 It is only under American socialism that Americans could have a government that actually upholds the interests of the people (Illustrated by Zeinab al-Hajj for Al Mayadeen English) On July 27, Fox News aired a national segment attacking my party, the American Communist Party (ACP), my speech, and the Subversion Summer Camp that hosted it in Bridgeport, Chicago. I was asked for a press release a couple of days prior, but no part of the statement that I gave was featured on the segment, nor was any of the actual speech I gave, which was titled after my recent book, Why We Need American Marxism. Instead, Fox News decided to clip a segment from my lecture at our Party’s national convention in October 2024, where I discussed, as Secretary of Education, the importance of free, creative, and critical thinking. By mocking a clip where I emphasize these themes, the Fox News anchors, as political analyst Eddie Smith argued, are admitting that they do not want people to think critically and beyond the boundaries of the established political horizon. They want people to think what the mainstream media, 95% of which is owned by a handful of major media monopolies, tells them to think. Anything which encourages a form of thinking that breaks through the dogmatic narratives they craft to justify war, poverty, and our people’s debt-enslavement must be ridiculed, attacked, and censored. Most interesting was their sophistical intertwining of my speech and the ACP with the activities done by the rest of the ten-day camp, failing, of course, to note that we had no control over the rest of it. We were simply guests, graciously allowed to speak in an environment foreign to us, a context of liberal activism we have notoriously been at odds with. This is the activism that they ridiculed and tried to link to our party, an activism that says that we fight fascism with “pool noodles” and “queer magic". In fact, my speech was introduced as being “controversial” precisely because we are communists, people whose patriotism is second to none. Our organization does not seek to impose liberal wokeism on an American working class that is overwhelmingly socially conservative. But alas, the narrative-spinners at the Rupert Murdoch-owned cesspool, which is Fox News, had to ignore all the facts to connect us to a Congress for Cultural Freedom style compatible “left” that is completely alienating to working-class Americans. This fact alone forces me to ask the following question: what are they afraid of? Why must they distort the facts to craft their narratives? Could it be, perhaps, that somewhere deep down they know that had their viewers listened to what I said, they would’ve found someone expressing sentiments which they agree with? A political line that comprehends the everyday grievances they live with, those which the political class ignores? Ridicule is the tribute paid by those threatened to admit the truth of that which becomes the object of scorn. In such a predicament, constructing a caricature vulgar enough to knock down is the only resort. The paradox is that even the spectacle they spun made them, not those promoting critical, free, and creative thinking, look bad. Had they shown the American people the actual speech, or even the statement they omitted, they wouldn’t have been able to otherize and mock us as quickly as they did. The essence of my talk, which is available online, is that the most fundamental values the American people hold are intimately tied to a conception of government of, by, and for the people. But this notion, first uttered by Abraham Lincoln in his Gettysburg Address, is fundamentally incompatible with the society we have today in America, where we have a government of, by, and for big business, banks, and the military-industrial complex. By identifying with the notion of government of, by, and for the people, Americans are identifying with socialism, whose fundamental essence is nothing more than a society that has as its ultimate principle serving the people, not the interests of capital. As the legendary American communist Fred Hampton said, “Socialism is the people, if you’re afraid of socialism, you are afraid of yourself.” Based on the ideals of 1776 and those of the refined democratic creed, the American people already align with a socialist social vision; they just do not know it yet. Their anti-communism, artificially inscribed through McCarthyite propaganda, is nothing more than a form of self-estrangement, a fear of facing the predicament of themselves in the mirror and realizing that how they think society should work is already communist, in essence. It is like when in old cartoons the roadrunner runs off a cliff but only falls when they notice they are hanging in midair, likewise, the American people are already socialists, in a freefall away from the parasitic capitalist system they live under, they just do not know it yet. Had Fox aired the segment and not ridiculed it by highlighting the antics of US “leftism", its audience would’ve received the truth, namely, that there is nothing fundamentally at odds between being a patriotic American and a communist. In fact, they would’ve found a scholarly, elaborated account of why you could only be a consistent and genuine American patriot through being a communist. They would’ve been able to see that we could only escape the crisis we are in, where Americans are poorer, more indebted, and more desperate than past generations, by fighting, as our ancestors did in 1776, for a government that is truly of, by, and for the American people. Such a fight is already being waged, in an organized manner, by the American Communist Party that they sought to ridicule. Had Fox aired my statement in the segment, the viewers would’ve been able to see that our ideas and struggle are rooted not in “queer magic", but in faithfully developing the ideals of 1776 to their logical and practical conclusion – socialism! It is only under American socialism that Americans could have a government that actually upholds the interests of the people, instead of one that sends our taxes abroad to fund genocide and imperialist plunder. Originally published on Al Mayadeen English 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.
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