labor and capital.
The mixed public/private economy that formerly built up American industry by minimizing the cost of living and doing business has been reversed by what is Trump’s most influential constituency (and that of the Democrats as well, to be sure) – the wealthiest One Percent, which continues to march its troops under the libertarian flag of Thatcherism, Reaganomics and Chicago anti-government (meaning anti-labor) ideologues. They accuse the government’s progressive income and wealth taxes, investment in public infrastructure and role as regulator to prevent predatory economic behavior and polarization, of being intrusions into “free markets.”

The question, of course, is “free for whom”? What they mean is a market free for the wealthy to extract economic rent. They ignore both the need to tax or otherwise minimize economic rent to achieve industrial competitiveness, and the fact that slashing income taxes on the wealthy – and then insisting on balancing the government budget like that of a family household so as to avoid running yet deeper into debt – starves the economy of public injection of purchasing power. Without net public spending, the economy is obliged to turn for financing to the banks, whose interest-bearing loans grow exponentially and crowd out spending on goods and real services. This intensifies the wage squeeze described above and the dynamic of deindustrialization.

A fatal effect of all these changes has been that instead of capitalism industrializing the banking and financial system as was expected in the nineteenth century, industry has been financialized. The finance sector has not allocated its credit to finance new means of production, but to take over assets already in place – primarily real estate and existing companies. This loads the assets down with debt in the process of inflating capital gains as the finance sector lends money to bid up prices for them.

This process of increasing financialized wealth adds to economic overhead not only in the form of debt, but in the form of higher purchase prices (inflated by bank credit) for real estate and industrial and other companies. And consistently with its business plan of making capital gains, the finance sector has sought to untax such gains. It also has taken the lead in urging cuts in real estate taxes so as to leave more of the rising site value of housing and office buildings – their rent-of-location – to be pledged to the banks instead of serving as the major tax base for local and national fiscal systems as classical economists urged throughout the nineteenth century.

The result has been a shift from progressive taxation to regressive taxation. Rentier income and debt-financed capital gains have been untaxed, and the tax burden shifted onto labor and industry. It is this tax shift that has encouraged corporate financial managers to replace the drive for corporate profits with making capital gains as described above.

What promised to be a harmony of interests for all classes – to be achieved by increasing their wealth by running into debt and watching prices rise for homes and other real estate, stocks and bonds – has turned into a class war.
It is now much more than the class war of industrial capital against labor familiar in the nineteenth century. The postmodern form of class war is that of finance capital against both labor and industry. Employers still exploit labor by seeking profits by paying labor less than what they sell its products for. But labor has been increasingly exploited by debt – mortgage debt (with “easier” credit fueling the debt-driven inflation of housing costs), student debt, automobile debt and credit-card debt just to meet its break-even costs of living.

Having to pay these debt charges increases the cost of labor to industrial employers, constraining their ability to make profits. And (as indicated above) it is such exploitation of industry (and indeed of the whole economy) by finance capital and other rentiers that has spurred the offshoring of industry and deindustrialization of the United States and other Western economies that have followed the same policy path.3 In stark contrast to Western deindustrialization stands China’s successful industrial takeoff. Today, living standards in China are, for much of the population, broadly as high as those in the United States. That is a result of the Chinese government’s policy of providing public support for industrial employers by subsidizing basic needs (e.g., education and medical care) and public high-speed rail, local subway and other transportation, better high-technology communications and other consumer goods, along with their payments systems.

Most important, China has kept banking and credit creation in the public domain as a public utility. That is the key policy that has enabled it to avoid the financialization that has deindustrialized the U.S. and other Western economies.

The great irony is that China’s industrial policy is remarkably similar to that of America’s nineteenth-century industrial takeoff. China’s government, as just mentioned, has financed basic infrastructure and kept it in the public domain, providing its services at low prices to keep the economy’s cost structure as low as possible. And China’s rising wages and living standards have indeed found their counterpart in rising labor productivity.

There are billionaires in China, but they are not viewed as celebrity heroes and models for how the economy at large should seek to develop. The accumulation of conspicuous large fortunes such as those that have characterized the West and created its political Donor Class have been countered by political and moral sanctions against the use of personal wealth to gain control of public economic policy.

This government activism that U.S. rhetoric denounces as Chinese “autocracy” has managed to do what Western democracies have not done: prevent the emergence of a financialized rentier oligarchy that uses its wealth to buy control of government and takes over the economy by privatizing government functions and promoting its own gains by indebting the rest of the economy to itself while dismantling public regulatory policy.

What was the Gilded Age that Trump hopes to resurrect?

Trump and the Republicans have put one political aim above all others: cutting taxes, above all progressive taxation that falls mainly on the highest incomes and personal wealth. It seems that at some point Trump must have asked some economist whether there was any alternative way for governments to finance themselves. Someone must have informed him that from American independence through the eve of World War I, by far the dominant form of government revenue was customs revenue from tariffs.

It is easy to see the lightbulb that went off in Trump’s brain. Tariffs don’t fall on his rentier class of real estate, financial and monopoly billionaires, but primarily on labor (and on industry too, for imports of necessary raw materials and parts).

In introducing his enormous and unprecedented tariff rates on April 3, Trump promised that tariffs alone, by themselves, would re-industrialize America, by both creating a protective barrier and enabling Congress to slash taxes on the wealthiest Americans, whom he seems to believe will thereby be incentivized to “rebuild” American industry. It is as if giving more wealth to the financial managers who have deindustrialized America’s economy will somehow enable a repeat of the industrial takeoff that was peaking in the 1890s under William McKinley.
What Trump’s narrative leaves out of account is that tariffs were merely the precondition for the nurturing of industry by the government in a mixed public/private economy where the government shaped markets in ways designed to minimize the cost of living and doing business. That public nurturing is what gave nineteenth-century America its competitive international advantage. But given his guiding economic aim to untax himself and his most influential political constituency, what appeals to Trump is simply the fact that the government did not yet have an income tax.

What also appeals to Trump is the super-affluence of a robber-baron class, in whose ranks he can readily imagine himself as if in a historical novel. But that self-indulgent class consciousness has a blind spot regarding how its own drives for predatory income and wealth destroy the economy around it, while fantasizing that the robber barons made their fortunes by being the great organizers and drivers of industry. He is unaware that the Gilded Age did not emerge as part of America’s industrial strategy for success but because it did not yet regulate monopolies and tax rentier income. The great fortunes were made possible by the early failure to regulate monopolies and tax economic rent. Gustavus Myers’ History of the Great American Fortunes tells the story of how railroad and real estate monopolies were carved out at the expense of the economy at large.

America’s anti-trust legislation was enacted to deal with this problem, and the original 1913 income tax applied only to the wealthiest 2 percent of the population. It fell (as noted above) mainly on financial and real estate wealth and monopolies – financial interest, land rent and monopoly rent – not on labor or most businesses. By contrast, Trump’s plan is to replace taxation of the wealthiest rentier classes with tariffs paid mainly by American consumers. To share his belief that national prosperity can be achieved by tax favoritism for his Donor Class by untaxing their rentier income, it is necessary to block awareness that such a fiscal policy will prevent the re-industrialization of America that he claims to want.

The U.S. economy cannot be re-industrialized without freeing it from rentier income

The most immediate effects of Trump’s tariff policy will be unemployment as a result of the trade disruption (over and above the unemployment flowing from his DOGE cutbacks in government employment) and an increase in consumer prices for a labor force already squeezed by the financial, insurance and real estate charges that it has to bear as first claims on its wage income. Arrears on mortgage loans, auto loans and credit-card loans already are at historically high levels, and more than half of Americans have no net savings at all – and tell pollsters that they cannot cope with an emergency need to raise $400.

There is no way that disposable personal income will rise in these circumstances. And there is no way that American production can avoid being interrupted by the trade disruption and layoffs that will be caused by the enormous tariff barriers that Trump has threatened – at least until the conclusion of his country-by-country negotiation to extract economic concessions from other countries in exchange for restoring more normal access to the American market.

While Trump has announced a 90-day pause during which the tariffs will be reduced to 10% for countries that have indicated a willingness to so negotiate, he has raised tariffs on Chinese imports to 145%.4

China and other foreign countries and companies already have stopped exporting raw materials and parts needed by American industry. For many companies it will be too risky to resume trade until the uncertainty surrounding these political negotiations are settled. Some countries can be expected to use this interim to find alternatives to the U.S. market (including producing for their own populations).

As for Trump’s hope to persuade foreign companies to relocate their factories to the United States, such companies face the risk of him holding a Sword of Damocles over their heads as foreign investors. He may in due course simply insist that they sell out their American affiliate to domestic U.S. investors, as he has demanded that China do with TikTok.
And the most basic problem, of course, is that the American economy’s rising debt overhead, health insurance and housing costs already have priced U.S. labor, and the products it makes, out of world markets. Trump’s tariff policy will not solve this. Indeed, his tariffs by increasing consumer prices will exacerbate this problem by further increasing the cost of living and thus the price of American labor.

Instead of supporting a regrowth of U.S. industry, the effect of Trump’s tariffs and other fiscal policies will be to protect and subsidize obsolescence and financialized deindustrialization. Without restructuring the rentier financialized economy to move it back toward the original business plan of industrial capitalism with markets freed from rentier income, as advocated by the classical economists and their distinctions between value and price, and hence between rent and industrial profit, his program will fail to re-industrialize America. Indeed, it threatens to push the U.S. economy into depression – for 90 percent of the population, that is.

So we find ourselves dealing with two opposing economic philosophies. On the one hand is the original industrial program that the United States and most other successful nations followed. It is the classical program based on public infrastructure investment and strong government regulation, with rising wages protected by tariffs that provided the public revenue and profit opportunities to create factories and employ labor.

Trump has no plans to recreate such an economy. Instead, he advocates the opposing economic philosophy: downsizing government, weakening public regulation, privatizating public infrastructure, and abolishing progressive income taxes. This is the neoliberal program that has increased the cost structure for industry and polarized wealth and income between creditors and debtors. Donald Trump misrepresents this program as being supportive of industry, not its antithesis.

Imposing tariffs while continuing the neoliberal program will simply protect senility in the form of industrial production burdened by high costs for labor as a result of rising domestic housing prices, medical insurance, education, and services bought from privatized public utilities that used to provide basic needs for communications, transportation and other basic needs at subsidized prices instead of financialized monopoly rents. It will be a tarnished gilded age.
​
While Trump may be genuine in wanting to re-industrialize America, his more single-minded aim is to cut taxes on his Donor Class, imagining that tariff revenues can pay for this. But much trade already has stopped. By the time more normal trade resumes and tariff revenue is generated from it, widespread layoffs will have occurred, leading the affected labor to fall further into debt arrears, with the American economy in no better position to re-industrialize.

The geopolitical dimension

Trump’s country-by-country negotiations to extract economic concessions from other countries in exchange for restoring their access to the American market no doubt will lead some countries to succumb to this coercive tactic. Indeed, Trump has announced over 75 countries have contacted the U.S. government to negotiate. But some Asian and Latin American countries already are seeking an alternative to the U.S. weaponization of trade dependency to extort concessions. Countries are discussing options to join together to create a mutual trade market with less anarchic rules.

The result of them doing so would be that Trump’s policy will become yet another step in America’s Cold War march to isolate itself from trade and investment relations with the rest of the world, including potentially with some of its European satellites. The United States runs the risk of being thrown back onto what has long been supposed its strongest economic advantage: its ability to be self-sufficient in food, raw materials, and labor. But it already has deindustrialized itself, and has little to offer other countries except for the promise not to hurt them, disrupt their trade and impose sanctions on them if they agree to let the United States be the major beneficiary of their economic growth.

The hubris of national leaders trying to extend their empire is age-old – as is their nemesis, which usually turns out to be themselves. At his second inauguration, Trump promised a new Golden Age. Herodotus (History, Book 1.53) tells the story of Croesus, king of Lydia c. 585-546 BC in what is now Western Turkey and the Ionian shore of the Mediterranean. Croesus conquered Ephesus, Miletus and neighboring Greek-speaking realms, obtaining tribute and booty that made him one of the richest rulers of his time, famous for his gold coinage in particular. But these victories and wealth led to arrogance and hubris. Croesus turned his eyes eastward, ambitious to conquer Persia, ruled by Cyrus the Great. 

Having endowed the region’s cosmopolitan Temple of Delphi with substantial gold and silver, Croesus asked its Oracle whether he would be successful in the conquest that he had planned. The Pythia priestess answered: “If you go to war against Persia, you will destroy a great empire.”

Croesus optimistically set out to attack Persia c. 547 BC. Marching eastward, he attacked Persia’s vassal-state Phrygia. Cyrus mounted a Special Military Operation to drive Croesus back, defeating Croesus’s army, capturing him and taking the opportunity to seize Lydia’s gold to introduce his own Persian gold coinage. So Croesus did indeed destroy a great empire – but it was his own. 

Fast-forward to today. Like Croesus hoping to gain the riches of other countries for his gold coinage, Trump hoped that his global trade aggression would enable America to extort the wealth of other nations and strengthen the dollar’s role as a reserve currency against foreign defensive moves to de-dollarize and create alternative plans for conducting international trade and holding foreign reserves. But Trump’s aggressive stance has further undermined trust in the dollar abroad, and is causing serious interruptions in the supply chain of U.S. industry, halting production and causing layoffs at home.

Investors hoped for a return to normalcy as the Dow Jones Industrial Average soared upon Trump’s suspension of his tariffs, only to then fall back when it became clear that he was still taxing all countries 10 percent (and China a prohibitive 145 percent). It is now becoming apparent that his radical disruption of trade cannot be reversed.
The tariffs that Trump announced on April 3, followed by his statement that this was simply his maximum demand, to be negotiated on a bilateral country-by-country basis to extract economic and political concessions (subject to more changes at Trump’s discretion) have replaced the traditional idea of a set of rules consistent and binding for all countries. His demand that the United States must be “the winner” in any transaction has changed how the rest of the world views its economic relations with the United States. An entirely different geopolitical logic is now emerging to create a new international economic order.

China has responded with its own tariffs and export controls as its trade with the United States is frozen, potentially paralyzed. It seems unlikely that China will remove its export controls on many products essential for U.S. supply chains. Other countries are searching for alternatives to their trade dependency on the United States, and a reordering of the global economy is now under negotiation, including defensive de-dollarization policies. Trump has taken a giant step toward the destruction of what was a great empire.

Thanks to the Democracy Collaborative.

Republished from Michael Hudson's blog

Michael Hudson is President of The Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends (ISLET), a Wall Street Financial Analyst, Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. He is the author of Super-Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire (Editions 1968, 2003, 2021), ‘and forgive them their debts’ (2018), J is for Junk Economics (2017), Killing the Host (2015), The Bubble and Beyond (2012), Trade, Development and Foreign Debt (1992 & 2009) and of The Myth of Aid (1971), amongst many others.

Image by Lux Enigma from Pixabay

​Footnotes

1. The three usual factors of production are labor, capital and land. But these factors are best thought of in terms of classes of income recipients. Capitalists and workers play a productive role, but landlords receive rent without producing a productive service, as their land rent is unearned income that they make “in their sleep.”
2. In contrast to the British system of short-term trade credit and a stock market aimed at making quick gains at the expense of the rest of the economy, Germany went further than the United States in creating a symbiosis of government, heavy industry and banking. Its economists called the logic on which this was based the State Theory of Money. I give the details in Killing the Host (2015, chapter 7).
3. America’s deindustrialization has also been facilitated by U.S. policy (starting under Jimmy Carter and accelerated under Bill Clinton) promoting the offshoring of industrial production to Mexico, China, Vietnam and other countries with lower wage levels. Trump’s anti-immigrant policies playing on native Americanism are a reflection of the success of this deliberate U.S policy in deindustrializing America. It is worth noting that his migration policies are the opposite of those of America’s industrial takeoff, which encouraged immigration as a source of labor – not only skilled labor fleeing Europe’s oppressive society, but also low-wage labor to work in the construction industry (for men) and the textile industry (for women). But today, by having moved directly to the countries from which immigrants performing U.S. industrial labor previously came, American industry has no need to bring them to the United States.
4. The White House has pointed out that Trump’s new 125% tariff on China is on top of the 20% IEEPA (International Emergency Economic Powers Act) tariffs already in place, making the tariff on Chinese imports an unpayably high 145%.

WASHINGTON DC, April 5 (RTSG) – Thousands of protestors gathered in Washington DC this month to protest against the war in Palestine. Among the attendees was Norman Finkelstein, an American political-scientist and journalist who has spent decades advocating against the state of Israel and the war against Palestine. He has called Israel a “Jewish supremacist state” and says that Israel is committing crimes of apartheid against Palestinians. He has also spoken many times in support of Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group which the United States has labelled as a terrorist organization.

We asked Finkelstein what he thought about this event, and if the showing there was a sign that more people were becoming aware of the movement.

​Finkelstein said that “It (the National March for Palestine) was a good showing, but it was almost all non-white. I don’t know why we lost the white folks who were coming out. It felt like it was not as representative. Much less diverse than it was say in November.”

When asked if this was because of a perceived threat to white people, Finkelstein replied “The threat is really not to folks like me, the threat is to the people who came. So they showed real courage, right, coming. I’m not sure, I don’t know what the answers are but it was very noticeable.”

Other attendees were also interviewed by RTSG News.

Em, a 51 year-old cook from Pittsburgh, said that “looking back at how Israel was created and the role of world banks” led him to become an activist for Palestine. “Once you start doing your research, man, you just can’t stop if you’ve got a heart and some moral conviction.”

“The biggest issue is that people are still acting like sheep until they wake up. People are cheap and very ignorant; they think it’s cool to just be the way we are.”

When asked if part of the problem was corporate influence in politics, Em replied that “[People] believe capitalism is flawless. I’m not saying we should ditch capitalism overnight—that’s what we have—but when corporations have more power than the workers, that’s a serious problem.”

We asked if this meant that people were waking up about the situation in Gaza. Em replied “It’s a nice crowd, right? But if people were really waking up, we’d have millions coming together—everyone from all over, even from places like DC or three hours away like Philadelphia.”

“This is serious stuff, yet if anyone knows anything, we’re just not coming together enough. It might be better than it was two or three years ago—even five years ago—but consider what happened recently: the country voted for someone who one minute said he’d lower prices and then switched to raising them, and then went on to talk about tariffs and taxes. It’s all so contradictory.”

“I believe it all comes down to getting money out of politics.”

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

​Pope Francis, who passed away on April 21, 2025, at the age of 88, was a figure of profound complexity, embodying both the contradictions of his time and the potential for transformative change within the Catholic Church. The socio-political changes in his home Argentina influenced Jorge Mario Bergoglio's viewpoint as the first Jesuit to become pontiff and the first Latin American pope. Pope Francis was an unexpected ally in the fight for social justice, especially because of his outspoken support for the Palestinian cause and his sharp criticism of global capitalism and neoliberalism.

​Despite having Catholic roots, his pontificate upended the status quo and served as a ray of hope for progressive ideas in a sea of conservatism. This article explores Francis's legacy, criticizes his early silence during the Argentine dictatorship, examines his progressive contributions—including opening up to the People's Republic of China and political engagement with individuals like Fidel Castro and contrasts his approach with that of his predecessor, John Paul II, whose anti-communist stance during the Cold War sided with Western interests.
 
Early Days of Silence
 
During Argentina's Dirty War (1976–1983), a time of severe state repression under a military dictatorship, Jorge Bergoglio's early career took place. An estimated 30,000 people went missing as a result of the regime's targeting of academics, labour unionists, and communists who were thought to be dissenters. Bergoglio was accused of collaboration as the leader of the Jesuit order in Argentina, especially in the abduction and torture of two Jesuit priests, Orlando Yorio and Francisco Jalics. Critics, particularly human rights campaigners and the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, felt that his silence throughout this period amounted to tacit support for the junta.
 
Nonetheless, the story is not biased. According to some reports, Bergoglio spoke with junta authorities to arrange the priests' release and helped others flee persecution in order to work behind the scenes to defend people. He visited her to show concern for priests working in slums, according to Alicia Oliveira, a friend and former Argentine judge who remembered him as being extremely critical of the dictatorship. These contradictory reports show how complicated his activities were at a very dangerous moment.
 
The Constructivist Lens: Contextualising Silence
 
From a constructivist approach, Bergoglio’s silence must be interpreted within the socio-political setting of Argentina in the 1970s. The dictatorship and the Catholic Church, a significant institution in Argentina, were closely linked, with some priests publicly endorsing the government's anti-communist campaign. Conservative Christians who supported the junta and economic interests frequently vilified communism and socialism as the "work of Satan." The Church leadership, especially the Vatican under Pope Paul VI and subsequently John Paul II, saw liberation theology, a movement that attempted to reconcile Christian teachings with Marxist critiques of structural inequality as heretical.
 
The limitations of Bergoglio's surroundings are reflected in his lack of engagement with liberation theology during this time. He worked as a Jesuit leader in an environment where open disagreement may result in persecution for both himself and the people he was responsible for. Despite criticism, his cautious attitude was perhaps a practical reaction to the oppressive environment. However, his exposure to the injustice and poverty of Argentina's slums, along with the emphasis on the poor in liberation theology, sowed the roots that would eventually grow into his papacy's progressive objectives.
 
Progressive Ideals and the Gospel as Communist
 
Pope Francis changed the tone of the Catholic Church when he took office in 2013, focusing on compassion, humility, and helping those who are less fortunate. He broke with the opulence of his predecessors by choosing to live in a modest Vatican guesthouse instead of the Apostolic Palace and by dressing simply. He denounced the "economy of exclusion and inequality" in his apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, saying, "Such an economy kills". This critique of capitalism resonated with Marxist critiques of systematic exploitation, presenting Francis as a critic of global economic processes.
 
Francis deviated significantly from the Church's conventional position by being inclusive of the LGBTQ+ population. A change toward pastoral care over judgment was signaled by his 2013 statement, "If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?". His words encouraged discussion and acceptance, which was in line with progressive movements that supported equality, even if he did not change Church teaching on homosexuality.
 
Communism and the Gospel: A Sociological Interpretation
 
In a 2022 interview, Francis made one of his most striking claims: “If I see the Gospel in a sociological way only, yes, I am a communist, and so too is Jesus”. This provocative statement reflects a sociological interpretation of the Gospel that critiques wealth accumulation and emphasizes communal welfare. Scholars like Terry Eagleton contend that Jesus' teachings, in particular, his exhortations for wealth redistribution, charity, and a rejection of material excess, reflect the class struggle and egalitarian tenets of Marxism. According to Eagleton, the early Christian communities as they were portrayed in the Acts of the Apostles shared resources to make sure no one was in need and lived in a manner reminiscent of socialism.
 
This connection is further highlighted by Francis's involvement with liberation theology. While he originally distanced himself from its Marxist features, labeling them as “ideological exploitation,” he subsequently welcomed its focus on the poor. His 2013 encounter with Gustavo Gutiérrez, a major liberation theologian, and his integration of issues like land, work, and housing into his World encounter of Popular Movements, reflect a reconciliation with the movement’s basic concerns. Francis was an appealing figure for Marxists looking for partners in the struggle against tyranny because of his nuanced approach, which enabled him to combine traditional Christian ideals with revolutionary social philosophy.
 
Constant Assistance to Palestine
 
One of the most notable aspects of Pope Francis's pontificate, especially in the latter years, was his dedication to the Palestinian cause. He was praised by activists for his persistent demands for peace in Gaza and his direct interaction with Palestinian people, which was in line with Marxist criticisms of occupation and imperialism. Francis called for a ceasefire, the release of hostages, and assistance for a "starving people that aspires to a future of peace" in his final public speech on Easter Sunday, April 20, 2025, from St. Peter's Basilica. He also denounced the "deplorable humanitarian situation" in Gaza. This message, which was read by an assistant because of his deteriorating health, demonstrated his constant attention to the suffering in the area.
 
Francis, who was hospitalized with pneumonia in early 2025, called the lone Catholic church in Gaza every day throughout Israel's war operation, giving prayers and solidarity. Israel responded diplomatically to his vocal condemnation of Israel's conduct, which included a statement in November 2024 urging the international community to look into whether the campaign amounted to genocide. With his support for Palestinian self-determination, Francis was able to establish himself as a moral voice opposing what many Marxists perceive to be imperialist aggression.
 
The Catholic Right and Conservative Critics
 
Conservative Catholics strongly opposed Pope Francis's progressive views, especially in the US, where a traditionalist movement became stronger while he was pope. Clergy and lay critics were among his detractors, accusing him of confusing fundamental beliefs like marriage and sexuality and of assuming an authoritarian leadership style while posing as humble. His economic criticisms and his use of inclusive terminology, such as referring to transgender people as "daughters of God" in 2023, were viewed as breaking with precedent.
 
Notable opponents included U.S. conservative media sources like EWTN, which exacerbated opposition, and Cardinal George Pell, who anonymously wrote a report calling Francis's pontificate a “disaster”. In response, Francis criticized his detractors' "backward" views, saying that holding onto tradition while denying doctrinal progress was a "suicidal attitude”. In contrast to his critics' dogmatic views, he emphasized the Church's function as a "field hospital" for a suffering world.
 
Diplomatic Overtures to China
 
Pope Francis’s efforts to improve relations with the People’s Republic of China are equally noteworthy. Since taking charge in 2013, Francis has expressed a desire to visit China and has taken concrete steps towards fostering better ties. The preliminary agreement on the appointment of bishops in China, agreed on September 22, 2018, was a historic step. This accord, while not creating official diplomatic relations, provides for a collaborative procedure in which China selects bishops and the pope has the ability to appoint or reject these suggestions.
 
The 2018 accord, characterized by Vatican officials as "not political but pastoral," seeks to reconcile the Catholic Church in China by guaranteeing bishops are in communion with Rome while still being recognized by Chinese authorities. Following the deal, Pope Francis accepted seven Beijing-appointed bishops, eliminating censures against those consecrated without papal authority. The arrangement has been extended several times, the most recent being in October 2024 for four years, suggesting that coordinated efforts are being made to maintain this sensitive partnership. 
 
Despite these limitations, Pope Francis' approach represents a long-term engagement and dialogue strategy aimed at establishing a Catholic Church presence in China that respects both religious freedom and national sovereignty. This approach stands in stark contrast to earlier popes' more hostile views, especially John Paul II, who played a key role in the demise of communist governments across Eastern Europe.
 
Conclusion
 
Pope Francis' papacy, which ended on April 21, 2025, changed the Catholic Church's role in a divided world. His progressive perspective, centered on compassion, economic critique, and solidarity with disadvantaged people like Palestinians and the LGBTQ+ community, challenged the Church’s conservative orthodoxy. Francis connected Christian ethics and revolutionary social philosophy by participating in liberation theology, establishing engagement with China, and applying a sociological lens to the Gospel, winning both acclaim and ire. His early quiet during Argentina's Dirty War is still debated, but his subsequent acts indicate a pragmatic growth molded by sociopolitical circumstances. In contrast to John Paul II's anti-communist campaign, Francis' legacy is a nuanced, inclusive ecclesiology that positions the Church as a moral counterbalance to global imbalances and a beacon for progressive development in the face of enduring conservative resistance.

INTRODUCTION

On April 4, 2025, a YouTube user under the name “Brandon Torres” uploaded a video titled “The Nonsense of MAGA Communism.”[1] The video repeats a familiar litany of long-debunked arguments against the American Communist Party (ACP) and the broader MAGA Communist tendency—arguments that rely less on theory or substance than on smears, moral panic, and liberal dogma. Beneath the surface, the video reflects a deeper anxiety brewing within the professional-managerial left: anxiety over the fact that, for the first time in generations, Marxism-Leninism is breaking out of the subcultural bubble of academia and NGOs and reconnecting with the American working class.

For decades, communism in the United States has been confined to elite spaces—academic departments, nonprofit bureaucracies, and online echo chambers detached from the material struggles of the people. MAGA Communism represents a serious challenge to this status quo. It reorients Marxism toward praxis, reclaims language and symbols abandoned to the right, and engages with the people as they are, not as liberal moralists wish them to be. That is why the response from the mainstream left has not been rigorous debate or ideological critique—but hysteria, character assassination, and ideological distortion.

This document exists to answer that distortion. It offers point-by-point rebuttals to the major claims made in the video, exposing the flaws in its reasoning, the hollowness of its accusations, and the liberal chauvinism behind its worldview. More than a defense of MAGA Communism, this is a challenge to the left’s inherited dogmas—an invitation to return to the great revolutionary tradition of Marxism-Leninism.

CLAIM:
“The ACP is not a communist party; it’s a far-right fascist movement in disguise.”

RESPONSE:
This is the central smear of the entire video, and it hinges not on serious political analysis, but on aesthetic discomfort, guilt-by-association, and Cold War liberal moral panic. Rather than engaging the ACP’s actual political platform—canceling debt, public housing, nationalizing industry, ending imperialism—the video dismisses it as mere “branding.” At one point, the narrator even declares, “It’s not socialism—it’s national socialism,” invoking Nazism to condemn the ACP without ever seriously grappling with its political program, class analysis, or materialist method.

This line of argument is rooted in the discredited logic of horseshoe theory—the liberal myth that fascism and communism are two extremes that bend toward each other.[2] Popularized during the Cold War to delegitimize any revolutionary politics, this framework refuses to understand fascism as a class phenomenon and instead reduces it to a vague spiritual disease: the domain of “bad people” with “bad thoughts.” In fact, the narrator never even defines what he means by fascism. Is he referring to historical Italian fascism? German Nazism? No—what he means by “fascism” is nothing more than cultural noncompliance. To this mindset, a “fascist” is simply anyone who defies the liberal global order. “Fascist” becomes a slur, not a concept. It is a variation of Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” comment, weaponized against the very class the left is supposed to represent.[3]

This rhetorical move has deep roots in the postwar liberal tradition, especially in Theodor Adorno’s 1950 study The Authoritarian Personality, which pathologized political dissent by attributing fascism to a set of psychological traits.[4] Rather than explaining fascism as the crisis response of capitalism in decay, Adorno redefined it as a personality defect—a mental virus lurking in the minds of working-class men with “rigid views,” “sexual repression,” or “deference to authority.” In this framework, everyone becomes a potential fascist, and the only antidote is psychological re-education under liberal hegemony. As Haz Al-Din writes: “The word Fascism today means malign sovereignty: sovereignty that is misaligned, unaligned, or even nonaligned with the American unipolar global system.”[5] Whether it’s a nation that refuses the IMF, or a man who refuses to put pronouns in his bio, both are guilty of “fascism”—because they disobey.

Haz continues: “The malign individual is an outlaw, a criminal. The malign sovereign is a Fascist, because their sovereignty is used in an illegitimate way.”[6] In other words, what liberals fear isn’t fascism—it’s disobedience. Their view of fascism is not materialist, but metaphysical. They imagine fascism as a dark force inside people’s souls—a form of secular original sin—and they smear anyone who threatens the liberal consensus with this label, regardless of what they actually believe.

While Western leftists treat fascism as a metaphysical force—an ever-looming “dark side” to be warded off through institutional moderation, moral posturing, and elite managerialism—Marxist theory identifies fascism through its class character. Fascism arises not from irrational passions or ideological extremism, but from the ruling class’s desperation to preserve capitalist rule in moments of systemic crisis. It is not the opposite of liberal democracy, but rather its final line of defense when democratic forms can no longer contain working-class resistance. As Georgi Dimitrov famously explained, fascism is “the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital.”[7]

In this context, MAGA Communism and the ACP represent not a slide into reaction, but the reassertion of working-class agency against globalist imperialism and monopoly capital. Far from being fascist, the ACP is grounded in a concrete Marxist-Leninist analysis of the American condition: that the American proletariat—deindustrialized, dispossessed, and betrayed by both parties—must be organized, radicalized, and led to seize state power. This is not a descent into fascism, but a revival of the revolutionary and democratic potential of communism in a uniquely American form.

CLAIM:

“MAGA Communism is contradictory. You can’t be both MAGA and Marxist.”

RESPONSE:

This claim reveals a profound misunderstanding—not only of MAGA Communism, but of Marxism itself. It assumes that “MAGA” refers exclusively to Donald Trump the individual, rather than to the mass political phenomenon that emerged in 2016: a diffuse but real working-class rejection of the neoliberal consensus, of Washington elites, globalism, and perpetual war. As Haz Al-Din has written:

“Having its origins in a rather accidental confluence of circumstances, in Donald Trump’s presidential election in 2016, the movement has become the host of every possible real counter-hegemonic ideological tendency within the United States.”[8]
In this light, MAGA is not a loyalty oath to a billionaire—it is a signifier of mass alienation, of cultural and class dislocation, of workers (especially rural and deindustrialized) looking for anything outside the ruling liberal order. MAGA Communism seeks not to endorse reactionary politics but to meet these people where they are and channel their anger toward the real enemy: finance capital, imperialism, and the capitalist state.

This strategy is not new. It is precisely the approach taken by Lenin, Mao, and every successful revolutionary movement in history. Mao famously insisted:

“As for people who are politically backward, Communists should not slight or despise them, but should befriend them, unite with them, convince them and encourage them to go forward.”[9]

By contrast, Western academic Marxists today have adopted what Carlos L. Garrido calls a “purity fetish.”[10] They demand that workers adopt perfect ideological positions before they can be accepted into the struggle. Garrido criticizes this approach for treating people's ideas as static, rather than dialectical and changing through struggle. It is a fantasy of organizing from the top down—lecturing the working class from a podium of moral superiority, rather than organizing with them in real life, in their language, on their terms.

As Haz Al-Din further clarifies:

“The unity of Communism with MAGA is nothing more than the unity of Marxism with the worker’s movement. But this unity will not be accomplished by attempting to enforce the condescending tone-policing of Western Marxists, but by a genuine praxiological encounter between Communist partisans and the people.”[11]

To reject MAGA Communism because some of its audience holds “incorrect views” is to reject the Marxist tradition itself. Revolutions are not made by perfect people. They are made by the conscious transformation of imperfect people—through struggle, through encounter, through praxis.

CLAIM:

“They quote Dugin and LaRouche — that proves they’re fascists.”

RESPONSE:

This accusation rests entirely on guilt-by-association, not on serious ideological critique. The video implies that engaging with the thought of Alexander Dugin or the history of Lyndon LaRouche is equivalent to endorsing fascism outright—a standard that no serious Marxist thinker has ever upheld. MAGA Communism and the American Communist Party (ACP) are not defined by any figure or phrase but by their fundamental commitment to applying Marxism-Leninism to the specific conditions of the United States—what we call socialism with American characteristics.

Let’s take the case of Dugin. Members of the ACP have critically engaged with Dugin’s work—especially his critiques of Western unipolarity, liberal hegemony, and the globalist erosion of national sovereignty. These critiques resonate with Marxist-Leninist anti-imperialism, but this does not mean wholesale endorsement. The video conveniently ignores that Dugin’s “Fourth Political Theory” explicitly rejects fascism, as well as liberalism and communism, aiming to forge a new ideological synthesis outside of the 20th-century tradition.[12] Dugin has publicly opposed Ukrainian neo-Nazis, a real fascist force backed by NATO and the U.S., while Western liberals have remained shamefully silent or complicit.[13]

But on what grounds does this video label Dugin a “fascist”? It is not because of his actual positions—it is because he is Russian, and the West is currently in a geopolitical war with the Russian Federation. Western leftists, despite their anti-establishment posturing, act as faithful ideological defenders of NATO and the Western global order. Anyone who offers a civilizational or national critique of U.S. unipolarity—especially from outside the Anglosphere—is reflexively branded a fascist. This is Western chauvinism, plain and simple. And when leftists join in, they become useful idiots of imperialism.

As for LaRouche, the connection is even more tenuous. The video attempts to construct a lineage between the ACP and LaRouche based on vague thematic overlap and a handful of social media soundbites. But this is not how Marxists analyze ideology. There is no doctrinal influence from LaRouche in the ACP’s theoretical documents, platform, or political analysis. The entire line of attack amounts to a kind of “smear-by-Google”: a name is invoked, its aesthetic or historical associations disapproved of, and then others are condemned by superficial proximity. That is not dialectics, it is liberal moralism.

Marx himself engaged extensively with right-wing and bourgeois thinkers—from Hegel to Ricardo to Edmund Burke—to understand the terrain of capitalist ideology. Reading or referencing a thinker has never equaled endorsement in the Marxist tradition. It is part of theoretical struggle. If we must now treat every non-liberal philosopher as radioactive, then Marx, Engels, Lenin, and all revolutionary theorists would be disqualified by today’s purity-obsessed left.

CLAIM:

“ACP rejects class struggle and replaces it with conspiracies about ‘international finance.’”

RESPONSE:

This is a dishonest strawman and a deeply ironic one. The ACP and the broader MAGA Communist current are rooted in Marxist-Leninist class struggle, not in conspiratorial thinking. Our critique of finance capital is not some fringe departure from Marxism—it is directly in line with Lenin’s own analysis in his classic pamphlet, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism.[14] In that work, Lenin describes how industrial capital merges with banking capital to form a financial oligarchy that dominates not only national economies but the global system. This is not a “fascist dogwhistle”—it is basic Marxist analysis.

To quote Lenin:

“Imperialism is the epoch of finance capital and monopolies.”[15]

To call any critique of financial capitalism “fascism” is not only historically illiterate, it is politically bankrupt. It treats the word “finance” as a red flag, rather than a material category. But worse still, it smuggles in a dangerous, liberal-idealist assumption: that to criticize finance capital is somehow antisemitic. This is not only false—it is itself an antisemitic idea.

Why? Because it equates Jews with finance, banks, and monopoly capital—a racist and essentialist stereotype that Marxists have always rejected. The irony is that the only people making this association between Jews and finance are the Western leftists who launch these accusations against the ACP. They imply that every time MAGA Communists refer to “Wall Street” we are secretly talking about Jews—which is absurd, offensive, and insulting to both working-class Jews and to the integrity of revolutionary theory.

Marxists do not attribute capitalism to ethnic groups—we understand it as a historically specific system of class relations. When the ACP critiques finance capital, we critique an institutional structure of global power, not a religious group. The charge of antisemitism is increasingly weaponized to shield the core structures of global capitalism from critique. In this, certain Western leftists ironically share common ground with Zionists: both use the accusation of antisemitism not to protect Jews, but to silence revolutionary criticism of global systems of domination. For Zionists, it is deployed to defend a brutal apartheid regime. For Western leftists, it functions to defend the imperialist financial order—the IMF, NATO, the Federal Reserve, and the global regime of unipolarity. In both cases, the charge of antisemitism is cynically deployed—not to protect Jews, but to silence critiques of the status quo.

CONCLUSION

The ACP and the broader MAGA Communist tendency represent a genuine threat to the left-liberal status quo. Not because we are “fascists in disguise,” as hysterical critics claim, but because we are doing something that neither the mainstream left intelligentsia have managed in decades: reconnecting communism with the actual working class of this country.

Unlike the insular subculture of academia, NGOs, and professional activist circles, the ACP speaks directly to disaffected workers, rural poor, deindustrialized communities, veterans, small business owners crushed by monopolies, and those millions of Americans who know something is deeply wrong with the system, even if they don’t yet speak the language of theory. These are the very people the liberal left has written off as “deplorables,” “reactionaries,” or “fascists.”

MAGA Communism breaks every rule of the neoliberal left's etiquette. It challenges the identitarian fragmentation that has replaced class politics with a never-ending moral audit of individual behavior. It refuses to treat “incorrect” opinions as moral contamination. It rejects the hyper-individualized, therapeutic worldview that has neutered socialist politics and replaced revolutionary struggle with lifestyle branding. And most importantly, it doesn’t just critique empire—it seeks to destroy it. The ACP doesn’t exist merely to “raise awareness.” It exists to organize power, to reclaim national sovereignty from finance capital, and to end U.S. imperialism—not just in theory, but in practice.

And so, the defenders of the globalist liberal order strike back. Not with open ideological debate, but with smears, guilt-by-association, and pseudo-psychological pathologizing. Unable to challenge the ACP’s platform, critics resort to innuendo: if we engage the working class on their terms, we must be fascists; if we critique finance capital, we must be antisemitic; if we challenge liberal norms, we must be dangerous. These are not arguments. They are the desperate cries of a moribund professional-managerial left that fears losing its monopoly on opposition politics.

But the terrain is shifting. The old gatekeepers are losing control. A new American Marxism is emerging—one that is rooted, strategic, anti-imperialist, and unafraid. And that is why they are so desperate to shut it down.

Author
​
Jonathan Brown is a historian and sociologist who serves on the Department of Education of the American Communist Party. He sits on the editorial board of Red America journal and is the editorial director of Southern Worker.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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