 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 teaches high school social studies in Athens, Georgia, where he inspires students with his deep passion for exploring society and history. He also teaches sociology as an adjunct professor at Athens Technical College. Jonathan holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Georgia and a master’s degree from California State University, Northridge, where he studied culture and politics from a Marxist perspective. Outside the classroom, Jonathan plays guitar in a punk rock band and is an active member of the Jewish anti-Zionist community. He is a committed member of the American Communist Party. Jonathan is the co-host of the Praxis Report, a podcast focusing on revolutionary theory and political analysis. [1] Brandon Torres. “The Nonsense of MAGA Communism.” Youtube (April 4, 2025): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpLy6brTYvM [2] Simon Choat. “‘Horseshoe Theory’ is Nonsense – the Far Right and Far Left Have Little in Common.” The Conversation (May 12, 2017): https://theconversation.com/horseshoe-theory-is-nonsense-the-far-right-and-far-left-have-little-in-common-77588 [3] Domenico Montanaro. “Hillary Clinton's 'Basket Of Deplorables,' In Full Context Of This Ugly Campaign.” NPR (September 10, 2016): https://www.npr.org/2016/09/10/493427601/hillary-clintons-basket-of-deplorables-in-full-context-of-this-ugly-campaign [4] Theodor Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, et al. The Authoritarian Personality. (Brooklyn: Verso Books, 2019 [1950]). [5] Haz Al-Din. “The Rise of MAGA Communism.” Substack (September 18, 2022): https://showinfrared.substack.com/p/the-rise-of-maga-communism?sd=pf [6] Haz Al-Din, Ibid. [7] Georgi Dimitrov. “The Fascist Offensive and the Tasks of the Communist International in the Struggle of the Working Class Against Fascism.” Selected Works, vol. 2 (Sofia: Sofia Press, 1972) [8] Haz Al-Din, Ibid. [9] Mao Tse-Tung. “The Role of the Chinese Communist Party in the National War.” Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung, Vol. II (October 1938): https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-2/mswv2_10.htm [10] Carlos L. Garrido, The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (Dubuque: Midwestern Marx Publishing Press, 2023). [11] Haz Al-Din, Ibid. [12] Alexander Dugin. The Fourth Political Theory. (Moscow: Eurasian Movement, 2012). [13] Alexander Dugin. “West Created ‘Nazi Paradise’ in Ukraine to Fight Russians.” RT (March 3, 2023): https://www.rt.com/russia/572443-dugin-ukraine-nazi-paradise/ [14] Vladimir Ilich Lenin. Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. (Eastford: Martino Fine Books 2011 [1917]). [15] Vladimir Ilich Lenin, Ibid. Archives April 2025
1 Comment
Charles Brown
5/15/2025 04:19:57 pm
99% of the population, and so of the voting population are WORKING CLASS. All wage-laborers are working class . Leave a Reply. |
Archives
May 2025
Categories
All
|
RSS Feed