We are starting strong today with Stalin, but before we return to his somewhat controversial assessment of social democracy, and the usual whining the Social Fascism Thesis brings along with it, we have to deal with someone far worse:

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Do I have your attention? If I have your anger, stick with the article for a while longer, and see if I can’t change your mind.

I remember quite well when AOC won her bid for Congress back in 2018, and the general enthusiasm surrounding that victory, which made its way even across the Atlantic, all the way to my corner of Germany. And how could it not, in that small ‘leftist’ bubble of Munich I spent my days in? She was the youngest woman ever to win a Congressional seat; she unseated the terminally bought-and-paid-for Joe Crowley; she worked a normal (!) job, and beyond all that, she used that terribly scandalous word ‘socialism’, all with an endorsement from Bernie Sanders and the DSA. On top of that, and to my eternal embarrassment, I made a mini-documentary about her primary campaign for a project in my final year of high school, putting her in the ‘lofty’ tradition of ‘American Socialism’. That turned out to be more correct than I could have possibly imagined, but certainly not in the way I had hoped.

God, were we naive back then… or maybe that was just me. Either way:

Almost a decade has gone by since, and while some things have changed, as they always do, others have remained deceptively stable.

A whole generation of ‘socialists’ like AOC has taken their seats, and new ones are cropping up each and every election cycle, in almost every state, for many, many races. What started as a seeming novelty with the Sanders campaign of 2016 has developed into the norm for Democratic Party primaries; a real political force that can no longer be ignored by the old guard of the party, try as they might. Zohran Mamdani’s meteoric rise to Mayor of New York City, and one of the most popular politicians in the entire country; the DSA-endorsed candidates sweeping the New York primaries; highly contested insurgent victories; rumors of internal party meetings, and the list goes on. The candidates of the coming years are already waiting in the wings, ready to inch closer and closer to capturing the party as a whole, and perhaps one day, not so far away, even the presidency.

The future is bright; life will be good (great?) again; the United States shall be redeemed by healthcare, rent control, economic justice, and maybe, just maybe, it will go further than that… or so the story goes.

I’m afraid we must return to reality, though.

What presents itself as a new trend is really a revival of a much older one, in a new guise. Yes, even corpses can be made to look more presentable in fresh clothes; with enough perfume, in the form of charismatic, diverse, young people, there might even be a chance to cover up that old grave-stench of white supremacy and settler-colonialism at the core of the matter.

It was FDR’s New Deal that once saved the American state from its own working class by giving larger sections of it than ever before a stake in the settler state, and with that, access to that grand social category of whiteness. Similarly, under Johnson, a compromise was made to finally allow sections of the non-white masses to enter the bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeoisie, conveniently sabotaging their mutual integration with Third World national liberation struggles, the greatest danger the US state ever faced. This ‘gracious miracle’ can’t be repeated, with less and less to go around and white supremacy proving too foundational, so all there is to do is hand out some more treats and hope they are enough to keep the class-collaborationist alliance rolling, on and on and on…

Social democracy is prepared to do the deed once again; maybe it can dispense with the lynchings and concentration camps this time around.

This article is an examination of this abomination of an alliance, risen to hand out the spoils of imperialism to its very own class: The American labor aristocracy, joined by all the other petty-bourgeois parasites. While the ‘reformers’ of the New Deal at least had the decency to be straightforward about their utter disdain for anything resembling socialism, they have now seemingly taken up the red flag, uniting more and more people under its banner. But just as the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) once raised the red flag for the decrepit President Hindenburg, and, even before that, howled for the murder of proletarians, they have pinned theirs to the Democratic Party; one of the largest and most powerful imperialist parties in the whole world, filled to the brim with desk murderers of the American state. We have to look at more than the color of their flag to understand what it actually represents.

So… what does it represent?

What appears in the guise of ‘socialism’ is nothing but the latest lifeline of US imperialism, to make it more palatable to the hungry urban labor aristocrats and petty-bourgeoisie, yearning for the imagined lifestyle of the generations before them.

It is socialism in name, but social fascism in practice; social democracy at home, but imperialist slaughter abroad; pretty phrases for their domestic cross-class base, and guns aimed at the heads of the international proletariat.

The aspiration of this ‘socialism’ is nothing but a trickle of blood from the gigantic river flowing into the insatiable maw of American monopoly capital, even if it comes at the expense of the peoples of the whole world.

Or, as Lenin put it so aptly over a hundred years ago:

To explain where these ‘socialists’ are heading and why their path is all but certain, we must start with their disguise, take a closer look, and strip it away—piece by piece.

Trickle-Down-Socialism

In the beginning was the word: democratic socialism.

This term alone already contains some curious particularities, precisely by what remains unsaid, but is implied in its form. Of course, it also has a concrete history of anti-communism, but we will ignore this for now, since it is almost irrelevant to the self-identification of those who stumbled on it for the first time in their life in 2016 or 2020, when Bernie Sanders espoused it during his primary campaigns. At its most fundamental, the term itself implies a distinction between 'socialism' and 'democratic socialism', as though the former lacked some mysterious democratic quality that only the latter could provide.

Where exactly can this ‘democratic’ element be found, then?

It is, supposedly, twofold:

• Democratic socialism follows a ‘democratic’ path towards socialism, firmly attaching itself to the absolute necessity of winning bourgeois elections to attain political power. There is no amount of canned phrases about popular participation and movement politics that can obscure its subordination to the formal political system of the bourgeois state; even the demands to change it exclusively conceptualize this as a process of reform from the inside, at best supported by outside pressure.

• Democratic socialism also describes a ‘democratic’ form of socialist construction, but here the concept's inherent confusion already shines through. It mainly serves as a way to distance oneself from the supposed authoritarianism of the revolutionary struggles of the twentieth century, and necessarily rejects the centralized forms that characterized it, alongside proletarian class dictatorship as such. This ‘democratic pluralism’ once again amounts to an affirmation of the state, and struggle against it is limited to the formal economic arena.

We can see that while the self-described goal of this ‘democratic socialism’ is to transform capitalist economic relations—or so its representatives usually claim, when they aren’t terrified of a scolding by the bourgeois press—in actuality it looks nothing like the socialism of old, or any kind of socialism for that matter. It is inevitably wound up in the fangs of the bourgeois state, which remains the only legitimate arena of ‘democracy’ for them. Thus, the term ‘democratic’ is cut loose from all class relations, and becomes ideologically fixed as a trans-historical phenomenon; an obvious regression to liberalism, which sees the bourgeoisie as the universal subject of history, and grafts this understanding onto all of humanity for eternity.

Lenin speaks on this exact notion of ‘democracy’, disconnected from class, in his famous polemic against the former Marxist turned renegade, Karl Kautsky:

“If we are not to mock at common sense and history, it is obvious that we cannot speak of ‘pure democracy’ as long as different classes exist; we can only speak of class democracy.

[…]

‘Pure democracy’ is the mendacious phrase of a liberal who wants to fool the workers. History knows of bourgeois democracy which takes the place of feudalism, and of proletarian democracy which takes the place of bourgeois democracy.

[…]

Kautsky does not understand this truth, which is so clear and obvious to every worker, because he has ‘forgotten,’ ‘unlearned’ to put the question: democracy for which class? He argues from the point of view of ‘pure’ (i.e., non-class? or above-class?) democracy. He argues like Shylock: my ‘pound of flesh’ and nothing else. Equality for all citizens—otherwise there is no democracy.

We must ask the learned Kautsky, the ‘Marxist’ and ‘socialist’ Kautsky:

Can there be equality between the exploited and the exploiters?”

— Lenin, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, 1918

It is scarcely necessary to answer Lenin’s rhetorical question with a resounding no. There can be no such equality between the exploited and exploiters, and there is no such thing as democracy apart from class.

The supposedly neutral adherence to democracy of this ‘democratic socialism’ is nothing but an anachronistic submission to the bourgeois state and its great ‘liberties’, standing opposed to proletarian democracy, and with that to the only possibility of genuine democracy in the modern world, even as they pay empty lip service to it—and we’ll get to that last part.

And just like that, the essential meaning of ‘democracy’ has been turned into its opposite, revealing itself as the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.

But what about their ‘socialism’, then?

They wish to overcome capitalism after all…right?

We could spend a whole article discussing what socialism, so bleached of all content, might mean in this context and the many confusions required to fit it into this shape, but for the sake of brevity, let us take a shortcut and get it straight from the proverbial horse’s mouth. In its brand new national program, the foremost organization of ‘democratic socialism’ in the US, the DSA, states:

“Democratic socialists know that no one has to live like this. If we lived in a classless society and governed ourselves, we could freely build a world without war or poverty. We could build a world where no one suffers for their race, gender, or religion, and everyone is free, equal, and cared for. Building this world is the guiding star of our movement. When we labor for our common good instead of private profit, we can all have a secure and dignified life, and use our time and talents how we wish.

To achieve this future, our class must organize. The Democratic Socialists of America is building a party whose goal is a democratic society of the working class. Our enemies are not just individual bosses, but the entire global system of capital; not just this or that cop, judge, or president, but the entire anti-democratic structure of our society. We are workers fighting to transform society: to win the battle for democracy, draft a new constitution, and create a democratic socialist republic.”

This does sound somewhat promising, doesn’t it? Here we have it, black on white, that they are fighting against the ‘entire global system of capitalism’, a system they recognize as fundamentally undemocratic! Maybe we were too quick to judge? Perhaps their ‘battle for democracy’ goes further than they let on, even as they indulge the language of liberal constitutionalism?

As is so often the case, the devil is in the details. Let us look at some examples of what this process ‘to transform society’ entails for them, and what it obviously doesn’t. What kind of social transformation does the DSA propose?

• The implementation of universal healthcare

• A 32-hour workweek with full pay, and expansion of the federal minimum wage

• The transformation of the US into a parliamentary republic and a ban on lobbying

• Universal (?) rent control and the construction of social housing

• The implementation of reparations for slavery and ‘tribal sovereignty’

• A federal jobs guarantee via public investment in ‘green’ infrastructure

• Public ownership of (only) the largest corporations

• Expanding the rights of unions

We will take them at their word for now, even though the vast majority of this will certainly remain a fantasy should they attain political power.

Does it need to be said? This is nothing but capitalism.

What we find here is not the program of a proletarian organization, but a program to reshape capitalism in what is imagined as a more ‘equitable’ and ‘democratic’ way; a program to preserve it, and meet the bourgeoisie halfway; a program of abject surrender to the ‘entire global system of capitalism’ to extract a few more scraps, large and small, for their domestic class base, and empower the most reactionary unions on the face of this planet. Every single thing on this list is a cowardly compromise with the bourgeoisie in its very own way. It contains a preservation of the bourgeois state, of private housing, of private land ownership, of monopoly capital, of the settler-colonial structure of the United States, of economism in the union movement, and an affirmation of ‘green capitalism’ wrapped up in the language of the New Deal.

And this endless list of concessions is the most ‘demanding’ they will ever get, with no acute need to make compromises with the bourgeois state they wish to enter en masse, so dearly. Yet.

This ‘maximalist’ program will only get more ‘minimal’ as time goes on.

Elements of capitalism may certainly persist as the transition towards socialism is accomplished; to assume anything else would be ridiculous, and retreat into Anarchist adventurism. But since the DSA lacks a basic idea of what this transition might even entail, and outright rejects what is ultimately necessary for it, meaning revolution and the suppression of the bourgeoisie as a class, what else can we conclude? Even Kautsky himself would shudder at this; not even the most cowardly reformist in the SPD of old could stomach such an obvious surrender to capital.

But don’t worry! The DSA assures us that this is only temporary… though considering the quality of their assurances, maybe they shouldn’t have:

“DSA has written this program for ending capitalist oligarchy and creating a real democracy. Some of these demands may be won under our current system, but we know complete victory will require building a new society from the ground up.

We push these demands to their furthest extent today, so we can fight for their fullest realization in a socialist future.”

Aren’t they brave? Aren’t they selfless? These front fighters, this vanguard of the ‘new society’, will take the arduous road of becoming government officials, congresspersons, mayors, senators, governors, presidents, or, in one word, paid bureaucrats for the bourgeois state, the very heart of the old society… but naturally, only to pave the way for the movements of the future! In fact, to really challenge the proletariat, to encourage its development to its ‘furthest extent’, they won’t simply step aside at that point. Oh no, that would not do at all. Instead, they will play the stern teacher and raise the class consciousness of the masses of the whole world by continuously selling them to the slaughterhouse of capital, until the American ‘working class’ is prepared to take power… one day, far away!

It is dialectical, you see? (don’t laugh!)

This theory is what I like to call ‘trickle-down socialism’.

Through steady implementation of lesser aims, the ‘workers’ will one day become ready for the real revolutionary program, which the most dedicated ‘socialists’ hold onto in the deepest layers of their hearts, hidden away from the light of day, as a sort of religious truth. There, it serves only to warm them through even the most brutal betrayals of socialism and the most disgusting opportunism, while they prepare for their imagined future. Until then, it is necessary to harden their hearts to the world, and implement bourgeois rule.

However, much like ‘trickle-down-economics’, nothing ever trickles down, except the blood of those caught up in the machine-gun fire of the imperialist world system.

Their ‘democracy’ has already revealed itself as the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, and here is their ‘socialism’, revealed as nothing but a futile attempt to establish a more humane capitalism. What appears as ‘democratic socialism’ finally shows itself as our old friend social democracy, the twin brother of fascism and the great traitor in our own ranks, in a new, shiny guise.

Really, the most damning evidence of modern social democracy’s insufficiency is its own awareness of it, which screams from every pore of its political performance. The somewhat embarrassed rebranding as ‘democratic socialism’ is an attempt to obscure the substance of the matter, but it can only hide for so long, and it fails precisely in the moment it achieves any semblance of political power.

Then it is time for those who didn’t rise to the lofty heights of government officials and parasitic campaign staffers to cry betrayal, and repeat this vicious, self-defeating cycle all over again, at the expense of the proletariat of the whole world.

Luckily, there is no reason for us to take even their most earnest wishes and delusions on this matter seriously. We know they never will transform society; there is no bourgeois-democratic path to socialism, as history itself and the utter failure of the very movement they claim to represent have proven. What is a DSA against an Unidad Popular, or a Communist Party of Indonesia? The comparison itself is obscene, insulting to the Chilean reformists and the popular front tactics of the Indonesian communists. Their destruction and failure were a historic tragedy; by comparison, the American social democrats are not even the shadow of a farce. The real question one ought to ask is why these anti-communists are so attractive for American ‘socialists’ in the first place, and what class-base they truly represent.

Once again, we can find a good summary of the difference between their goals and the interests of the proletariat in an old polemic against Kautsky and his fellow reformists:

Kautsky will have to enjoy the pleasant company of the Legiens and Davids, Plekhanovs, Potresovs, Tseretelis, and Chernovs, who are quite willing to work for the ‘shifting of the balance of forces within the state power’, for ‘winning a majority in parliament’, and ‘raising parliament to the ranks of master of the government’. A most worthy object, which is wholly acceptable to the opportunists and which keeps everything within the bounds of the bourgeois parliamentary republic.

We, however, shall break with the opportunists; and the entire class-conscious proletariat will be with us in the fight—not to ‘shift the balance of forces’, but to overthrow the bourgeoisie, to destroy bourgeois parliamentarism, for a democratic republic after the type of the Commune, or a republic of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, for the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.”

— Lenin, The State and Revolution, 1917

This is, in two paragraphs, the difference between the communist movement and its explicit political enemies, no matter how much they play at waving red flags.

As we have seen, there is not a single ounce of ‘socialism’ in the national program of the DSA, and with that, not an ounce of ‘democracy’ either, for there can be no democracy in our time, except proletarian democracy, which, in itself, necessitates socialist construction and the dictatorship of the proletariat.

All that is left are well-meaning little wishes to modify bourgeois society and beg for scraps at the table, as has always been the purview of social democracy. And like the loyal dogs of the ruling classes they are, they only have the table in sight, only lust after the feast with jealousy, but have no interest or awareness of the fact that it was the butcher’s deed that made the feast possible in the first place.

We, though, must look to the butcher and his merchandise of flesh and blood.

Trickle-Down-Imperialism

We already understand what social democracy is, but before we can understand its concrete relation to US imperialism, we must understand imperialism itself.

So, what is this beast that continuously drowns the world in blood?

Imperialism is, above all else, a totalizing world-system; it is capitalism in the modern age, inseparable from the global process of accumulation and reproduction of capital it springs from. The very air we breathe is thick with it, and any given commodity, any production line, any industrial sector, and any national economy can only be understood as a component part of this all-encompassing dependency structure.

Every piece of metal and plastic has to be clawed from the earth somewhere, after all. Have you dug up any lithium or crude oil lately? How much would you pay for it?

We also know that this world system is responsible for, or rather expresses itself in, a ‘division of the world’ between the different imperialist states and their monopolists. This, in turn, provides the foundation for the subjugation of the entire rest of the world by the leading capitalist states, the imperialist states, who come to rely on their control over them to satisfy the ever-growing hunger of capital for living labor and cheap commodities. Imperialism presents itself as a way to mediate the permanent crisis cycle of capital, and to provide ample opportunity for the individual monopolists to temporarily drive up their profits, while expanding their reserve-army of labor to seemingly boundless proportions. At the same time, it escalates competition between them, and the states they have made their own, to unprecedented levels, creating the foundation for the horror of imperialist world wars.

This contradiction between the imperial core and the imperial periphery constitutes one aspect of the primary contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, between the socialized nature of production and the private ownership of the means of production, from which it develops and is reproduced daily and hourly. From there, it takes on unique qualities that influence and shape the class struggle as a whole, by raising it to a truly global scale.

Not so long ago, this took the form of direct colonial rule, unequal treaties, territorial concessions, and monopolization of foreign industries by direct force. Today, while some of these forms still persist in more-or-less modified versions, it has largely been replaced by indirect forms of domination. The power of the imperial core over the vast majority of the imperial periphery has shifted from old-style colonialism to neo-colonialism, which persists to this day—this shift makes it no less effective or brutal. In the introduction to his work on neo-colonialism, Kwame Nkrumah defined it in these terms, which are very useful for our purposes:

“The essence of neo-colonialism is that the State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside.

[…]

The result of neo-colonialism is that foreign capital is used for the exploitation rather than for the development of the less developed parts of the world. Investment under neo-colonialism increases rather than decreases the gap between the rich and the poor countries of the world.

[…]

Neo-colonialism, like colonialism, is an attempt to export the social conflicts of the capitalist countries. The temporary success of this policy can be seen in the ever-widening gap between the richer and the poorer nations of the world. But the internal contradictions and conflicts of neo-colonialism make it certain that it cannot endure as a permanent world policy.”

— Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism, 1965

Something Nkrumah pointed out over and over again is that neo-colonialism must not be understood as a kind of regression from the direct rule of old-style colonialism. In fact, it constitutes an objective advance in its capacity to dominate nations, fit for the shape of the new world it was born from; with this, it also increases the capacity to transfer wealth from the neo-colonies to the imperial core, by outsourcing the ‘costs’ of development to the client states, while reaping all the benefits of capital investment.

This is the basis of the modern welfare state, in the sense that it fulfills the role of pacification in the imperial core, binding the interests of many workers to the imperialist state, while outsourcing the costs to the periphery:

Neo-colonialism constitutes the necessary condition for the establishment of welfare states by the imperialist nations. Just as the welfare state is the internal condition, neo-colonialism is the external condition, for the continued hegemony of international finance capital.

Significantly, the neo-colonialist system costs the capitalist powers comparatively little, while enormous and increasing profits are made. This is shown by the ever-rising graphs representing the turn-over figures of the big capitalist business concerns implanted in the neo-colonialist areas of the world, and by the ever-widening gap between the wealthy and the poor peoples of the world.

In the final analysis, the neo-colonialist system of exploitation, which is the external condition for the maintenance of the capitalist welfare state, remains essentially dependent on the production of the neo-colonised workers, who must not only continue to produce under stagnant and continually worsening living conditions, but must produce substantially more than they did in the colonial days. They must do more than satisfy the needs of the metropolitan state. They must cater for the insatiable demands of the client government.

— Kwame Nkrumah, The Handbook of Revolutionary Warfare, 1968

We find the fulfilment of the dynamic Nkrumah paints in the entirety of the imperial core, but even here, the United States remains first among the plunderers; as the Sanders, Mamdanis, and AOCs never get tired of pointing out, it is the richest country in the history of the world after all… and this does not just go for the bourgeoisie, no matter what they claim.

Now, many would scoff at the idea that the American state resembles a welfare state, but as already discussed, the transfer of wealth from the imperial periphery to the core takes many forms, and a direct repartition of the spoils of imperialism by the state is often the least of them. The very structure of the global economy, from the basic function of the global value chains to systematic unequal exchange over decades and centuries, takes care of that repartition through the superexploitation of proletarians in the imperial periphery, and a ‘cutting in’ of workers in the imperial core into the superprofits produced by them. This is accomplished by paying them wages that vastly exceed the value they themselves produce, but goes far beyond it. Naturally, wages and the value of labor are not equivalents, but their sheer discrepancy can’t be explained by a difference in productivity or relative standard of living. To do so leads to all kinds of absurdities, when viewed on a global scale, one more chauvinist than the last.

In fact, this ‘bribery’ is exactly what has always constituted the transformation of workers into labor aristocrats, whether it concerned a small stratum of individual managers and specialists, uplifted through being handed a share of the surplus value produced by the workers, as it did in the early 19th century, or entire nations, as it does now. Together with the development of the imperialist world system, the scale of this ‘bribery’ has also developed to unprecedented heights; capital and its reproduction have become a truly global affair.

In general, we find that in the age of imperialism an ever-growing part of the imperial core working class is transformed into labor aristocrats, who live parasitically on the labor of the imperial periphery, which easily outmatches the relative value of their own productive labor, even when adjusted for other factors. In fact, less and less of it is productive labor in the first place, and more closely resembles the management, supervision, and realization of value produced by others, which was usually the purview of the bourgeoisie and the leading sections of their paid overseers. Some of these occupations are genuinely parasitic, while others are an inevitable result of capitalist production, and are necessary for valorization of value under capitalist production; what they have in common is that, in themselves, they produce no value.

Even once we adjust for ‘costs of living’—though this is already a tired concession to bourgeois common sense, since it is (mainly) productivity that matters if we ought to account for wage differences—the American working class as a whole remains among the richest on the entire planet. Certainly one can find a larger pool of people living in abject poverty than in almost any other imperialist state, but the high real income combined with a relatively low tax burden also produces the largest pool of ‘working-class’ millionaires of any state. This dynamic becomes even more obvious when we account for the nationally oppressed and racialized groups in the US, who get a lesser share in every way imaginable.

Or, as J. Sakai points out in his famous and often maligned polemic against the American settler class, and the notion that it constitutes a proletariat:

“The observation was made by the Black Liberation Movement during the 1960’s that modern Amerika was just ‘slavery days’ on a higher level - in which U.S. imperialism as slavemaster made the entire Third World its plantation and Amerika itself its ‘Big House.’ The real economy of the U.S. Empire is not continental but global in its structural dimensions.

The U.S. oppressor nation itself has increasingly specialized into a headquarters society, heavily dependent upon the super profits of looting the entire Third World. This is more than just a matter of dollar transactions. Born out of the slave trade and the conquest of Indian lands, raised up to power through colonial labor, the U.S. oppressor nation has again developed a one-sided dependence, even for its daily necessities, on the labor and resources of the oppressed nations.

[…]

So all over the Third World the oppressed not only supply U.S. imperialism with raw materials, but increasingly labor in both the factories and ‘the factories in the fields’ to send the U.S. a growing stream of consumer and industrial products, and even foodstuffs. The world plantation is still very real in the age of the computer. We say that the first makes the second possible.”

— J. Sakai, Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat, 1983

These are words to remember well, when attempting to understand why the social democrats act as they do; the problem is to assume they have any interest in transforming this system in the first place, when it is to their immediate benefit.

It would be one thing for the fighting party of the proletariat to lead the workers in a struggle for their immediate interests, but there is nothing ‘socialist’ about these goals in their own right when they are handed down to them by a bourgeois government that upholds the daily functioning of imperialism. Economic struggles and temporary gains are, always, a means to an end for those who struggle to overcome capitalist class rule, not an end in itself; without this, it turns into a struggle to distribute the spoils of imperialism among the American working class, which is a thoroughly reactionary demand.

Here, but only here, the trickle-down effect can become reality; however, this is not a victory for the international proletariat, but a horror to behold.

In the DSA and American social democracy as a whole, we find a party that has no strategy nor class interest to actually overthrow capitalism, but a very powerful incentive to strike a ‘compromise’ between the bourgeoisie and the ‘working-class’, much like the New Deal once did, but on a broader level; the strict segregation of the labor aristocracy has increasingly broken down, even though its general segmentation along national lines remains. The incredible wealth disparity between black workers and white workers alone, or even between the privileged strata of black immigrant workers and ‘native’ black workers, is more than ample evidence for that. The former is mediated by property and land ownership, the very heart of the settler-colonial relation; the latter by the plunder and purchase of specialized labor from the imperial periphery, raised to the ‘command center’ of the global economy, and compensated handsomely for it.

It is the party of its class, of the American labor aristocracy, that demands a restoration of the height it once had generations past; for this, they offer their loyalty to the imperialists, while demanding concessions. Nothing is shocking about this; they are only following their class interest to its natural conclusion, and have been for a long time, with some splendid help from the bourgeois state:

“It is a revealing comparison that during the 1930s the European imperialists could only resolve the social crisis in Italy, Germany, Spain, Poland, Finland, Romania, and so on, by introducing fascism, while in the U.S. the imperialists resolved the social crisis with the New Deal. In Germany the workers were hit with the Gestapo, while in Amerika they got the C.I.O. industrial unions.

[…]

The Eastern and Southern European immigrant national minorities won the ‘better life’ that Americanization promised them. They became full citizens of the U.S. empire, and, with the rest of the white industrial proletariat, won rights and privileges both inside and outside the factories. In return, as U.S. imperialism launched its drive for world hegemony, it could depend upon the armies of solidly united settlers serving imperialism at home and on the battlefield.”

— J. Sakai, Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat, 1983

We can see that those ‘armies’ are still standing, though they had to be reconstituted in different forms, as the white supremacist colonial state was rocked by increasing internal unrest; even the bandaids of the New Deal could not last forever, because crisis inevitably rears its ugly head in the capitalist system.

These days, we find ourselves at the tail end of yet another period of reconstitution, after the 2008 financial crisis and the failure of US imperialism to assert itself as the permanent global hegemon shattered the old compromise, giving rise to all kinds of morbid symptoms. From Trump’s ascendancy (and fall), alongside a dozen other would-be putschists he carried along, to the permanent inter-imperialist conflict brewing at the outer boundaries of the US empire, threatening to cut it down to size as we speak.

It is under these circumstances that American social democracy came limping along, promising to once again create ‘A Future To Believe In’, as Sanders liked to say during his 2016 campaign; a future for American imperialism, working for the ‘majority of Americans’… at the expense of all others, who are not invited for second helpings.

And here, for our finale, we must return to Stalin, and the dual nature of fascism.

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The Dialectics of Social Fascism

It has always been somewhat ironic to me that the Social Fascism Thesis, one of those classic products of the ‘Stalinist’ canon, was essentially finalized before Stalin even properly took his leading role in the Communist Party, and while Lenin was still very much alive, though in his final days, in early 1924.

Of course, and this is the real lie at the centre of most attacks against it, the analysis of the reactionary nature of reformism and its collaboration with the murderers of the bourgeoisie did not originate during the Third Period of the Comintern in 1928, but goes all the way back to the split with the Second International; the appearance and growth of the fascist movement, combined with the solidification of the social democratic line, simply required clarification.

The fact that social democrats and fascists often stand side by side to defend bourgeois power was already confirmed in reality, before fascism even carried a name, when the Freikorps butchers massacred the workers of Berlin, Munich, and the Ruhr, under the leadership of the Social Democratic Party of Germany.

The class character of this movement had been fully revealed.

So what does the Social Fascism Thesis actually say, disconnected from the many misconceptions—and some tragic truths—about its practical application and failure in the Weimar Republic? Let’s take a look at one of its early core formulations:

“Firstly, it is not true that fascism is only the fighting organisation of the bourgeoisie. Fascism is not only a military-technical category. Fascism is the bourgeoisie’s fighting organisation that relies on the active support of Social-Democracy. Social-Democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism.

[…]

These organisations do not negate, but supplement each other. They are not antipodes, they are twins. Fascism is an informal political bloc of these two chief organisations; a bloc, which arose in the circumstances of the post-war crisis of imperialism, and which is intended for combating the proletarian revolution. The bourgeoisie cannot retain power without such a bloc.”

— J. V. Stalin, Concerning the International Situation, 1924

Has there ever been a clearer description of the almost pathological impulse of American ‘socialists’ to defend the enormities of US imperialism, and its armed stormtroopers, wherever there is no liberal common sense to provide an unproblematic counter-narrative?

Most of the abject horror social democrats and certain ‘Marxists’ feel at the comparison to fascism stems from a somewhat unhealthy obsession with the particular form fascism took in Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy. What must be understood is their structural purpose for capitalism, the ultimate cause for the survival of fascism in our day, not its concrete historical expressions alone.

Social democracy and fascism are two tools that serve the interests of the same master, whether those who carry out their respective program are aware of it or not. This master is the imperialist bourgeoisie. Their purpose—even if those who carry out those policies don’t always realize it—is to disorient, combat, and ultimately destroy the proletarian movement for communism, finding their most common expressions in two modes of bourgeois rule in our day: The liberal democratic welfare state and the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary sections of capital. One popular way to frame this is to claim that social democracy is the carrot, and fascism is the stick; the former appears as the first instinct in the imperialist states, while the latter serves as a measure of last resort.

While this might not be explicitly wrong—it is a useful shorthand I have used in this very publication—it stands on very shaky ground when it is applied beyond the fascist dictatorships of the 20th century, which are far too historically specific to understand as a universal form of fascism. Instead, we must look at fascism and social democracy in their relation to one another, not only as distinct and successive forms of state, but in their coexistence in the modern bourgeois state, one next to the other.

When doing so, we quickly see that elements of fascism and social democracy are expressed in all modern imperialist states, complementing each other. This isn’t a coincidence either, as both are developments of capitalism in its imperialist stage, growing into themselves alongside the division of the world between the imperialist powers, which necessitates two distinct forms of state rule, initially made to fit the colonial territories and the metropole, respectively.

It is well known that there is a connection, a somewhat uneven line, between colonial violence and fascist violence; perhaps even more well-known, how closely linked the fascist formations in Italy and Germany were to the violence of the First World War. Yet somehow, to even consider the idea that the sort of violence the American state enacts on an incredible scale ought to be connected to the class character of those who want a share in those very spoils is considered a political crime beyond reckoning. Even the direct material relationship between the two is not enough. It is at its most obvious when the frankly disgusting worship of veterans is invoked, but it goes far beyond that; you do not have to get your own hands dirty to get your share of the price, after all.

The scale of the absurdity becomes clear when the victims of the horrors the US state enacts, be it abroad or at home, come into direct contact with the sort of politics, gravely nodding their heads at this or that election, while denouncing rhetoric that would ‘alienate American voters’. For Palestinians, it did not matter which administration was in charge; when the national liberation struggle of black, indigenous, chicano, and other oppressed peoples was at its height, they all provided the force necessary to put them down. The condition for the lifestyle of the vast majority of Americans, and the further security of that lifestyle, is the implementation of fascist forms of rule against those who wish to change their own position in the world system, and with that, often its class relations as such.

These ‘socialists’ will be no different, or they will be crushed; history itself proves it.

What can we call them but social fascists, if they stand side by side with oppression and anti-proletarian class warfare of this sort? When the chauvinism they bring to the table is the same, only rationalized for a different section of the exact same class-base? When the system they uphold is the very system that reproduces fascism?

The point of Marxist analysis is to provide us with a clearer view of the world, beyond all obfuscations, to pave the way for proletarian power; if the term fascism is restricted to its most obvious and cliché manifestations, independent of the real social relations that reproduce it and in which it has always manifested, it becomes useless.

In fact, the general shape of these social relations was already outlined by Lenin over a century ago, before the term fascism was ever coined:

“On the one hand, there is the tendency of the bourgeoisie and the opportunists to convert a handful of very rich and privileged nations into ‘eternal’ parasites on the body of the rest of mankind, to ‘rest on the laurels’ of the exploitation of Negroes, Indians, etc., keeping them in subjection with the aid of the excellent weapons of extermination provided by modern militarism.

On the other hand, there is the tendency of the masses, who are more oppressed than before and who bear the whole brunt of imperialist wars, to cast off this yoke and to overthrow the bourgeoisie. It is in the struggle between these two tendencies that the history of the labour movement will now inevitably develop. For the first tendency is not accidental; it is ‘substantiated’ economically.

In all countries the bourgeoisie has already begotten, fostered and secured for itself ‘bourgeois labour parties’ of social-chauvinists.

[…]

The important thing is that, economically, the desertion of a stratum of the labour aristocracy to the bourgeoisie has matured and become an accomplished fact; and this economic fact, this shift in class relations, will find political form, in one shape or another, without any particular ‘difficulty’.”

— Lenin, Imperialism and the Split in Socialism, 1916

In the development of the labor aristocracy, the kernel of fascism is already contained, and to this day, its many roots and sprouts infest our collective political body.

What makes American social democrats the enemy of the proletariat all around the world is the simple fact that if they have their way, they will turn the American labor aristocrats into the staunchest defenders of imperialism in the history of the world, even as they pretend to lead a struggle against it. The desertion to the bourgeoisie has long since become an accomplished fact. There is no way past this; no way to paint over their actual position in the class struggle; no way to hide that the carrot was only made possible by the bloody end of the stick.

Or, in the words of George Jackson, who actually fought the American imperialists, instead of shaking hands with them as they plunder the world and hand out treats:

No compromise with the imperialist bourgeoisie and their state.

No compromise with their lackeys and agents in the social democratic movement.

No compromise with the national chauvinists in the labor aristocracy.

The only line that can overthrow capitalism is the proletarian line, and it belongs to the proletariat of the whole world, not the parasites who feast on their blood.

Thank you for reading!

I’ll keep it short this time: Thank you for sticking around with Our History; my last article was posted almost seven months ago, and I’ve been incredibly busy with many things, some of them political, some of them personal; some of them positive, some of them less so. Despite that, the publication has gained over one thousand subscribers since, which is frankly incredible in the actual sense of the word. It means a lot.

Either way, I hope to breathe some more life into this publication again in the coming weeks and months, instead of only providing you with my thoughts and commentary in snarky, short notes on the social media side of this platform.

Once again, if you want to support my work, you can do so with a paid subscription or by making a donation on Ko-fi, depending on your preferences.

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Restacking and sharing this article also helps a ton to give it more reach.

Beyond that, consider leaving a comment to let me know what you think, generate some discussion, or to curse my name for dividing ‘the left’ or whatever. You are welcome to do all or none of them.

See you next time; hopefully sooner than in seven months!

For now, despite the lovely lines from Brecht, we must start with the wrong one.

It feels almost impossibly self-absorbed to head an article like this with a personal anecdote, but I ask you to bear with me here for a minute. I’m not in Tehran, Isfahan, or Qom, and neither are the overwhelming majority of you. Those who are in Iran, or have family or friends there, deserve more than fantasies of resistance and brave phrases, so I will start with my concrete reality and keep moving to the general from there—you would be well advised to do the same.

Besides, there is a point to make.

As soon as I heard about the attack on Iran, my first reaction was shock—not because it surprised me, but because it overwhelmed me. I had simply hoped it would not happen, despite my best judgment telling me the exact opposite.

A war against Iran has been the worst-case scenario for an escalation of imperialist aggression in West Asia for as long as I can remember being conscious of these things. An act of monstrous cruelty against more than ninety million people—something that once seemed conceivable only in the deranged minds of John Bolton, Lindsey Graham, and other desk murderers like them.

And yet, here we are. They were bragging about it, too. Could you hear them howling for blood, while the oil fields and people burned?

That is, until they started losing. They have become quieter since.

I was visiting my family in Bavaria when the war started so I headed to a quickly thrown-together demonstration in front of the US Consulate in Munich. Frankly, the reason I went had less to do with the concrete political use of yelling at American diplomatic missions and more with my curiosity about how many people would show up and what the prevailing mood would be. It was a small affair.

Afterwards, I texted an Iranian friend of mine in Vienna to report on the condition of anti-imperialism in my former home. It was not a good showing. If anything, I was disgusted with how laughably inadequate the initial response was, even though it had a purely symbolic character in the first place. She told me that her uncle, her aunt, and three of her cousins were preparing to leave their home in Tehran because of the American bombing campaign.

There is nothing symbolic about that.

The distinction between the concrete and symbolic in politics, the aspirational and the real, is part of the problem.

Here we can see a movement, the anti-imperialist movement in the Western states, unable to adapt to the radicalization of reality itself. The lack of mobilization and the prevailing slogans actually show a regression from the pro-Palestinian movement, which was already too constrained in terms of tactics and solidarity with the armed struggle. It would be all too easy to blame the police repression for this, but that is a comfortable delusion that I don’t consider worth engaging with—people have overcome far worse than a few kicks and punches and the occasional court date, for far less worthy causes.

The reality is that any sympathies in the imperial core for struggles in the imperial periphery are choked by both a flawed perception of victimhood and a lack of genuinely internationalist consciousness.

Sympathies alone aren’t solidarity by a long shot.

Only ‘perfect victims’, to say it in the terms of Mohammed el-Kurd, actually enjoy genuinely widespread support in the imperial core. You will find almost nobody who will openly justify the mass murder of children, but when it comes to those who fight back, the sympathies immediately wilt. During pro-Palestinian demonstrations in Germany, one could practically hear the hushed discomfort of various student activists and Green Party members when more principled groups, often Palestinian organizations, led chants of ‘Yallah, Yallah, Intifada’ or ‘Intifada Revolution’. That is, after all, the language of resistance, war, action—and we can’t have that, not even theoretically.

Direct statements of support for the armed resistance hardly needed to be criminalized, because the vast majority would not have dared to make them in the first place!

This sad pathology is only compounded when it comes to the Iranian state, which is anything but a ‘scrappy’ resistance group; it is a bourgeois state with a powerful arsenal of weapons, a million-strong army, internal repressive organs, officially sanctioned class-collaborationism, and, uniquely, an ideology of rather militant regional anti-imperialism. Worse yet, for many of those who have no analysis beyond an endless succession of tragedies in the Third World, Iran is now winning the war! This state is anything but a ‘perfect victim’ of US-Israeli aggression, and yet it deserves not just our sympathies but our explicit support in defeating that aggression. Many will not see it that way, though; even fewer than when it came to Palestine. Since returning to Vienna, I have spent hours upon hours convincing people that their discomfort with Iranian national flags at demonstrations initiated by Iranians is, to put it politely, delusional.

Time and reflection may fix some of that, as it did when it came to attitudes towards the armed Palestinian resistance, but there is an even more fundamental problem.

A question of political consciousness:

Well-meaning words quickly melt away when concrete support comes with a cost to personal convenience higher than spending an afternoon taking a walk, which is all most protests truly end up being. This somewhat grotesque social performance reigns supreme over politics; the cost for genuine resistance is too high, and alternatives seem ungraspable and abstract. It is rooted in the particular class position of the labor aristocracy and petty-bourgeoisie of the imperial core, who are ‘bribed’ by the superprofits extracted from the imperial periphery, securing their place on top of the global value chains, but it isn’t a natural law. Social being may determine consciousness, but subjective consciousness can transform social reality, both one’s own and that of society, if it is expressed in the real activity of politics, not merely symbolic substitutes—in this sense, consciousness may also transform into social being.

The power of mass politics is as real in the imperial core as it is in the imperial periphery; it just needs to be grasped by the masses, and they may even carry large sections of the petty-bourgeoisie and labor aristocracy with them in the process. Those who shirk that necessity are nothing but Western chauvinists, who hope others can do their dirty work for them until ‘socialism’ is magically granted to them by the march of history.

To transform possibilities into realities, orientation is required—a correct political line and political leadership; the revolutionary line and the revolutionary vanguard. Class consciousness does not grow on trees, international solidarity isn’t a mere slogan, and above all else, tactics need to be steadily and bitterly improved through struggle.

All this article can do is provide some clarity on the correct political line itself, to hopefully play a small role in that initial process of orientation.

So, what is our line?

Nothing less than support for the total and unconditional defeat of Euro-American imperialism by the Iranian state and/or the Iranian masses, both for those who live in the imperial core and those who live in the various comprador states of the periphery that host military bases used in the war of aggression against Iran.

In short, our line must be the revolutionary defeatist line:

Today, as in 1915, the modern successors of the social-chauvinists constitute a majority that needs to be beaten back without any room for opportunistic maneuvering between their various factions, while winning over those parts of the masses who have fallen for their lies.

However, abstract sloganeering means absolutely nothing and is worse than useless if it isn’t rooted in the concrete conditions of any given struggle. We are not in 1915, nor do we live in Tsarist Russia or the German Empire. Even though the general sentiment of this passage is universal, let’s take a closer look at our reality.

What is at stake, along which lines does the struggle take place, and what needs to be done?

What political consequences need to be drawn from the revolutionary defeatist line?

What must we do to ensure that West Asia becomes the grave of American imperialism?

Only our enemy is clear so far.

What Do the American Imperialists Want?

In one word: Destruction—but not irrationally so, as vile as the results might be.

On the very first day, the US and Israel set the tone for their grand war of ‘liberation’ by ‘heroically’ blowing up the 86-year-old Ali Khamenei alongside other senior leaders of the Iranian state—and just as often their families. This was swiftly followed by the murder of at least 175 civilians, the vast majority of them small children, in a primary school in the city of Minab. Calculated terror bombing and genocidal indifference to civilian deaths are hardly distinguishable when it comes to these actions. The only thing they liberate people from is their lives; by now, the numbers are in the thousands.

The next day, the imperialists declared imminent victory, as they have been doing for every other day since, and presumably will be doing for the next months as they plunge deeper and deeper into crisis. As I’m finishing this article, the US is drawing up an expeditionary force clearly designed for a limited land invasion, while the state’s mouthpieces are claiming total victory has already been achieved, as if the repetition alone would make it a reality.

Their propaganda is just as incoherent as their strategy.

In their public statements, the imperialists wildly undulate between mutually exclusive goals that range from Trump’s laughable bluster about ‘unconditional surrender’ all the way to Netanyahu’s rambling about backing a ‘popular uprising’ that is exclusively manifesting in his head. Beyond that, and despite claims to the contrary from the aggressors, Iran has shown a remarkable capacity to fight back through attacks against the assets of the US, the Gulf Monarchies, and Israel, all while using control over the Strait of Hormuz to seriously threaten their economies. Meanwhile, the much-lauded ‘Iron Dome’ has turned into more of a theoretical concept, as Khorramshahr missiles and Shahed drones strike the Zionist state’s military and intelligence infrastructure every single day.

The myth of American invincibility in conventional warfare, through sheer force of its bloated military budget, is getting damaged further with every strike, which is, at the very least, a moral victory for all peoples struggling against imperialism.

If the beast can be scratched, it can be killed.

It would be all too easy to chalk up this war, and its current failure to achieve any concrete goals, to a deep irrationalism caused by putting incompetent clowns like Trump and Hegseth in charge of the empire. Perhaps, as various reactionaries and petty-bourgeois ‘socialists’ insist, they were tricked by Netanyahu and the Zionist lobby into fighting an ‘Israeli war’, which goes against the ‘national interests’ of the US? Is the tail wagging the dog, after all?

It can be tempting to fall for these discourses, especially since the Iranian government has quite successfully (and shrewdly) picked up on the ‘Epstein Class’ terminology as part of their war propaganda, but this fails at even a semblance of analytical coherence. Of course, Netanyahu’s government may very well have convinced Trump and his close advisors, already emboldened by the Venezuelan adventure, to stumble into a larger war. There are certainly real divisions between the US and Israel concerning the scope of the war, just as there are real divisions between different factions of capital inside the US. However, this alone changes nothing about the generalized goals of the US bourgeoisie and Zionism’s role in them, much less about imperialism itself.

Imperialism has an independent historical logic rooted in the necessities of capital and growing out of its contradictions; it works through and often in spite of individuals, not according to their whims.

Hegel once described Napoleon as ‘world history on horseback’ (this is actually a misquote, but it is correct in essence) because he embodied the current developmental stage of the world spirit in his age, even if he himself was blind to it. ‘Great men’ do not make history, but history makes ‘great men’. Marx and Engels ultimately demystified this conception and revealed the world spirit, the motive force of history, as nothing but the relentless struggle of classes.

Needless to say, Trump is not Napoleon; the ‘world spirit’ found him lacking. Where the French Emperor was on horseback, the Commander-in-Chief is riding a blind mule down a cliff. To see a fundamental break in the logic of American imperialism under Trump is giving him and his advisors far too much credit.

The new-old aggression of US ‘foreign policy’ we can all see is a sign of dwindling hegemony at best, where the empire is trying to assert control over what it still can, in a process best described as imperial downsizing. Their semi-colonies in the Americas need to be rallied closely to shut out Chinese capital, and now they are trying to secure West Asia for their Israeli outpost to the best of their ability… and to limited success.

For this, the Iranian state needs to be neutralized or destroyed, as has essentially been US policy ever since 1979, and even before, when the Shahist state tried to assert limited autonomy through developmentalist policy. This is perfectly rational from the perspective of US imperialism, especially in a world where Israel’s leadership and economic integration in West Asia, once seemingly accomplished with the so-called ‘Abraham Accords’, was dealt a grievous wound by Operation Al-Aqsa Flood. Over two years later, and despite a war of extermination, the Palestinian resistance and their allies live, the Gulf States are more hesitant than ever to concede to Israeli regional dominance, and the colonial state is reviled the world over.

Or, as Georges Abdallah pointed out in a recent interview:

“On October 7th, the world told this colonial project: you have reached your end. The violence unleashed today in Gaza and Lebanon is the expression of that final chapter. Israel can no longer present itself to the peoples of the world as a ‘democracy.’ It has revealed itself for what it is: an absolute symbol of barbarism. Without the moral and political support of the imperialist West, Israel cannot survive.

They can continue sending it weapons, but weapons do not change history. It is the people who make it.”

To destroy Iran, or at least weaken its regional influence substantially, is the only recourse to keep the Zionist project functional in its current form, and with that, to have any chance to secure control over West Asia for US imperialism. For the US, this is certainly important, but for Israel, it is a question of survival, which is more than obvious from the increasingly desperate attempts to escalate the stakes of the war.

However, rationality alone should not be mistaken for accomplished fact.

When the Tsarist state joined the First World War on the side of the Entente, it was perfectly rational to secure its interests in the Balkans, and yet it meant its end by igniting revolutionary struggle at home. When the Hitlerites started the Second World War to accomplish their genocidal colonial project in Eastern Europe, they had a perfectly rational interest in revitalizing German imperialism, and yet their ‘Thousand Year Reich’ was crushed by the Soviet peoples. Today, it may seem rational for the US imperialists to plunge West Asia into War to destroy Iran, but they just might have bitten off more than they can chew, with the great majority of the world standing against them.

‘Monsters of all kinds shall be destroyed’, and ultimately it is only the masses who can accomplish this task—let’s talk about their role in the struggle.

What Do the Iranian Masses Need?

The title of this heading may be provocative to some of you, and I can assure you that is the intention.

Mass politics are real; they don’t happen in the imagination, and if we give up on the investigation of their conditions and exchange them for wishes and dreams, we might as well give up on politics altogether.

You might ask, even keeping this in mind, who I am to decide what tens of millions of people in Iran need?

Nobody.

Nevertheless, this is the shape hegemonic ideology on the Iranian masses usually takes, whether I, you, or anyone else likes it or not. In the resulting discourses, the masses are either passive victims, ideologically captured, or ungraspable beyond racist platitudes and politically misaligned sloganeering. This is a problem, so let’s confront it head-on, instead of taking the frankly embarrassing whining of fascists about the authentic experiences of the Iranian diaspora in Los Angeles or Berlin seriously. After all, who are they to dictate what Iranians need?

Despite what they would want you to believe… also nobody. Less than that. We don’t need to listen to the imperialists’ dogs, because their appeal to ‘lived experience’ makes them bark in tune with the war machine. History has proven a hundred times over that the partisans of US-led ‘regime change’ are reactionaries and enemies of the masses all around the world.

Only real politics matter, so judge their fascism on its own terms.

If we follow the narrative told by the partisans of regime change, and this has long become liberal common sense, the ‘Iranian people’, who are imagined as a vaguely defined mass beyond class lines, are in struggle with the rootless clergy, which rules through sheer terror and ideological capture of unfixable radicals; the IRGC’s Basij militias on one end, the ‘morality police’ on the other. In this grand national struggle against the clergy and their forcefully imposed state, any means are acceptable to topple it. Some, without the necessary tact to conceal their hand, openly advocate for US or even Israeli intervention, pathologically painting the Islamic Republic as some civilizational evil that needs to be wiped out like Nazi Germany. Others at least have the sense to advocate for the ‘popular’ restoration of the Shah, or even a ‘secular democracy’, to appeal to the Western chauvinists they speak to. Most commonly, especially among ‘leftists’, all of this is ignored, and it is insinuated that with enough time, ‘the people’ will rise and replace the Iranian ‘regime’ with some barely defined new form of government on their own accord, as if Iran existed in a bubble free from foreign influence, and revolutions come to fruition spontaneously.

As Marxists, we know this is utter nonsense, whether those who advocate for it believe it or not. Once you remove class analysis, the only political subjects left in their narrative are an abstract ‘people’ versus an abstract ‘regime.’ In this vacuum, the imperialist becomes the only vaguely plausible subject capable of action.

The best-case scenario in this fantasy is the subjugation of Iran by the US imperialists; the far more likely outcome is total state collapse, followed by years of brutal civil and interstate war—in short, the Zionists’ dream.

Luckily, it will remain a dream. The missiles hitting Tel-Aviv have made that exceedingly clear.

As Marxists, we also understand that bourgeois society is divided into antagonistic classes. This also goes for Iran. There is no united Iranian people, unless the interests of classes in struggle align in certain aspects. This is always temporary and conditional.

The real question is whether or not the Iranian masses—the urban and rural proletariat, the semi-proletariat, the remnants of the smallholding peasantry, and the most precarious sections of the petty-bourgeoisie—are currently aligned with the Iranian bourgeoisie, and the reactionary classes allied to them, who make up the state’s ruling classes. It is beyond any doubt that since the start of the war, the Iranian state has been in an existential struggle with imperialism, and that the victory of imperialism would mean nothing less than the total loss of national sovereignty and the plunder of the country by foreign capital. Iran, or whatever is left of it, would once again become a semi-colony of Western capital, and turn into a repository for cheap labor, capital export, and uncontrolled petrochemical resource extraction. It is in the most basic interests of the Iranian masses to firmly resist national subjugation, and as long as the Iranian bourgeois state shares that goal and can effectively fulfill it, they are aligned in this matter.

For now, the principal contradiction is between the masses and imperialism, not between the masses and the national bourgeoisie. However, should the national bourgeois state fail to defend Iran against subjugation, or should one faction or another of the bourgeoisie capitulate to imperialism or collaborate with it, as happened in Venezuela, the masses may be forced to take the lead in the struggle. In the meantime, the preservation of their organizational independence is key, and with that, the rejection of any right-opportunism in regards to the state. The proletariat needs to stay vigilant, when it stands next to the national bourgeoisie.

These days, in terms of the future, I am often reminded of Ervand Abrahamian’s closing words of his 1982 classic on the history and present of late-modern Iran:

“Similarly, the clergy are unlikely to find another public enemy as unpopular as the shah against whom they can rally the whole population—unless, of course, a foreign enemy invades the country and threatens the existence of the entire nation. Finally, the clergy will gradually lose their organizational monopoly once the secular forces catch their breath and start establishing roots among the discontented classes, especially among the intelligentsia, the urban proletariat, and the rural lower classes.

But whether it will be the older organizations, notably the Tudeh and the National Front, or those of more recent origin, such as the Feda’i and the Mujahedin, or even elements within the shattered military, that will attract the discontented classes is a question left to posterity.”

— Ervand Abrahamian, Iran Between Two Revolutions, 1982

Over four decades later, everything Abrahamian predicted in the first paragraph has largely come true, while all the organizations that seemed ripe to take a leading role once the alliance between the clergy, petty-bourgeoisie, and capital, threatened to rupture, were swept away by history. The Islamic Republic remained, though, until recently, in a constant crisis cycle, driven equally by imperialist siege and bitter urban discontent, ending in periodic political repression.

Nobody can tell the future, but as is often the case in times where a war of national defence takes place, existing internal contradictions become blurred until they reach a breaking point as external conditions change; from Revolutionary France, to the Chinese Civil War, all the way to the Algerian Revolution, this has proven to be correct.

The future of the Iranian national bourgeois state is tied to the future of the war, and with that to the future of all of West Asia.

We already discussed one extreme of the potential outcomes: The destruction of the Iranian state and consequent subjugation of what remains of it by Western imperialism; at least a temporary spatial fix for the Zionist colonial state and further integration with the Gulf States. However, this has already turned into a fantasy right before our eyes, considering the total strategic defeat of the US and the destruction of its military base infrastructure in the region.

What seems more likely at this point, is far on the other end of the spectrum: A war that will increasingly take initiative against the weakest link of US hegemony in the region, the decrepit and unpopular Gulf Monarchies, potentially crushing them altogether, and chasing the US back to cower in Israel and Jordan; the eventual collapse of Zionism, as it attempts to reach a strategic equilibrium in a region dominated by the Iranian state, while grappling with emboldened Palestinian and Lebanese resistance; total regional defeat for US imperialism, and the end of its hegemony in West Asia.

While this is anything but certain, it seems more likely by the day, and it would change the world forever; it would send the imperialist world system into a crisis it has not seen for decades.

This crisis would give the global proletariat precious room to breathe in its struggle for socialism. It would be a victory in itself and pave the way to many more victories.

If the beast can be scratched, it can be killed.

In this sense, any anti-imperialists worthy of the name hope for the victory of the Iranian masses, whether they have to stand on their own, or can stand with the Islamic Republic for the time being, as it fights a historically progressive war against imperialism. But hope alone is not enough. Those of us who live in the imperial core, or in US comprador states in West Asia and all around the world, have our own tasks in this struggle if we intend to show real solidarity, instead of empty words and pious wishes.

Let’s talk about some of those tasks.

Support My Work!

What Must We Do?

One thing up front, then a short discussion:

I despise the way the word ‘support’ is often abused by activist circles, and the form in which it has been made common sense among the petty-bourgeoisie of effectively all countries. You should despise it, too.

Why? Because ‘support’ has become conceptually meaningless, and, in the classic fashion of bourgeois ideological trends, has been turned towards the opposite of its essential meaning. The thoughts in your head do not constitute support for anything, and neither do the words written on this platform or spoken among your friends and your ‘community’, even though political agitation obviously has a place in the overall struggle. Support invariably means to prepare for action and to take action. The goal must be to effect material change in the real world; anything else is either personal fulfilment disguised as politics, pure performance, or an attempt to find a market niche in the online platform or NGO economy. We have no need for that, and neither do the Iranian masses.

It is easy, perhaps even tempting, to substitute real politics for these aspirational forms, while feeling ‘authentically’ connected to Iran through the mediation of social media and the bourgeois press. That alone is not enough, though it is perfectly understandable and can even provide progressive orientation.

I know that I’m not alone when I say that it gives me genuine joy to finally see the heart of the genocidal Zionist regime challenged; to see missiles and drones shatter the delusion of safety in the settler colony; to watch the desk murderers scramble as their plans to destroy Iran fail to manifest, and in turn, may just destroy them.

Similarly, it should rightfully give you hope that the American imperialists, with their trillion-dollar arms projects and vast economic advantage, are being beaten back as we speak; that the majority of their military bases in West Asia have been rendered unusable to such a degree, that they are reduced to hiding like roaches in hotels built for rich Western tourists; that they are on the run. We have all seen the videos of Palestinians cheering in Gaza when missiles rained down on Israel during the 2025 Twelve-Day War. How could they not? How could we not? Now those very same videos can be seen in the Gulf Monarchies, where the masses of migrant workers and proletarianized citizens are rightfully asking themselves why exactly they should be the ones to die for the United States, and their domestic bureaucrat-capitalists who exploit them for cheap, semi-indentured labor.

If tomorrow an Iranian missile hit a US military base in Germany, as unlikely as that scenario might be, my support would be no less vocal, and neither should be yours. The imperialist world system is entering a time of renewed crisis, and it should be used on all fronts to weaken US hegemony, and point out the real enemy—and that enemy remains right at home.

The revolutionary defeatist line, the only correct political line in a reactionary war, not only means to desire the defeat of one’s own government and one’s own imperialist bloc; it also means to bring that defeat about through political struggle.

This is, of course, easier said than done.

How often have you heard people complain that they don’t know what to do, even if they theoretically hold the correct political views and say the right words? This is nothing but a childish attitude common among the radicalized sections of the petty-bourgeoisie of all countries, who imagine the world must either be changed immediately or it can never change at all; they constantly shift between pseudo-radicalism and total surrender, depending on the mood of the day. Some of them may engage in productive politics in the meantime, but to defeat imperialism, and with that the combined power of our own states, requires a sustained struggle that can never be substituted by individualized action.

In short, and at the risk of sounding like a broken record on this topic, it requires the constitution of the revolutionary vanguard party, which can bridge the gap between scattered legal, semi-legal, and illegal struggles, develop a sharp revolutionary political line, and bring the most advanced sections of the masses into the fold of the struggle to assume leadership.

This is our task in the medium-term. In the short-term, it becomes a question of where to find the people to build this party, which will necessarily vary depending on local conditions. There is hardly a comparison to be made between an imperial core state like Britain, directly involved in the war, a semi-feudal comprador state like India, indirectly interwoven with US imperialism and Zionism, or a reactionary ‘artificial’ state like Kuwait, that serves as little more than a means for US capital to plunder the region.

Let me illustrate this differentiation with the case I know best:

In Germany, the most politically advanced section of the anti-imperialist movement has coalesced around the semi-legal anti-Zionist and anti-militarist struggle, where the demands against both German imperialism and its larger role in US imperialism intersect. The combination of war preparations against Russia and open support for the genocide in Gaza by the German state has led to a rift in the petty-bourgeois student movement; the more radical sections often merging with the most politically advanced sections of proletarianized migrants in Germany. Communists played an outsized role in this process. This combined effort is largely in its infancy and is plagued by a lack of mutual integration of concrete struggles, but it exists and is rooted in organizational coordination for the first time in post-’reunification’ history. In fact, it is miles ahead of where it was before 2023, and for the first time in my life, it seems like the formation of a vanguard organization might be within reach.

I can’t tell you what the condition of the struggle in your own country is, and you would be a fool to listen to me in the abstract, but if there is anything to take away from this, you should investigate closely where the different national trends of anti-imperialism connect, and where they can be advanced against US imperialism and your own bourgeois state, by mobilizing people against both at once.

All struggles are connected.

There is no need to follow the irrelevant and cowardly ‘peace movements’ that can do no better than scream ‘Hands off Iran’, just as they screamed ‘Hands off Iraq’ two decades ago, to little effect. Our slogan is victory for Iran, victory for the Iranian masses, and victory for the masses of West Asia in their combined struggle against US imperialism and Zionism.

One day, once the US imperialists have been swept away, these relations may change, and historically progressive forces may change into their opposites, becoming reactionary, but our support for the masses will not.

We are for peace, but never peace with imperialism and colonialism. Or, as Mao once said when the struggle against these twin evils was advancing like never before:

That day may be sooner than anyone could have imagined.

What started with Operation Al-Aqsa Flood turned into an avalanche that may bring down the whole rotten foundation of US imperialism in West Asia. We all have our role to play in this struggle, wherever we are, if we truly intend to stand on the side of human progress, realized only through proletarian liberation.

There are many more victories to come.

Thank you for reading!

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The observation that the law doesn’t coincide with morality is entirely unremarkable… in fact, it is so unremarkable that it often serves as a shield to distract from far more relevant discussions.

Even the most tepid liberal has long been forced to concede that there is a discrepancy between some imagined ideal of ‘justice’ and the reality of the law as it is actually enforced. That situation only becomes more uncomfortable when it takes on a (sometimes not so) historical dimension. Slavery, racial laws, marital rape, lobotomies, and outright extermination of the marginalized, all perfectly legal, and the other best hits of bourgeois ‘justice’ are difficult to defend even for the most reactionary advocates of subordination to the state institutions.

In reality, there are more important questions than morality, for those who intend to change the world instead of shrugging at it:

What general attitude should we have towards the law? When is it correct to break the law? How do we fight against the overwhelming force of the state?

None of this can be answered in the abstract, especially when the answers become political (as they must), so let’s start this discussion with a concrete example… about as concrete as getting socked in the jaw, in my case:

As some of you may know, I was arrested earlier this year during the anti-militarist ‘Disarm Rheinmetall’ protest camp in Cologne, and accused of ‘aggravated disturbance of the public peace’ and ‘resistance to state authority’. I’m not alone in that; hundreds of protesters were accused of similar supposed crimes. After a series of arbitrary attacks by the state repressive forces on the final day’s demonstration, the whole event was declared dissolved on fabricated charges, which was promptly followed by a ten-hour-long orgy of police violence that would leave over two-hundred people injured, and over a dozen hospitalized. Even for the German state, where violence against left-wing protests is the norm, it was exceptional for the sheer scale of repression.

Whether the charges will stick or even get close to a court is more than doubtful, but also largely irrelevant. The basic point stands:

More often than not, upholding the correct political line has the potential to bring you into conflict with the law and its various enforcers. This conflict can be a good thing, but it doesn’t have to be, without the proper goals and results. To make that distinction, we need analysis, both of the fundamental nature of the state and of the concrete situation in which we find ourselves when we face it.

When it comes to the ‘Disarm Rheinmetall’ protests, confrontation with the state, and with that the very notion of its law, was always part of the expectation and strategy.

• Shutting down the logistics headquarters of military monopolists, all of them complicit in genocide and imperialism? Illegal.

• Blocking the recruitment offices of the German Army, while it was ramping up its recruitment propaganda campaign? Illegal.

• Occupying the party office of the Social Democrats, who have spent the last century stacking up so many betrayals that it would be impossible to name them here? Also illegal, I’m afraid.

Illegal… yet certainly justified, considering the institutions the actions were aimed against. There is even a case to be made that the escalation did not go far enough, but justification and moral absolution alone are of no interest to us—we need results.

What these actions had in common is that they are what is most often referred to as ‘direct action’, a blanket term for political struggles that seemingly ‘skip’ institutional and organizational boundaries and focus their attention on concrete targets that can be attacked in various ways—as the name implies, directly. While this is just one tactic among many, it is undeniable that in recent years, direct action has taken on a certain sheen for many who are frustrated by the failure to confront the horrors enacted by the Western imperialists in Palestine and elsewhere. And frankly, who can blame them? It feels good to actually do something, and it requires a certain degree of personal commitment and seriousness that snarky social commentary on Substack/Twitter/Whatever, NGO-infested mutual aid groups, and student-led reading circles can’t even hope to approach. Party politics may have that potential and more, but in practice, the most important organizational work is often tedious. Why not, as the old anarchist slogan goes, ‘break apart, what breaks you apart’ instead?

It certainly is part of the real struggle when, as a more than relevant example, Palestine Action members sabotage Elbit Systems facilities and disturb the supply lines of the war and extermination economy. The risks involved are self-evident when looking at the conditions the British state has subjected the prisoners to during their ongoing hunger strike, and the repression it is enacting against those sympathetic to them. Maybe just as importantly for those involved, and the praxis that develops through them, it creates a semblance of continuity between resistance struggles in the Third World and those in the First World—something that too often remains abstract at best.

Is it, after all, not the duty of those in the imperial core to fight the imperialists of their own country, however necessary? Is it not our obligation to materially support liberation struggles through lived solidarity?

Is the main enemy not at home?

I strongly sympathize with these attitudes—those exact attitudes brought me all the way from Vienna to Cologne—and in general, I hold them to be correct, but we always have to concern ourselves with the concrete. Lenin famously warned:

To understand what practical activity is sensible, and what forms are necessary in the current moment of the struggle, we first need to understand what we are up against.

The answer is the state. Not ours, mind you: The state of our enemies; the state of the bourgeoisie.

Let’s talk about that state and what character the law takes on under its rule.

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The Bourgeois State and Class Justice

If you ever took an intro class for any social science, or took a social studies course in your equivalent of High School, chances are you were handed a blanket definition of the state, and some perfectly vague bullet points along with it. They may have looked something like this:

• Population: A state must have people. The citizens form the backbone of a state and are subject to its laws and governance.

• Territory: A state requires a defined geographical area, within which it exercises control and jurisdiction.

• Government: This is the organizational structure through which the state enforces laws, provides public services, and conducts external relations.

• Sovereignty: The ultimate authority within a territory, free from external interference. Sovereignty is what distinguishes a state from other political entities.

Did your eyes glaze over? So far, so uninteresting… right?

None of this is entirely false, but the issue is that it fails to grasp the state as a concrete social relation, instead portraying it as something abstract that stands outside of itself—outside of the historical circumstances and social relations that produce it. What is presented as a common-sense accumulation of aspects of the state is, in reality, an amalgam of the likes of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Max Weber, while sneaking in their thoroughly ideological and thoroughly bourgeois assumptions through the back door as fact. A definition like this ultimately presumes that the state is a neutral institution; a sort of natural and unchangeable product of the march of history, with features that may at most find different expressions, depending on the specific circumstances the state is faced with. And thus, through distortion and decontextualization, bourgeois institutions and their hegemonic ideology become common sense.

What is missing entirely is class society and its historical development, even though this must always be our base for understanding social relations of any kind, if it is to be based on the world as it actually exists.

The shortest version of such a definition, derived from a longer analysis by Engels, comes from Lenin:

“The state is a product and a manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms. The state arises where, when and insofar as class antagonism objectively cannot be reconciled. And, conversely, the existence of the state proves that the class antagonisms are irreconcilable.

[…]

That the state is an organ of the rule of a definite class which cannot be reconciled with its antipode (the class opposite to it) is something the petty-bourgeois democrats will never be able to understand.”

— Lenin, The State and Revolution, 1917

This materialist understanding of the development and character of the state is the polar opposite of liberal common sense. Not only is the state not a neutral institution open for capture by different forces; it can never be neutral in the first place, since its very existence is unchangeably predicated on the rule of one specific class over another, and the struggles that gave birth to it. The modern state we are faced with was shaped by the needs of the capitalist ruling class, whichever form it takes, and is perfectly adapted to enforcing those needs, while disguised as an organ for all ‘citizens’—consequently, to overcome bourgeois class rule, this state must be destroyed.

Yes, the disguise is in itself only a poor appropriation of the universalizing ideological role of the French Revolution, where the first ‘true’ bourgeois state was forced to integrate the urban masses to seize power and combat the feudal order of old Europe. It is no coincidence that even today, the Jacobins symbolically stand in for utopian radicalism, the Sans-culottes for unmitigated mob violence, and Robespierre as the prototype of the overzealous revolutionary who betrays lofty ideals for bloody, dictatorial oppression. Never has the historically progressive role of the bourgeoisie been expressed more clearly than during the ‘lawless’ days of the guillotine, which remains a powerful symbol to this day; so naturally, the bourgeoisie must denounce it all the more in a time where their class has long taken on a reactionary role. This truly progressive period of the bourgeoisie ended, at the latest, with the small victories and grand defeats of 1848, leading straight to the national-feudal compromise of the German Empire and the first proletarian revolution in history, the Paris Commune.

The hegemonic feudal order of Europe was subsumed and buried, while in the colonies, it was gradually warped and appropriated to serve the bourgeoisie of the imperial core. ‘All that is solid melts into air’, and the task of this new form of state was, above all else, to keep the proletariat subordinated and chained to the means of production, firmly in the hands of the ruling class. The state, and with that its law, had taken on a very different character than even that of the French Revolution, while keeping the old language to serve as a treat for the downtrodden masses, so they might falsely identify themselves with their enemy’s state.

So, what is the character of the law under the rule of the modern bourgeois state? As is the case with all class struggles, it is, in essence, violence. In this case, the violence is obfuscated by the letter of universalized law and the institutions born alongside it.

Rosa Luxemburg exposed the underlying logic of this violence quite effectively:

“If one ‘free citizen’ is taken by another against his will and confined in close and uncomfortable quarters for a while, everyone realises immediately that an act of violence has been committed. However, as soon as the process takes place in accordance with the book known as the penal code, and the quarters in question are in prison, then the whole affair immediately becomes peaceable and legal. If one man is compelled by another to kill his fellow men, then that is obviously an act of violence. However, as soon as the process is called ‘military service’, the good citizen is consoled with the idea that everything is perfectly legal and in order.

[…]

Bourgeois legality is nothing but the particular social form in which the political violence of the bourgeoisie, developing its given economic basis, expresses itself.”

— Rosa Luxemburg, Die Neue Zeit May 14th Ed., 1902

What becomes clear in Luxemburg’s analysis is that there is nothing about the bourgeois state’s legal authority that is genuinely exceptional, except for the perception of that authority—but that perception, or rather legitimacy, is a powerful thing indeed; it is where differences in class consciousness are expressed most clearly.

If a robber held you at gunpoint and demanded that you surrender your wallet to them, there is no metaphor to hide the violence behind; the threat is crystal clear: Give up your wallet, or consequences will follow swiftly. You might doubt the capacity of the robber to actually follow through with that violence, but the threat itself, and the capacity for harm implicit in it, is enough to make most people reconsider resisting. You give up, under immediate duress. However, this is not how state authority actually functions in the vast majority of cases, despite popular clichés about how taxation, property laws, and so on are theft, and other similar distortions.

The fact that taxation is not theft is exactly what makes it so effective.

The main purpose of the law is to mediate violence and make direct force unnecessary, while still enforcing the authority of the ruling class—an example:

If you stopped paying your rent next month, your landlord isn’t going to personally break down your door, seize your property as recompense, and kick you out on the street into homelessness—in fact, that would be blatantly illegal. Certainly, such cases do happen, but they are exceedingly rare and usually the result of an attempt by the property owner to dodge the law, knowing full well that the tenant has no access to the state’s legal system for various reasons. What is far more common is the mediation of violence through bourgeois law and its various enforcers. A landlord and a tenant ‘share’ a contract, embedded into the framework of the larger legal system, that theoretically identifies obligations for both parties, chief among them the regular payment of rent in exchange for access to the landlord’s property. If that contract is broken by the tenant, the agreement becomes null and void, and the landlord is within their rights to call upon the bourgeois state to enforce property laws.

What follows are court orders, bailiffs, eviction notices, and yes, only as a final consequence, the unfiltered violence of the bourgeois state in the form of the police, who will, if necessary, break down your door, seize your property, and physically throw you out onto the street.

However, in the daily lives of most people, physical violence is not necessary to ensure they comply with bourgeois law, even if it is to their detriment. The threat alone is enough, and more importantly, the good ‘citizen’ has often been convinced that ‘law and order’ ultimately benefits everyone, even if a specific ruling may not benefit them. This is the realm of ideology, without a developed proletarian consciousness to overcome it. The question of who is served by the general form of law and order they live under remains secondary when the state presents itself as a great neutral mediator and has the legitimacy to uphold that idea.

The law appears as a natural thing, even though it is far from it.

Of course, the ideal of abstracted neutrality of the law stands in stark contrast with the lived experience of most people who, to stick with our example, have ever ‘shared’ a contract with a landlord. My lived experience of scrubbing black mold that is slowly breaking through thin layers of paint, which it was mysteriously covered with, all while waiting for weeks to get a response from my contractual ‘partner’, certainly stands in stark contrast with getting angry calls if I should ever be even one day late on the rent.

The joys of being under the thumb of the much-loved petty-bourgeoisie!

But what can you do? Lawyers are too expensive, and even basic legal aid is usually hard to come by. We all know that in the overwhelming majority of cases, the landlord holds the power, because they own the property, and they have the money—but this isn’t a natural law.

Why is that? Because bourgeois law, for all its supposed neutrality, does not account for the real relations between those subject to it, the real class differences:

“Bourgeois thought, for which the framework of commodity production is the eternal and natural framework of all societies, therefore declares abstract state authority to be an attribute of every society.

[…]

Free and equal commodity owners meeting in the market are free and equal only in the abstract relationship between buyer and seller. In actual life they are tied to each other by many relationships of dependence. These are the shopkeepers and the large wholesaler, the peasant and the estate owner, the ruined debtor and his creditor, the proletarian and the capitalist. These countless relations of real dependence constitute the true basis of state organization. However, for the juridic theory of the state it is as if they do not exist.

— Evgeny Pashukanis, The General Theory of Law and Marxism, 1924

What the great, and dreadfully underread, Soviet theorist of the law, Evgeny Pashukanis, concludes here is a truth that should be taken away from any study of bourgeois law:

All so-called justice is by definition class justice, and bourgeois class justice is no justice at all.

The abstracted social relation between universal subjects taken as a given by bourgeois law only exists in the realm of idealist metaphysics, never in the real world. As materialists, we must reject it outright and look at the real relations obscured by it and their development.

The idealist notion of universal justice was once historically progressive, during the period of the French Revolution, where the destruction of the special privileges and petty laws accumulated by the feudal aristocracy went hand in hand with their suppression as a class, often by extra-judicial means; by the sharp ‘law’ of the guillotine. From there, it found its most complete realization not in Europe but in the Haitian Revolution, where first the colonized and then the enslaved masses fought for their freedom, their universal subjectivity, in the only way they could: Through the physical destruction of all slaveowners and their domestic colonial overlords. The French bourgeoisie, having themselves turned towards Bonapartist reaction to safeguard their power and discipline the masses at home, very quickly concluded that the profits of the sugar plantations of Saint-Dominique were far more worthwhile than any abstract principles of justice.

Here, in the rejection of the Haitian Revolution, the bourgeoisie revealed the limits of its progressive character, and the contradictions of the legal fiction of a neutral, universal law—these contradictions are born from class society itself:

What sort of justice can there be between slaves and slaveowners, if it is the latter who hold the power to enforce the law? The notion itself is ridiculous to our modern sensibilities, where we can recognize that any law upholding slavery can’t possible be turned to benefit the enslaved; any advantage won through it only serves to contain and temper resistance. Justice can only be won in the struggle of slaves against the slaveowner, and with that their law, and the very conditions that make them subject to slavery. In a similar manner, the proletariat can only win justice by winning their struggle against the bourgeoisie, their state, and with that, their law.

That is our historic task, since in reality, there is no such thing as universal justice as long as class society exists, and once it ceases to exist, the very notion of justice, predicated on class society itself, will wither away alongside the state.

To prevent their destruction as a class, the bourgeoisie and their lackeys will stop at nothing, including the abolition of any semblance of their own legality:

“The more unstable the authority of the bourgeoisie became, the more compromising its corrections became, the more the Rechtsstaat [legal state] turned into an incorporeal shadow, until finally the extreme intensification of the class struggle forced the bourgeoisie completely to discard the mask of the Rechtsstaat and to reveal the essence of authority as the organized force of one class against another.”

— Evgeny Pashukanis, The General Theory of Law and Marxism, 1924

Under pressure, the mask of legality is left behind by the bourgeoisie, and revealed, in its most extreme expression, as open terror disconnected from any abstract legal authority. Fascism is anticipated in this, and the natural conclusion of developments at a time of heightened class struggle—many of you who live in the United States can see right now what it looks like when legality is no longer used to mediate violence. What was once revolutionary against the feudal aristocracy takes on an entirely reactionary character against the proletariat in our time, and serves to extend the ruling classes’ grip on state authority by force.

Once class struggle intensifies law returns to its essence of violence, and make no mistake: If we want to win, it will intensify, so we must be prepared for it.

It is time to talk about our tactics in this struggle and how they relate to the law.

Illegality and Legality

War is immanent to the conditions of capitalism. It ebbs and flows like the sea.

Recent weeks have been plagued by a renewed, although certainly not unprecedented, escalation of US imperialism by military means. The direct assault against Venezuela is only the tip of the iceberg, while threats against Colombia, Mexico, Panama, and, farcically, Greenland persist. As I’m finishing this article, military strikes against Iran seem imminent every other night, while Israel is preparing to complete the ethnic cleansing of Gaza with unbroken American, British, and German support. At the same time, and in direct conjunction with it, political repression in the imperialist states against the opponents of war, genocide, and fascist violence has been ramping up at a rapid pace.

The mask is slipping.

In Gramsci’s immortal words—or rather in the way they have been popularized by everyone’s least favorite Hegelian, Slavoj Žižek: Now is the time of monsters.

In such a time, anti-imperialists must be keenly aware of their tasks and develop appropriate tactics to fulfil them. What are those tasks? Nothing less than to do everything to combat the seemingly overwhelming force of the imperialist states, especially here in the imperial core, where destruction is exported from into the entire world to secure the rate of profit.

Breaking their weapons and sabotaging their plans whenever they strike in the imperial periphery should be our goal, since those who come under assault there don’t have a choice in the matter—if international solidarity is to be more than an empty slogan, neither do those of us who live in the imperial core. That makes it all the more important that a real practice of solidarity is established to connect the struggles. This task is far from accomplished, as is more than evident from the fact that after over two years of genocide in Gaza, the movement has barely been able to dent open support for the Zionist colonial state.

Excuses can be made for days on end, but it must be said clearly: The overwhelming failure to concretely aid the Palestinian liberation struggle, and other anti-imperialist struggles, is utterly shameful and has to prompt serious self-criticism of the anti-imperialist movement as a whole.

One immediate response, although only by a small fraction of the larger movement, has been to ‘move on’ from legalized protests to direct action of various forms. In general, it makes sense to differentiate here between three types that have emerged organically:

• Actions take place in tandem with mass action, such as blockades, destruction of property, or minor sabotage actions, usually during larger protests where it is possible to hide in the crowd. These are generally characterized by their spontaneous nature, lack of concrete organizational cohesion, and more often than not, low-stakes state repression in the form of immediate police violence.

• Actions organized and planned by small groups of activists to carry out significant sabotage against specific targets that are instrumental for the imperialist war economy. Naturally, the stakes are quite a lot higher as those who participate are expecting to be met with prison sentences; there has been little effort to seriously conceal identities as a larger strategy of struggle.

• Actions entirely carried out by individuals, isolated from mass action, ranging from petty agitation all the way to political assassinations and self-immolation. Some may take issue with including this, but to separate these acts from direct action as a whole, especially in their pseudo-radical excesses, is wishful thinking. State repression differs significantly, depending on the perceived severity and the immediate use of violence.

What all of these actions have in common is that they represent a small, and generally more radicalized, sub-section of the anti-imperialist movement that has rejected the primacy of legal struggle not just in theoretical but in practical terms.

The reasons for this vary significantly, but as a rule, resulted directly from a perceived (and largely real) failure of legal struggle to advance the goals of the movement. It becomes tempting in such a situation to create a false dichotomy between legal and illegal struggle, where the former is automatically decried as tepid and useless liberalism while the latter is valorized. This must be seen as a sign of a movement that is in the process of stripping itself of a false adherence to bourgeois law, but is not yet at the stage of genuine revolutionary consciousness. Illegality is still seen as something exceptional that should, above all else, be valued for its bravery, and while this may even be correct in the given moment, it is ultimately a sign of infantile underdevelopment, not of a radical advance.

Those under assault by imperialism do not make the difference between legal and illegal means when it is time to fight back; neither can we if we are truly fighting the same struggle.

Marxist revolutionary and theorist György Lukács identified this exact tendency in his essay on the tactics of revolutionary struggle:

By surrounding illegal means and methods of struggle with a certain aura, by conferring upon them a special, revolutionary ‘authenticity’, one endows the existing state with a certain legal validity, with a more than just empirical existence. For to rebel against the law qua law, to prefer certain actions because they are illegal, implies for anyone who so acts that the law has retained its binding validity.

The risk of breaking the law should not be regarded any differently than the risk of missing a train connection when on an important journey.

— György Lukács, History & Class Consciousness, 1923

To fetishize illegality is a grave error that results from a petty-bourgeois consciousness valuing form over content; individualist struggle is valued over the great collective struggle of classes. Ironically enough, the other extreme, where legality is fetishized as the only possible form, is similarly a form of false petty-bourgeois consciousness, just more closely aligned with the bourgeoisie and their state.

Indeed, if legality is nothing but an instrument of class domination, then illegality cannot be judged abstractly either. The question is not whether laws are broken, but whether breaking them alters the objective balance of forces; if breaking them advances the real struggle. Illegality that remains symbolic, isolated, or substitutive for personal fulfillment, risks reproducing the power of the state instead of negating it. Meanwhile, legality, while it may produce temporary advances, can never be the solution since, in a final analysis, the state of the bourgeoisie is our most principled enemy, and its legal institutions, including the law itself, must be fought and destroyed to achieve any lasting victories.

We all know that the law has no moral authority. The sort of morality that evaluates a breach of property law and petty vandalism as greater crimes than genocide can only belong to the bourgeoisie; it is the sort of morality that makes even Hitlerites and their equivalent feel right at home.

We also have established that the law has no authority that transcends class. It is an expression of the violence of the ruling class, elevated and obscured as universal by the ideology of the bourgeoisie, while in truth it is in direct opposition to the interests of the vast majority of people around the world and in any given state.

Both these attitudes towards the law are fundamentally false and represent bourgeois hegemony.

The obvious question is then, how should we actually view the law?

The answer, as with most things, is as a temporary historical product of class struggle, which can be negated:

“What is essential is to realise that the capitalist state should be seen and evaluated as a historical phenomenon even while it exists. It should be treated, therefore, purely as a power structure which has to be taken into account only to the extent to which its actual power stretches.

[…]

The proletariat of Central and Western Europe still has an arduous road before it. If it is to become conscious of its historical mission and of the legitimacy of its rule it must first grasp the fact that the problem of legality and illegality is purely tactical in nature. It must be able to slough off both the cretinism of legality and the romanticism of illegality.

— György Lukács, History & Class Consciousness, 1923

It is our duty to bring about a revolutionary alternative, even when revolution is not possible under the current conditions; the state of the future is born within the old. These structures must be ready in advance, or it will be far too late when they are acutely needed. Any serious anti-imperialist organization needs to be prepared for illegal struggle, but that alone gives us no answer to the usefulness of legality or illegality in any given situation. Here, we need concrete analysis.

A protest may be a sign of performative liberalism, in direct opposition to the larger struggle, while sucking away people from far more important activities and giving a false outlet to developing radicalism; it can also be a mustering of forces to show that a movement has the masses behind it, and can actually challenge state authority, while agitating among those who remain uncertain. The destruction of an industrial plant may be blind actionism, completely disconnected from any mass-movement, that will lead to nothing except repression and cozy feelings of heroism; it can also be a powerful tool to strike against imperialism where it does real damage, while energizing and emboldening a popular mass movement or even the armed struggle. To fight cops may be a sign of embarrassing machismo, which will only lead to a useless and poorly thought-out escalation; it can also be absolutely vital in breaking the last resistance of the state forces, and enable revolutionary action.

Tactics have no inherent value; the results matter, and those depend on what the concrete moment calls for. So, in that spirit, to return to the central question of this article:

When is it time to break the law?

The only principled answer is: Whenever necessary; whenever it can be turned to our advantage; whenever the bourgeois state is bound to lose any given struggle.

When is it time to uphold the law?

The only principled answer is: Whenever necessary; whenever the balance of forces is to our disadvantage; whenever the bourgeois state is bound to win any given struggle.

Our attitude towards the law must be purely instrumental; we must reject the categories of legality and illegality outright, beyond the force the state can actually muster against the movement in any given moment. Whether or not something is legal or illegal only deserves consideration if it is relevant to understanding how the state will respond to our advances. The state is our enemy, and so is its law; both are real forces, but nothing more. Bourgeois legality is no transhistorical truth, and ultimately, when the developments come to a head, we must be prepared to shatter it.

It is, as Lukács put it, a ‘purely tactical’ question.

Only this understanding of the law and the state allows us to see these conflicts for what they really are, beyond all the obfuscations and ideology:

The relentless struggle of one class against another—and history is on our side.

Thank you for reading!

This is effectively the one-year anniversary of Our History, and I’m beyond thankful for all of you who have stuck around or just joined us. Last January, I started this whole project in frustration with a lack of revolutionary outlets that clearly call for what needs to be done to transform society. Now, a year later, Substack is practically teeming with them, and I like to think this community played a small role in that. Theory alone may not be enough, but it is something. I’ll look forward to another year.

Thank you for that as well!

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That’s it for now. Stick around with Our History, more will follow soon… this time, actually! Also, if you made it all the way down here, leave me some of your thoughts in the comments. I always appreciate those, even if I don’t have time to reply to all of them.

Well… I’m sure this one is going to be entirely uncontroversial.

Before you comment about how ‘the left’ is allergic to winning and loves losing, please do me the courtesy of following along with my argument, at least until it pisses you off too much to hold back. I swear, the point of this article isn’t to denounce Zohran Mamdani for failing to mobilize the vast peasant masses (suburbanites) of the New York hinterland (New Jersey) for a people’s war, until Andrew Cuomo is forced to flee the mainland and establish a government in exile on Staten Island.

That will be covered by the next article, of course. We try to have fun around here.

What this article also isn’t about, at least not primarily, is to reiterate the obvious: That Zohran Mamdani is a reformist at best, that the DSA as a whole is a reformist organization, and that reformism is structurally doomed to failure or complete surrender; to either go the route of Salvador Allende with a bullet to the head, or to follow the path of European social democracy, and make significant investments in the bullet-distribution business while eventually selling your Grandma’s pension fund to BlackRock, and bombing Afghanistan. One of these is better than the other, but neither will ever lead to proletarian revolution, much less socialism. Frankly, if you projected those particular hopes onto somebody running on a Democratic Party ticket for mayor of New York, that has less to do with his campaign than the bitter state of revolutionary consciousness in much of the imperial core, and especially in the US. For all his flaws, Mamdani never claimed to be anything other than a ‘democratic socialist’, a meaningless term in a post-Sanders world, while making vague overtures to more radical positions, in order to mobilize a DSA base that often has superficial radicalism tacked over their petty-bourgeois understanding of politics. Everybody wants to think of their movement as the Bolsheviks who storm the heavens; nobody wants to be the Mensheviks who end up in the gutter of history—that’s nothing new.

Finally, what this article is REALLY NOT about is claiming that my best friend, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, spoke to me on the phone last night and told me that he thinks Zohran Mamdani is a bad, evil, bourgeois man with bad politics, who would have supported Kerensky, the First World War, and the murder of Rosa Luxemburg. Then he yelled at me, asking what happened to the Soviet Union, but I hung up before it got too awkward.

…

Jokes aside, it is, of course, ridiculous to have any discussion on the basis of what long-dead people might have thought about conditions that they had no connection to, no stake in, and lived outside of in every way imaginable—in fact, it is so thoroughly anti-materialist that it doesn’t merit discussion. That being said, while Lenin was only a man of flesh and blood, his ideas, much like those of Marx, Engels, and others like them, stand on their own and have been integrated into a universalized theory of social relations that has only been developed further since: Marxism. Now, your interpretation of this theory may vary, and you may even reject the development of Marxism-Leninism from it, but all I ask of you is to kindly not name your politics after people whose ideas you clearly reject on a fundamental level, while abusing badly contextualized quotes to wildly misrepresent their position. It just leads to confusion for everyone involved. If I started calling myself an anarchist while advocating for a revolutionary vanguard party and a centrally planned economy, you’d be confused, too, right? Lying about your politics, even to yourself, to win arguments is rarely a good idea—and by ‘rarely’ I mean ‘literally never’. It is deeply unserious, and beyond that, useless.

So, now that we've got all that out of the way, the obvious question presents itself:

What the hell is this article about, then?

This article is mainly about surrender and the contradictions that lead to it; the contradictions inherent in the attempt to wield bourgeois state power for anti-capitalist ends.

This article is about Zohran Mamdani, AOC, Bernie Sanders, and hundreds of others just like them in almost every state on the planet, capitulating to the bourgeoisie before the fight has even started in earnest.

This article attempts to answer the question of why it keeps happening and what we can do about it.

For now, let’s talk about anti-zionism, anti-imperialism, and why they matter in a New York mayoral election. All struggles are connected, and consequently, opportunism sells all of them down the road at once if it sells even one. Or as Mamdani said back in 2021:

That is… unfortunate phrasing, isn’t it? How well Mamdani spoke when he was still playing at Marxism! It is always easy to say the right thing, with seemingly nothing on the line—even though when it comes to politics, everything is always on the line, whether those who participate know it or not.

Opportunism: A Future For Sale

Let’s begin this discussion with a prediction—or rather, a contradiction that we will attempt to resolve over the course of this article:

As you may be shocked to hear, I don’t know Zohran Mamdani; he is not my best friend, and I don’t particularly care if he is a cool, funny guy. Still, everything about his history with the DSA indicates to me that Mamdani is not a zionist. I have no reason to believe he is a bloodthirsty imperialist either, or that he is a big fan of the NYPD. And yet, I am beyond certain that once he is elected as mayor of New York, which he almost certainly will be, his positions will become largely indistinguishable from every other bourgeois politician with any semblance of official power within the US. He will not Boycott, Divest, and Sanction, he will not even give token support to breaking the blockades of imperialism, and dear God, he will not defund the police state. Frankly, I’d be surprised if his rent control and free public transport policies survive his first year in office.

Some of you may be outraged by the mere suggestion of such a collapse of principle, or at least by my pessimism, but you should remember that this exact process has already taken place for many, many other social democratic darlings. Really… all of them in recent-ish history. Look at Bernie Sanders, whose career was long misjudged as flawless by most ‘leftists’ despite his open support for the destruction of Yugoslavia, and his more than problematic relationship with zionism. Or look to AOC, and other members of ‘the squad’, who have regularly adopted openly imperialist positions in accordance with state-led agitation against some of the poorest countries in the world, whenever standing against it would have been even slightly inconvenient.

Worse yet, and this is part of my reason for writing this piece, Mamdani has already capitulated on many issues long before attaining political power, with little to show for it. This isn’t an exhaustive list, but just to name some examples:

• He affirmed the right of Israel to exist as a ‘democratic state’, in effect denying the settler colonial nature of the state, and with that, the political line of every single Palestinian resistance organization. Similarly, he distanced himself from the slogan ‘Globalize the Intifada’, after refusing to do so initially.

• He apologized for calling the US police a racist institution and retreated from his initial position of defunding or even dismantling it, as he once called for in 2020, all while affirming his hope to work together with the officers of the NYPD who ‘put their lives on the line every single day.’

• After an unclear interview regarding his stance on so-called ‘left-wing authoritarians’, his campaign reaffirmed that they, naturally, consider Cuba’s Miguel Díaz-Canel and Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro dictators and condemn them for it, essentially falling in line with the general US imperialist line on these states.

• He retreated from much of his initially radical language on reformist socialism that he once upheld during his election to the New York State Assembly, returning largely to a tamed, Sanders-esque social democratic line.

I could go on, but I think the point is relatively clear: Concessions have been made, and this indicates that they will continue to be made whenever politically convenient.

But all of this seems rather strange, doesn’t it?

Why would someone who is reliably leading polls by 15+ percent, already won the nomination, and who managed to build a profile with relative radicalism, make these concessions in the first place? Why alienate your most dedicated base for little to no reason?

You might answer by saying that this is a tactical choice to win an election, and even though it is looking good, it isn’t over yet. Really, aren’t most of these issues minor things in the first place; things the mayor of New York (mostly) will have little impact on either way? Maybe it won’t hurt to make concessions now, and then bring in the big policy wins later, once power has been reached, right? Who is to say that Mamdani isn’t planning a silent socialist coup by offering the bourgeoisie calming words, only to strike at their power base the first chance he gets?

Well… I’m saying that he isn’t doing that. Me, history, and the Marxist theory of the state, because it has literally never happened anywhere, ever. There is a much more coherent explanation:

Campaigning does have other audiences than the bulk of voters alone, especially in a deep blue city where Mamdani has already won the Democratic nomination and is now mainly in conflict with a candidate like Andrew Cuomo, who has no real support base beyond name recognition and wealthy bourgeois backers who see Mamdani’s campaign as a problem—not because he will topple their power mind you, but because they consider his policies threatening to keeping New York City open and appealing as their free-for-all investment playground. By making these public concessions, he is speaking to the capitalist class and their entrenched state bureaucracy, ensuring them that he will never go too far; that even if he could, he isn’t like those ‘left-wing authoritarians’ in Cuba and Venezuela; that he would not give in to demands to destroy ‘law and order’; that he will be a reasonable mayor, who has an ear open to their legitimate concerns, all while being far more popular than that fossil Cuomo.

More than anything, this is a job interview process of sorts. For what position, you might ask? As a ‘reasonable’ administrator of the bourgeois state in New York City, of course. Not some dangerous radical. That would not do at all.

This is emblematic of Mamdani’s role as a ‘democratic socialist’ who will be entering, or in this case, become the leading figurehead for, a bourgeois government. Rosa Luxemburg identified the consequences of this political line over a century ago:

“The government of the modern state is essentially an organization of class domination, the regular functioning of which is one of the conditions of existence of the class state. With the entry of a socialist into the government, and class domination continuing to exist, the bourgeois government doesn’t transform itself into a socialist government, but a socialist transforms himself into a bourgeois minister.

The social reforms that a minister who is a friend of the workers can realize have nothing, in themselves, of socialism; they are socialist only insofar as they are obtained through class struggle.

[…]

The entry of a socialist into a bourgeois government is not, as it is thought, a partial conquest of the bourgeois state by the socialists, but a partial conquest of the socialist party by the bourgeois state.”

— Rosa Luxemburg, The Dreyfus Affair and the Millerand Case, 1899

The DSA and its elected representatives have been in a steady process of being conquered by the US American bourgeois state for almost a decade at this point, all while they have convinced themselves that it is they who are doing the conquering!

Ironically, or rather as expected, the closer to power those representatives come, the more fully have they been absorbed by the bourgeois state, and the Democratic Party institutions they used to reach those positions of power in the first place. While it was still possible for someone like Julia Salazar, who was the first DSA member to be elected to the New York State Assembly in 2018, to freely state that she considered Lenin and Che Guevara among her political inspirations—as pitiful as that may be without drawing the necessary consequences—those same words would already be entirely impossible for anyone even considering to run for Congress in 2025, much less once they have been elected to it. In practice, the main task of reformists elected to high office is to fall in line with the Democratic Party and keep their base entertained with vaguely radical phrasemongering. The great conciliation for their supporters, and the constant excuse for even the most obscene capitulation, is the fact that they have little real power in their scattered platform, with barely a handful of members. While this is certainly true, it fundamentally misunderstands the reality of interacting with bourgeois politics in this manner. In fact, it is backward:

The closer a ‘democratic socialist’ comes to real power, and Mamdani will be the closest by far with his executive position as mayor of New York, the more necessary and appealing surrender to the bourgeois state becomes. That semblance of power just makes the inevitable betrayals sting worse.

It is far easier to exchange positions on the fly, with seemingly little consequence, when there are no concrete policy decisions to put into action, but once a ‘democratic socialist’ takes part in or even leads a bourgeois government, it is no longer possible to avoid the nature of the state one participates in. Complete surrender on issues that endanger the general interest of the bourgeoisie becomes the inevitable consequence, if one isn’t prepared to enter into open struggle with their state—and if Salvador Allende’s Unidad Popular wasn’t ready, with a popular mass movement behind them after winning a general election and holding power for three years, the DSA certainly isn’t ready either. In reality, it doesn’t even figure into their conception of politics, so even this kind of speculation gives them far too much credit. History does repeat after all, ‘first as tragedy, then as farce.’ The farce has been playing out in the US since the first Sanders campaign, which was in itself only a shadow of Eugene Debs.

Lack of clarity, where positions constantly shift in relation to their perceived usefulness, is a central feature of opportunism. This will only become worse as the new city government aligns itself more and more with its natural role as a custodian of the bourgeois state, in direct contradiction with the promises made to its electoral base:

“The opportunist, by his very nature, tends to avoid a definite and final solution of a question; he is always seeking for alternatives; he writhes like an eel between mutually exclusive points of view; he tries to ‘be in agreement’ with all sides, but expresses his disagreements in amendments, doubts, pious and innocent wishes, etc. etc.”

— Lenin, One Step Forward; Two Steps Back, 1904

Zohran Mamdani may be charismatic, and as far as one can reasonably judge from a distance, he often seems honest, but honesty, charisma, and ‘pious and innocent wishes’ change little about the objective conditions that will soon surround his city government like barbed wire.

Will he get caught in it and make a heroic, but largely senseless, sacrifice for the working-class struggle? It is more than doubtful, judging by his behavior so far, that of his contemporaries, and his disinterested support base in the petty bourgeoisie and the labor aristocracy, who will likely ‘return to brunch’ once the election is over, leaving him plenty of space to let the proletarians fall quietly—the proletarians are always the ones left to fall, in the end.

This, of course, begs the question: What is the alternative?

The short answer is principle—but never blind principle, that leaves reality behind.

Principle and Compromise: A World To Win

Let me continue this discussion with yet another contradiction; we are getting dialectical today:

Reality always imposes limitations on political struggle, and compromises may become a necessity when the alternative is defeat, even if those compromises are painful—and yet, some principles can never be given up, or the entire struggle will be for nothing at all. To oppose compromise in general is for three-year-olds, not for politics, but how do we draw that line between compromise and surrender?

Lenin identified this tension most clearly in his famous polemic against ‘Left-Wing’ Communists, who unwittingly exchanged sober analysis for pseudo-revolutionary radicalism—some of you might be tempted to accuse me of doing exactly that with this article, and we’ll get to that. It is no coincidence either that this is the work produced while the Bolsheviks were embroiled in a brutal Civil War, suffering from the effects of imperialist siege and intervention. Reality, the actual existing conditions of the revolutionary struggle, forced compromises on them, as it does to us all:

“To reject compromises ‘on principle’, to reject the permissibility of compromises in general, no matter of what kind, is childishness, which it is difficult even to consider seriously. A political leader who desires to be useful to the revolutionary proletariat must be able to distinguish concrete cases of compromises that are inexcusable and are an expression of opportunism and treachery […]”

— Lenin, “Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder, 1920

This distinction, between compromises that are inexcusable and those that are necessary, is absolutely vital, but there are no easy rules of thumb that can provide us with an exact limit between the two; to assume this is possible divorced from the concrete conditions of the struggle, is a form of idealism. The closest to a generalized answer is to seriously consider what decision ultimately serves the final goal of any serious communist organization: Proletarian revolution. But once again, this distinction is often supremely difficult to make in reality. To stick with the Russian example, the question of what compromises are permissible almost caused a split within the Bolsheviks, not once, not twice, but thrice, during the first year of the October Revolution alone—most famously when Lenin threatened to resign from his post if the Central Committee refused to accept the humiliating terms of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. The ‘left communists’ considered it an unacceptable concession to German imperialism; Lenin and others defended it as an absolute necessity to immediately end the war and prevent the German Empire from marching on Petrograd to snuff out the revolution. Today, it is easy to say that Lenin’s position was correct, but at the time, both sides of the debate accused each other of betrayal.

With all that in mind, let’s return to the year 2025. Considering how difficult it is to make the distinction between opportunism and compromise in the abstract, how can we ever be sure that the current way is the right way—or, for that matter, that any given way is false? As with all things, the answer lies in analysis and unflinching criticism, but that alone isn’t enough.

Organizations must find a binding political line, build mechanisms of internal criticism, and be able to adjust their political line accordingly. Tactical compromises must always find their place within and subordinated to that political line, which is by definition a representation of the principles of a party; the principles of proletarian struggle for power as it is advocated for by that party.

In this sense, the task of a party is to have a sharp enough analysis to allow it to distinguish the revolutionary line from opportunism in any given case, and strong enough internal structures of criticism to reflect on mistakes in its political line that caused it to misjudge any given case and give in to opportunism. Or, as Lenin defined the role of the party in this text, fittingly called ‘On Compromise’:

“The task of a truly revolutionary party is not to declare that it is impossible to renounce all compromises, but to be able, through all compromises, when they are unavoidable, to remain true to its principles, to its class, to its revolutionary purpose, to its task of paving the way for revolution and educating the mass of the people for victory in the revolution.”

— Lenin, On Compromise, 1917

Here lies the crux of the issue, that finally brings us back to Zohran Mamdani, the DSA, and really the entire political project of ‘big-tent socialist’ parties in any country, anywhere in the world, where they have taken root:

The basic structure of ‘big tent socialist parties’ is built on foundations of false unity over substance—something I have criticized quite extensively before—which makes them fundamentally unable to distinguish between compromises and total surrender, since they have nothing resembling a coherent political line in the first place.

Sure, the DSA has a code of conduct and a (very) vaguely defined program—although, they are always sure to remind you they aren’t a party, as if that is a good thing—but this alone is completely useless without adequate mechanisms of enforcement for members and clear goals. How is it possible for people with political views as diverse as self-defined ‘Marxist-Leninists-Maoists’ (Lenin said it best in State and Revolution: “All the social chauvinists are now ‘Marxists’. Don’t laugh!") and social democrats who openly support US imperialism, including the arming of the Filipino State against actual Maoists, to exist in the same organization, working for the same goal?

The actual answer is simple: The politics they identify with have nothing to do with their actual politics! Those who attain any semblance of power naturally follow the path of least resistance and give in to every kind of opportunism imaginable, while those who were once their most enthusiastic supporters and share an organization with them grumble about supposed disagreements, performing toothless radicalism. The very structure of their organization makes it impossible to overcome opportunism, since principled criticism and debate are replaced by the most tepid co-existence imaginable, where open contradictions are simply shrugged off as the price of unity. I said it before: All struggles are connected, and consequently, opportunism sells all of them down the road at once if it sells even one. In this case, all of them are sold at once, so the rest hardly matters. The struggle for socialism is reduced to a state of mind, keeping members busy with community activities to paint over the gaping hole in the political structures that surround them.

Just for a second, imagine a world with me, where elected representatives of these organizations, like Zohran Mamdani, are actually accountable to the organization that built them up in the first place.

Imagine a world where tens of thousands of members, no matter their position within that organization, are accountable to a principled political line, not based on the moods of individual chapters or what their local leadership structure thinks, but on years of practical experience and self-criticism, condensed into a sharp theoretical weapon.

Imagine a world where a senior member of the organization repudiating anti-imperialism and anti-zionism for tactical gain and credit with the bourgeoisie isn’t even a possibility, because the political consequences from their own organization would be so devastating that even struggling with the bourgeois state sounds more tempting.

That world isn’t a fantasy—it is the world of the vanguard party, of democratic centralism, and of a clearly defined political line all members are subject to. In short, it is the world, the only world, that leads to the communist mass party. We built it before, and we can build it again, but it requires us to say once and for all:

Yes to principle, yes to compromise, but down with opportunism!

Until then, the betrayals will mount, because there is little of substance to betray in the first place, except the proletarians themselves—it is, after all, always the proletarians who are left to fall, in the end. This time, we have to make sure they stand up.

Or in Rosa Luxemburg’s words:

Thank you for reading!

I’m gonna keep it short this time:

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That’s it for now. Stick around with Our History, more will follow soon! Also, if you made it all the way down here, leave me some of your thoughts in the comments. I always appreciate those, even if I don’t have time to reply to all of them.

To murder someone is a crime.

To cover for a murderer and hide the bloodstained knife, yes, that too is a crime.

But what if you don’t merely cover for the murderer? What if the knife is exposed for everyone to see, while you insist that it never existed in the first place? What if you claim that the blood is an illusion, and the cut throat a matter of perspective? Besides, the victim had it coming all along, and really, who is to blame for the fact that their blood flows freely once the skin is pierced? The heart is at fault, and it has been pumping on and on for over a thousand years…

Is that a crime?

According to some, that is journalism. According to others, it is genocidal propaganda. I guess that’s also a matter of perspective, huh?

For almost twenty-two months, we have been watching genocide unfold against the Palestinian people in Gaza, and most of us have long given up on trying to interpret the events through the absurd lens of the Western bourgeois media. At best, they acted as reluctant stenographers of the Israeli state, and at worst, they produced filth of the type that is only possible for institutions hiding behind the thinnest possible veil of neutrality, only to use it as a shield for their propaganda.

The sentence blocks employed for this have already become a parody in their own right, but remain just as unbearable:

“Unconfirmed eye-witness reports…"

“According to numbers provided by the Hamas-led health ministry…”

“IDF sources confirm…”

“Dozens were killed and injured by gunfire…”

“After the October 7th terrorist attack…”

And so on, and so forth. There are dozens of these little, disgusting phrases, one more absurd than the other, dripping in passive voice, sheer contempt, and dehumanization of an entire people. Ultimately, they serve a singular purpose, whether those who use them do so consciously, at the mercy of binding editorial guidelines, or having genuinely eaten up the murderous slop:

That purpose is to make the genocide digestible for Western audiences, to put it into the *necessary* context—most context is, of course, entirely unnecessary, especially if it doesn’t favor Israel—all while playing into racist narratives that designate Palestinians as less than human in the Western imagination. I don’t need to write an article to tell you that the bourgeois media is complicit; that much is obvious for anyone who has been paying attention.

Instead, this article is an attempt to answer a different kind of question:

What is to be done with those who relentlessly produce propaganda for genocide, but never fire a single bullet?

In Germany, we have a word for them: Desk Murderers. Their job, for the most part, is already accomplished, and now they are trying to duck away and hide the blood that stains their white collar. Will we let them? Is there an alternative? Is there even such a thing as justice in the real world?

In order to approach an answer, let’s talk about genocide propagandists of all types, be they dead, alive, or with a metaphorical noose around their necks. They won’t be missed. Good Riddance.

Editorializing a Genocide

Consent for the genocide was created long before the first bombs ever hit Gaza.

You need something that helps the bitter medicine of extermination go down, so ‘politically informed’ liberals can feel good about the state of the world while their party of choice backs the destruction of an entire people. Remember: Feeling good about themselves is the entire reason liberals want to be ‘politically informed’ in the first place.

The single most impactful piece of writing enabling Western consent for the genocide was, without a doubt, the now infamous ‘Screams Without Words’ article published by the New York Times on December 28th, 2023. Looking back at the article now, knowing that pretty much every single claim is fabricated in some way and that the alleged ‘systematic sexual violence’ is left without a shred of evidence to this day, it is tempting to view it as a sort of original sin of propaganda surrounding the genocide. It certainly calcified the narrative in a way that allowed Zionists to beat well-meaning liberals into submission with charges of denying sexual violence, but that isn’t the whole story. In fact, that gives the Western bourgeois media a little too much credit, while underestimating the impact of state-led propaganda and plain supremacist ideology.

After all, it was not the New York Times that invented the agitation narrative of systematic sexual violence on October 7th; they only gave it that sought-after halo of credibility the ‘independent’ press holds for liberals of all kinds. Democracy dies in darkness and all that, especially if it isn’t propped up by billionaire investors and the US State Department. Ultimately, it was the Israeli State that first spread the lie of systematic sexual violence, using an opportunity to universalize a very old, racially charged narrative of barbarians waiting just beyond the gates of civilisation, ready to inflict untold violence, and ‘despoil’ women that the ‘civilisation’ in question presumes to have taken patriarchal ownership of. From there, it was repeated as undeniable fact, along with other absurdities by Israel’s state supporters in the imperial core, in what was clearly a coordinated effort to legitimize the inevitable apocalyptic violence that the colonial state would unleash.

Just as one example:

Both Joe Biden and Germany’s then foreign minister Annalena Baerbock claimed to have seen footage of ‘beheaded babies’ from October 7th. This footage hasn’t manifested to this day, because… well, it doesn’t exist. Obviously. The claim was an outright fabrication by the Israeli i24 News ‘journalist’ (read: genocide propagandist) Nicole Zedeck, citing anonymous IDF soldiers (read: state propaganda), which was in turn repeated by Netanyahu’s press office. From there, the soon-to-be collaborators of the genocide in Gaza made sure the lie went around the world.

Or, as Jeremy Scahill put it quite aptly in an Intercept article from December 2023, pointing out the use of this fabrication:

“None of these facts have altered Biden’s commitment to making the debunked beheading claim a key detail in his impassioned defense of the legitimacy of Israel’s mass killing campaign, during which more than 18,000 Palestinians have been killed, including more than 7,000 children.”

Of course, this is only one of many, many lies. Since then, half a hundred of them have been spread by the Israeli state, and are in turn uncritically repeated by the states providing vital military and economic support to it. The bourgeois media usually contents itself by adding the little ‘according to the IDF’ disclaimer, as if that absolves them from repeating genocidal propaganda without a second thought—‘according to some people’ the earth is flat, but that doesn’t mean you have to write articles validating their perspective. The armed resistance organisations, and frankly Palestinians in general unless they bow to rigid rules of self-denial, never receive the same treatment, not even with a little disclaimer. Instead, everything said by them must immediately be validated by a ‘trustworthy’ (read: Western) perspective. That perspective is mostly offered by their murderers and those who aid them.

And here lies the crux of the issue, that goes far beyond any single piece of state-led propaganda:

The existence of the Israeli colony and the subjugation of the Palestinian people are treated as unchangeable facts of life, as certain as the change of the seasons. You might not be a fan of summer or winter, but it’s not like you can do much about them, is there? Similarly, the slaughter of Palestinians is written and spoken about as if it were a naturally occurring phenomenon, like an earthquake or a particularly nasty outbreak of disease. The stenographers of the Israeli Genocide Forces turn snipers shooting children in the head into deaths by natural causes— ‘according to the Hamas-led health ministry, several people were killed by bullets’, and so on.

No phrase exemplifies this approach to the facts of the colonial occupation better than the endless chorus heard in every bourgeois outlet in the imperial core for months on end:

and the usual response

This sentence pair shows the actual purpose of the bourgeois media in their approach to the Israeli genocide quite well. In theory, journalism is supposed to contextualize events for readers, so they can form a more ‘nuanced’ or ‘informed’ view of world events; in practice, the bourgeois media uses this approach to decontextualize events and lead readers to foregone conclusions that just happen to align with the bourgeois class position. In short, the purpose is agitative propaganda in the actual sense of the word.

When dozens of papers and news outlets close every article or piece of reporting on the genocide by talking about the ‘1200 people killed during the October 7th massacre,’ they aren’t trying to inform an imaginary reader who might have been in a coma for the last two years; they are trying to justify Israel’s supposed ‘right to self-defence’ against the people they have occupied for the last eight decades. Ask yourself this: Why doesn’t every other article end with the disclaimer ‘In 1948, Israeli terrorists ethnically cleansed one million Palestinians from their homes, forcing them into permanent exile’ or ‘During the Great March of Return in 2018 and 2019, the IDF massacred hundreds of Palestinians, most of them women and children’? There are countless other examples one could use, but none of them find a place in the bourgeois press.

This is how one editorializes genocide: Quietly, with little words and phrases, uncritical quotes, and silent racial agitation that kills without a sound. They can bet on Western supremacy and the genocidaires to do the rest—the ‘dirty work’ as Germany’s Chancellor Merz called it.

The worst part? Usually, these genocide propagandists get away without as much as a slap on the wrist. They just keep on writing, as if nothing ever happened, while their words are soaked in blood. Everyone makes mistakes, right? Most mistakes don’t contribute to genocide, though. Most mistakes don’t happen with clear intent.

We’ve all seen the images; so have they.

However, there is one of their kind, one of the few in history, who didn’t get away. One of them was punished. Sadly, that hardly matters. Let’s talk about why.

Why Julius Streicher Does Not Matter

There is nothing particularly interesting about Julius Streicher or the sort of things he printed in his obscene agitation rag, ‘Der Stürmer’. You can find similar things (minus the racist pornography) on Substack right now, if you dig deep enough into the neo-nazi corners that have formed and festered on this website… or the zionist corners, for that matter. Weird how that works, huh?

The most interesting part about Streicher might be that the Allies hanged him—good job on that by the way, bravo—but we’ll get to that.

The shortest and probably most apt assessment of his person comes from the British journalist Rebecca West, describing Streicher, whom she witnessed at the Nuremberg Tribunal, as a ‘dirty old man of the sort that gives trouble in parks’. It sums up Streicher and what his trajectory might have been under different circumstances quite well. Even among other members of the NSDAP, Streicher had a tarnished reputation, to put it politely. His particular flavor of hyper-sexualised racial supremacy was seen as eccentric even for the standards of the nazis, his personal record of sexual abuse of women was an open secret, and his screeching editorials denouncing this or that (fabricated) case of the supposed depravity of the ‘Untermensch’ were embarrassing for the more ‘sophisticated’ agitation led by Goebbel’s Propaganda Ministry. Streicher was tolerated more than anything else, largely because of his semi-legendary status as one of the oldest of the so-called ‘old fighters’—he had joined Hitler in his 1923 coup attempt in Munich. He was a true believer in the cause and wanted to drag along the masses.

Today, there are endless debates about how much of an impact Streicher’s agitation really had on the ‘German consciousness’, mostly marked by disbelief that this crude propaganda really could have convinced anyone. In some ways, it is the epitome of what Theodor Adorno called ‘the rumor about the jews’, where every day, hundreds of ‘anonymous tips’ would reach the Stürmer editorial board, detailing this or that supposed depravity inflicted on the German people, which would be reprinted as salacious articles and reader letters. Personally, none of this seems particularly surprising, considering the way Muslims are discussed by Western fascists these days; it is the same type of baseless agitation, often crudely sexualized and patriarchal, just with a different target and a different set of tropes. One must only look at the genocide agitation conducted after October 7th by Zionists to see the similarities. In the end, most Germans were certainly aware of Streicher’s genocidal propaganda, but how much it impacted them… well, that is hardly possible to reconstruct.

More importantly for our purposes, Streicher became a symbol abroad, particularly in American and Soviet wartime propaganda, finding an easy target for their ridicule in his obscene claims. The Americans dubbed him as Hitler’s number one ‘jew-baiter’, and as such, he was quickly drawn up as one of those who would take the stand at the Nuremberg Tribunals for the leading war criminals, especially considering the suicide-induced absence of Goebbels. What followed was perhaps the most ridiculous of all the defences at Nuremberg: Streicher at first claimed that he didn’t know anything about genocide and other crimes committed in the East, and since he had no official party role after 1940, he was categorically innocent of anything but ‘journalism’.

Sounds familiar, huh? Is Bret Stephens in the room with us right now? ‘Journalism’ remains a convenient shield for genocide agitators.

When that collapsed in on itself, with clear evidence presented that Streicher was well aware of the German extermination camps, he proceeded to complain that all of his judges were likely jews—they weren’t, not that it matters. Shockingly, this defence didn’t work. In the end, he became the first person sentenced to what would only later be dubbed ‘incitement to genocide’, a crime against humanity, one we should think about more often these days. His sentence read:

“Streicher's incitement to murder and extermination at the time when Jews in the East were being killed under the most horrible conditions clearly constitutes persecution on political and racial grounds in connection with war crimes as defined by the Charter, and constitutes a crime against humanity.”

And then, they hanged him. Streicher, jew-baiter until the end, blurted out one final ‘Heil Hitler!’ and ‘Purimfest!’—alluding to the supposed ‘Jewish nature’ of his sentence—before choking to death. Slowly. The end. Good riddance.

I can’t lie and pretend that I don’t get a certain satisfaction from the Nuremberg Tribunals, and in particular, the fact that Streicher was sentenced. Few people as vile as that get their comeuppance, a little taste of justice. But, of course, that is only a small part of the story. Most nazi genocidaires got away with it, and Streicher remained not only the first, but the only one to be sentenced for his genocide agitation at all. There were thousands like him, writing articles, making radio broadcasts, or working for the nazi state’s other propaganda instruments, and all they ended up with was a slap on the wrist and a cushy job as respectable journalists after the war. You can still find their names in the archives, but largely, they are forgotten.

Today, there are once again thousands of little Streichers, writing for this or that news broadcaster, ‘respectable’ paper, tabloid, or simply posting genocide agitation on social media, some of them on this very website. All while the Palestinians in Gaza are being exterminated ‘under the most horrible conditions’. You know the names of many of these desk murderers by now, but will that matter?

Will they be forgotten? Will they even get a slap on the wrist? Will they end up saying that they couldn’t have known about the extermination camp that Gaza has become? Will they still scream ‘Pallywood!’ before the end?

I only know one thing: Most of them are getting worried that the consequences of their actions will one day catch up to them, and God, I hope they are right. We need to make sure they are right.

How Could We Have Known?

Something rather strange is happening in the Western media landscape lately, at least on the surface level:

While the IDF and their handpicked American mercenaries working through the so-called ‘Gaza Humantarian Foundation’, murder a hundred Palestinians a day under the guise of aid, many of the exact same outlets that were blindly (and too often with their eyes wide open) reproducing the genocidal propaganda are now writing articles cautiously condemning the starvation, the bombs and everything else. Are the condemnations sufficient? Are they clear? Do they make the necessary distinction between resistance and colonial violence?

No, no, and no on all accounts. Of course.

It isn’t nearly enough; in fact, it is part of the same propaganda effort, yet the difference in form is so obvious that it can’t be overlooked. They have changed their tune, and I can’t help but wonder how the 'journalists’ responsible for it on the lowest rung of the ladder feel. Do they taste blood on their tongue when they read back the little obscenities they repeated over the last twenty-two months? Do they have a guilty conscience when they hear their own words repeated back to them in Israeli genocide agitation? I doubt it, but I also can’t read their minds. What we can do is look at the real effect of their output.

This entire piece, and the comparison with Streicher, grew from a sudden burst of anger I felt when reading one of the New York Times headlines mentioned above, still trying to run cover for the Zionist extermination campaign. There are many more like them. Over the years, I’ve managed to develop a healthy (and sometimes unhealthy) layer of cynicism that shields me from letting the daily insanity of bourgeois media framing get to me. Still… eventually, the sheer depravity of denying what everyone has seen, can see, and will continue to see finally gets to you. I don’t think I’m alone in that. It feels like something has to budge.

Let me be very clear:

I do not call these people genocide propagandists because I like the way those words sound in conjunction with one another. It isn’t a metaphor. They are criminals in a sense that transcends bourgeois notions of law, and in any just world, they would be punished for their crimes. But we live in the real world, and for now, justice is an abstraction that has little to do with real conditions. The law itself is merely a reflection of the bourgeois dictatorship. In that world, the only world that matters, the vast majority of these so-called ‘journalists’ will never be held accountable by any institutions, because they are simply doing their bloody work exactly as intended by creating consent for atrocity after atrocity, until it seems like the most normal thing imaginable.

Now that the tide has seemingly turned and the imperialist powers are worried about the optics of genocide, their role has changed once again. They no longer need to hold up the Israeli flag as if it hasn’t turned into a blood-stained rag in the public perception, but instead, they are the ones who set the *appropriate* measure of condemnation and misgivings about the sheer horror we all continue to witness. That is the new task of those who editorialize genocide for Western audiences. It is no less vile.

Netanyahu, Katz, Ben-Gvir, Smotrich, and all the others whose names have become poison to ‘respectable’ liberals must be discarded and even attacked, so others much like them can take their place to preserve the Israeli settler colony itself. They may struggle, they may fight bitterly, and maybe they will even evade prosecution. Still, their personal fates and that of their government are nothing for the imperialist powers—Israel, ultimately a tool of Western imperialism to sustain its hegemony over West Asia, is everything. It must be preserved at all costs.

Am Yisrael Chai, right?

There will be no Nuremberg tribunals where the editors responsible for reproducing Israeli propaganda and invalidating the atrocities will take the stand, as much as I wish that would be the case. They may have hanged the ‘jew-baiter’ in chief Streicher at Nuremberg, and one day they might put Ben-Gvir in front of a court in Den Haag; maybe they’ll even get Israel’s very own ‘Palestinian-baiter’ in chief, Eylon Levy, to join him. I doubt it, though. But what about those who share their beliefs? What about those who spread them to this day, and are paid for it handsomely? What about those who feel no shame when they look at the corpses of Palestinian women, men, and children, and call it ‘Pallywood’ while mocking the victims? We, those of us who live in the imperial core, are the only ones who can hold them accountable in the here and now, in whatever way we can.

They have no excuses, and neither do we.

In the year 2025, none of us need to rely on rumors, anecdotes, or hunches. We can see the genocide unfolding with our own eyes, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, in so much granular, exhaustive detail that no singular person could ever witness it all. We can see the mangled corpses, the burning flesh, the bombed-out ruins, the starving children, the uncovered mass graves, the grieving parents, the bloodstained murderers, and all the misery, death, and destruction they leave behind in their wake. It is horror, it should make you sick, and it is real.

Whatever will happen, history remains the final judge, and in that ‘long arc of history’ the Palestinian people and the memory of their heroic liberation struggle will live, while the words and names of the many genocide propagandists who participated in their attempted extermination will forever remain as a shameful reminder of their depravity, and above all, the depravity of imperialism.

Do they feel ashamed? They may or may not; it does not matter. Their judgment is a certainty, and the noose is already placed around their necks, as it has been and will be for all who stand in the way of human liberation, until they are finally swept away into the ‘dustbin of history’ together with the disgusting remnants of all other stillborn societies, such as the Israeli colonial regime itself. Then, finally, the verdict will be: Guilty!

This is the only eulogy they deserve. Palestine will be free, Palestine will live.

Thank you for reading!

I’ve been pretty busy, and I took a lot of care in making sure this article was phrased in the right way to make my point as clear as possible, while keeping my hopes up that Bret Stephens will sue me for comparing him to Julius Streicher.

The writing speaks for itself; the rest is up to you.

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Our History has now been going for six months, and 1500 subscribers later, I couldn’t be more thankful for every single one. You keep me motivated to put in the work, to hopefully produce something with meaning for all of us. Thank you! I’m looking forward to six more months of ‘ruthless criticism of all that exists’, and I hope you’ll stick around.

I usually don’t use my articles to respond to current events, because that often makes meaningful structural analysis more difficult or downright impossible. I also happen to be a (very) slow writer. Right now, though? It feels impossible to write anything else, and there are always general points that can be applied to the concrete situation.

So, let’s talk about what the Israeli attack on Iran means, and along what lines it needs to be resisted.

About half an hour after the first explosions rocked Tehran, the internationally wanted genocidaire and terrorist Netanyahu gave a speech in English clearly aimed at Western audiences, trying to justify the attack. This is a familiar play by now. One line still stood out to me:

On that note, Israel’s very own ex-PM Naftali Bennett also released a hilariously terrible propaganda video about Netanyahu’s fantasy scenario, which I just can’t keep from you, because it is a perfect example of how dysfunctional Israeli messaging has become in the face of their genocide-induced image collapse:

Does that sound and look familiar? Well, those of you who were around for the start of the Iraq War—or those of you who studied it after the fact—might remember the fantastical narratives about imminent attacks by Saddam Hussein’s ‘powerful’ military forces and their (fabricated) al-Qaida allies, prepared to strike European and American cities with chemical weapons. This was one of the many lies the war was built on, and how consent for it was established; always secondary to the grand lie of nuclear weapons, but not irrelevant. Saddam was painted as the Hitler of Baghdad, and what do you do with Hitler? You have to put him down with overwhelming force.

Did people actually believe that London, Paris and Washington were in danger of being struck by ballistic missiles carrying sarin gas? Well, the short answer is no, and even popularised stories about the panic buying of gas masks and such are mostly later exaggerations.

In that spirit:

Do people actually believe that Iran would have any interest, reason or sudden breakdown severe enough to strike targets in Europe or the US with entirely theoretical nuclear weapons? Obviously, no. The claim is utterly ridiculous even to the most die-hard regime change advocates, but that’s not what this is about in the first place.

Saddam’s Iraq and today’s Iran are neither the first nor the last states to receive this treatment of being recast as a danger to Western metropoles. Assad was once decried as another Hitler during the height of the Syrian Civil War, when the US, the comprador Gulf States and their European allies still had hopes of a quick overthrow of the state. Before him, it was Gaddafi, painted as the epitome of a ruthless murderer of his own people and, more importantly, an international sponsor of ‘terrorism’. And long before him? Britain and France famously tried to frame Egypt’s Nasser as the ‘Mussolini of the Nile’ while attempting to reoccupy the Suez Canal with Israeli support in 1956. The list goes on. These are different set pieces, but the same old justifications for imperialist war, murder and robbery.

The point of this increasingly rabid rhetoric isn’t so much to convince people of its validity, but to make these war narratives part of the acceptable discourse; to prepare the way for action.

Most ‘experts’ who are currently being paraded through the bourgeois media smugly wave off the ridiculous claims that Tehran is close to unleashing a nuclear holocaust, while with the other hand they wag their finger and decry the instability the ‘regime’ brings to the region, that it has provoked Israel and needs to respect ‘valid security concerns’, that Iran must be reasonable and avoid further conflict, that they should restart talks even as they are being bombed, and so on and so forth. If all else fails, perhaps some human rights experts and Middle Eastern Studies graduates from American universities can be drummed up to point at various detainees, political prisoners and upcoming executions in Iran to condemn in the harshest terms. Famously, Israeli missiles never kill women or gay people, nor would the US ever execute oppressed minorities. In the Western bourgeois media, only Muslims do—especially if they are on the wrong side of the next war.

Even as I’m finishing this article, the consent machine is running hot. While Iran is retaliating against Tel Aviv, over at CNN, official Israeli spokespeople and unofficial Israeli spokespeople are given a platform to swear vengeance, cry injustice, and demand further terror against the people of Iran, Palestine and just about anyone else you can imagine.

All of them, from state officials to journalists at the bottom of the self-replicating propaganda machine, are ultimately united in their purpose, consciously or not:

This purpose is to convince people thousands of miles away that their enemy is the state of Iran, and that the missiles, drones and incendiary bombs travelling from Tel-Aviv to Tehran and the rest of the country are not only in their interest, but also in the interest of the people of Iran who are yearning for liberation from the ‘mullah regime’. Already, the leading Western states—the US, France, the UK, Germany, Italy and their dependents—are once again rallying behind the Israeli colonial state and its supposed right of ‘self-defence’ against the war it started, all while continuing to support the genocide against Palestinians. It is looking increasingly like they are prepared to take part in yet another brutal redivision of the world at the expense of tens of millions by attempting to dismantle Iran and tear apart one of the central pillars of resistance to US domination in the region.

This is the result of the world system of imperialist capitalism, the primary enemy of the international proletariat. It must be resisted at all costs, but the question is, how can it be resisted? What is the correct political line in the face of an imperialist war of aggression?

To answer these questions, let’s talk about the contradictions of imperialism and their effects on Iran’s position.

Imperialism and Its Many Enemies

The primary contradiction of all things political, as long as capitalism remains the dominant mode of production, remains between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. So far, so good.

However, in today’s age, where the vast majority of the world has long been divided between the dominant capitalist states and their monopolies, this conflict expresses itself through the general bourgeois interest of perpetuating imperialism, while the general proletarian interest is to resist it. The imperialist bourgeoisie and their states seek to redivide the world in their favor, smash open new markets, and subjugate proletarians under increasingly miserable conditions to drive down the cost of labor while bribing their domestic working class into compliance with the help of accumulated superprofits. All of this objectively turns the global proletariat, especially in the most exploited regions of the world, into the imperialists’ uncompromising enemies, resulting in the anti-imperialist struggle, now immanent to the class conflict.

But, of course, those aren’t the imperialists’ only enemies. The concrete lines of these conflicts depend on the local conditions, but their ranks are often joined by:

• Smallholding peasants, middle peasants and even agricultural landowners who cannot compete with the flood of foreign products, are bought out of their land or the land they work, become dependent on high-industry products to stay competitive, or get ruined by price-dumping schemes.

• The petit-bourgeoisie, represented by independent lawyers and doctors, shopkeepers, food-stall owners, and just about any other ‘small-business’ you can imagine, who are outcompeted and proletarianized in the process.

• Even the sections of the domestic bourgeoisie, whose particular branches of commodity production can’t be integrated by the imperialist bourgeoisie and are instead entirely subordinated, ultimately threatening the former’s profits and market-share, or even their very class position.

All of them can turn against imperialism, but unlike proletarians, this isn’t a result of their class position in general, but rather a question of secondary contradictions, which are entirely circumstantial and can lead them right back into the camp of the imperialist bourgeoisie if it is in their immediate interest.

Beyond that, the imperialists are also in competition with each other for who gets to exploit which territories of the globe and which sections of its proletarians. Over time, these conflicts intensify and become unresolvable via purely economic means, creating the stage for inter-imperialist war, as they did before during the First and Second World War.

The reason I’m telling you this is because it is necessary to understand the role of any given state in the general struggle between imperialism and anti-imperialism, to understand the nature of the conflicts this state is involved in; it is necessary to develop a political line against ‘unjust’ wars, and find a way to intervene in ‘just’ wars in a way that advances the revolutionary proletarian political line.

As Lenin wrote in 1915, contrasting wars of oppressed states with wars between the imperialists:

“For example, if tomorrow, Morocco were to declare war on France, India on England, Persia or China on Russia, and so forth, those would be ‘just,’ ‘defensive’ wars, irrespective of who attacked first; and every Socialist would sympathise with the victory of the oppressed, dependent, unequal states against the oppressing, slaveowning, predatory ‘great’ powers.

But picture to yourselves a slave-owner who owned 100 slaves warring against a slave-owner who owned 200 slaves for a more ‘just’ distribution of slaves. Clearly, the application of the term ‘defensive’ war, or war ‘for the defence of the fatherland’ in such a case would be historically false, and in practice would be sheer deception of the common people, of philistines, of ignorant people, by the astute slaveowners. Precisely in this way are the present-day imperialist bourgeoisie deceiving the peoples by means of ‘national ideology’ and the term ‘defence of the fatherland’ in the present war between slave-owners for fortifying and strengthening slavery.”

— Lenin, Socialism and War, 1915

Using Lenin’s framework, it is absolutely clear that, for example, the so-called ‘war’ between Israel and Palestine is a ‘just’ war for Palestinians, fighting for their liberation and against genocide. You don’t need to be a communist to understand this.

Whenever zionists decry the October 7th attacks, what is the answer? History did not start on October 7th! This argument—an instinctively correct argument—actually isn’t so much about who started it, but rather about the conditions inflicted upon Palestinians by the Zionist colonial project: Those of colonial subjugation, national oppression and genocide. Any war against such conditions is by definition a ‘just’ war; a ‘defensive’ war; a war of national liberation. This is obvious to anyone with a functioning moral compass that hasn’t been eaten away by genocidal ideology.

Now, if we look at the case of Iran, the situation isn’t quite as obvious. Iran may have been attacked by Israel, but as we have seen above, the question of who attacked first hardly matters—it is about the objective position of the war parties in the world imperialist system and their goals within it.

The Class Character of Iran and the War

This article obviously can’t give a comprehensive or even vaguely adequate overview of Iranian history, so for the sake of brevity, I will stick to the class character of the 1979 Iranian Revolution that toppled the Shah’s puppet dictatorship, and how this class character persists today. The Shahist state was, despite what flag-waving fascists who support the Shah’s restoration from California might make you believe, a project of the comprador bourgeoisie, in alliance with Washington and the Israeli state, designed to keep a steady flow of oil exports and deny it to the Soviet Union. Iran was effectively a semi-colony. This worked for some time, until the comprador bourgeoisie overstepped and tried to assert more direct control of Iran’s resources, ultimately resulting in failure and, with that, a showcase of their real weakness in the face of imperialist domination. The vicious cycle of protest followed by inadequate repression came to a head in 1978-79.

The Iranian revolution was mainly an urban movement that managed to mobilize the peasantry behind national liberation from foreign domination, not dissimilar to other anti-colonial movements of the prior decade. This movement was chiefly led by the urban proletariat and the urban petit-bourgeoisie, with the latter ultimately winning out by entering into a generalised alliance with the small-holding peasantry, middle peasants, vast sections of the reactionary and feudal intelligentsia, and above all the non-comprador sections of the national bourgeoisie. They defeated the proletariat, and with that, the progressive tendency, marked by the suppression of the Tudeh Party and its allies among the larger communist movement. This is the class base of the so-called ‘Islamic Revolution’, which swept away the semi-colonial structures and the ruling comprador bourgeoisie, and replaced them with a class-collaborationist state dominated by the petit-bourgeoisie and a new national bourgeoisie. Iran may be a bourgeois dictatorship, but once again, the secondary contradictions can’t be ignored.

Right after the revolution, the United States and its regional puppets conspired with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, which had only recently abandoned cooperation with the Soviet Union, to seize the Persian oil fields and choke the new state in the crib. What followed was a decade of brutal war and imperialist siege to win back what had been lost with the Shahist state’s collapse. This brutal assault by imperialism never allowed the Iranian national bourgeoisie to enter into unequal cooperation with the bourgeoisie of the imperial core, since they had to defend their very existence, forcing them to take on a circumstantial anti-imperialist position—in short, they never had the opportunity to become a comprador bourgeoisie1. Since then, the Iranian bourgeoisie has been defending their little parcel of the world market against all foreign impositions, while attempting to dislodge the US—and above all their colonial outpost in Israel—from the wider region.

This is why Iran is taking on an objectively anti-imperialist position, despite its reactionary class character as a bourgeois class-collaborationist state, weighed down by feudal remnants. Usually, this would be a breeding ground for fascism, but the Iranian bourgeoisie does not have the resources or sufficiently developed productive forces to transition toward finance capital as its primary form of accumulation, which is a structural necessity of fascism. Only proletarian dictatorships are anti-imperialist by their basic class character, but other classes may take on this position under pressure from imperialism, and this is the exact case in Iran.

This leaves us with only one conclusion:

Iran has been a state under siege by Western imperialism since 1979, and now this siege has escalated to a full frontal assault, led by the imperial core’s attack dog in the region, Israel. It is a ‘just’ war, not least of all because it could dislodge the genocidal Zionist regime. However, and this is what differentiates Marxists from campists who pick their favorite bourgeois state, the secondary contradictions never invalidate the primary contradiction, and in the case of Iran, this, of course, remains the contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.

This puts the Iranian working class into a supremely difficult position, but that changes nothing about the correct line. The enemy of the Iranian proletariat is not only the imperialists who seek to dismantle their state, throwing them into chaos as they have done in Libya and Syria, and then right into neo-colonial domination; the enemy of the Iranian proletariat is also the bourgeois class-collaborationist state, and the reactionary classes allied to it. The only state that can actually be free from imperialist domination, and with that liberate Iran, is the dictatorship of the proletariat. The concrete political line to achieve this is not decided in Western discussion, but by the Iranian working class and their organisations. Understanding the class character of the current situation is only the first step.

And what is ‘our’ task in the face of a war of imperialist aggression? And by ‘our’, I’m referring to those who live in the imperial core, who are still the majority of my readers.

Well, I’ll let Karl Liebknecht, one of the most principled enemies of imperialist war in the history of my country, say it in his own words, but you might have guessed it from the title:

Your enemy is not Iran, and it is certainly not the Iranian people; it is and has always been imperialism. It is the states of imperial core—The United States, France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, and their many dependents—giving unconditional support to their genocidal puppet regime in Tel-Aviv, as they have done for the last twenty months, and as they have done for the last seventy-odd years.

Solidarity with our class sisters and brothers in Iran, Palestine and wherever else the imperialists may strike is the slogan of the hour. When they scream at us ‘down with the mullah regime,’ our answer must be:

Down with the regime in Washington, in Paris, in London, in Berlin, in Rome and in Tel-Aviv!

Thank you for reading!

Once again, it took a whole month to put out an article, but this one was actually written in the span of a few days. The topic is important, and the words kept coming. This is good news, because there are other articles close to done that would have usually taken the place of this one, until Israel's bombing of Tehran changed my plans.

Look forward to that! I hope this commentary on recent events isn’t too far off from what you expect, but I think the analysis was worth it.

If you made it all the way down here, consider leaving some of your thoughts in the comments. I’m always glad to read your opinions and discussions.

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Before you leave a comment complaining about ‘sectarianism’ and incessant (and always senseless!) left-wing infighting, I invite you to seriously consider two questions:

What is ‘the left’? What makes a ‘leftist’?

These aren’t meant to be purely rhetorical questions, so bear with me for a minute or two.

When people speak of ‘the left’ these days, it is almost impossible to discern what they actually mean without looking out for a hundred different context clues and other signifiers of their concrete political affiliation. The results have very little to do with each other. I’m not gonna bore you with lectures about the seating order in the revolutionary French National Assembly, but the fact that the very terms we use originate in this world-historical bourgeois revolution isn’t a coincidence—class conflicts are always at the core of serious political differentiation, then as they are now.

To those on ‘the right’—a term that colloquially describes a vague cultural affiliation with neo-fascist politics these days, since capitalism is hegemonic either way—leftism is essentially a conspiracy theory, propagated by shadowy figures behind the scenes and executed by million-strong armies of college students, woke professors, liberal journalists, trans people, ethnic minorities, women (yes, all of them) and whoever else needs to play the role of the enemy for the Zeitgeist not to collapse in on itself. None of this would be particularly interesting if it weren’t for the fact that this abstraction of ‘leftism’ from politics has led to widespread confusion about what their presumed enemies even want in the first place. This confusion about what ‘the left’ actually is has long crossed the cultural divide.

When Lenin lamented the miserable state of supposed ‘Marxists’ after the collapse of the Second International in the face of the First World War, he put it like this:

Today, all the social-chauvinists are ‘leftists’ (you may laugh, while it’s still funny!).

Confused liberals who think ‘progressive’ doesn’t sound spectacular enough while screaming for war; social democrats who believe in begging ninety-year-old genocidaires for healthcare and debt relief; democratic socialists who want to appease the calcified narratives of the red scare by attacking imaginary ‘authoritarians’; a hundred types of communists and anarchists who are terrified of their own history: All of them become ‘leftists’ when questioned on their politics, and they all seek to impose the proper limits on what ‘leftism’ should be. This is—to put it politely—completely ridiculous. As a final consequence, ‘leftism’ means nothing and turns into an empty cultural affiliation divorced from politics.

The immediate antidote for this is clarity: If you are a Marxist, don’t shy away from the label. If you are a communist, don’t run from the hammer and sickle. If you don’t know what you are, learn from those who do. Clarity is a weapon when others try to obscure their position because they know it is inadequate.

Of course, it isn’t a crime to hold uninterrogated, unrealised or incomplete ideas—these ideas mainly end up being a reflection of the class character of those who hold them, for good or ill—but the problem is when they are turned into parties, organisations and political lines. Then those ideas quickly turn into tragedy, by actively hampering the development of a class-conscious proletarian movement. Worse yet, some exploit this lack of clarity for their own goals that have absolutely nothing to do with socialism.

This is where the supposed necessity for unity turns into self-inflicted sabotage.

To take the extreme contrast, and with that the clearest example:

It should be obvious to anyone that the feckless social democratic parties turned neoliberal, infesting Europe’s parliaments while spitting on the memory of the workers’ movement, have nothing to do with Marxism, not even to mention the ongoing people’s wars of communist guerrillas in the Philippines, Myanmar, India or Palestine. Just because they wave a red flag and, on very rare occasions, incidentally invoke the same slogans to describe entirely different things, they are not on the same side—to be fair, most social democrats are afraid even to wave the flags and invoke the slogans nowadays. An attempt to bring these political projects under one imaginary umbrella isn’t just absurd, it is also completely useless when it becomes necessary to understand their role in the larger struggle. And oh… We’ll get to that role, alright.

For now, let’s talk about the difference between unity and surrender.

On Unity

Let me be provocative:

Left unity, as it is commonly understood, is a sham; a damaging one at that.

In the last weeks, a lot of time has been spent discussing in what way communists should interact with various social democratic projects, no matter how reactionary in actual substance. One only needs to take a look at the reception of Bernie Sanders and AOC touring the United States, and advocating for… well, what exactly remains somewhat unclear, but the positions expressed suggest a future social democratic presidential campaign by AOC, with healthcare, student debt cancellation, affordable housing and all the best hits that managed to turn young Americans into ‘leftists' ten years ago. In some sense, this entire campaign seems stuck in the past, since many of those turned into ‘leftists’ didn’t stop there and now advocate for ideas that seem to dangerously outmanoeuvre social democracy.

This discrepancy in concrete interests, most clear when it comes to anti-zionist positions coming out of a burgeoning sense of international solidarity and revulsion with the moral cost of imperialism, inevitably leads to friction, and with friction come those who wish to alleviate it no matter the cost—yes, even if it means going out of their way to indirectly run cover for genocide.

Should we not work together in the face of Trump’s fascism?

Can’t we put our differences aside for now?

Don’t we have more in common than drives us apart?

Do we always have to fight over the little things?

Isn’t it time for unity?

Ultimately, such empty calls for unity are always wielded as a cudgel against Marxists. That is their entire purpose, whether those who wield them know it or not.

When these supposed ‘leftists’ cry out for unity, it is never they who are willing to subordinate themself and their organisations to the Marxist line and tactics for the sake of unity; it is always the Marxists who must be ‘reasonable’ and ‘realistic’ and take a step toward reformism, liberalism and then as a final consequence the imperialist bourgeoisie we are supposedly all fighting against. ‘Being reasonable’, much like ‘common sense’, functions as a synonym for total surrender to the formal state institutions and the logic of imperialism.

Who then wields this cudgel? At best, misguided cowards who surrender to imagined roadblocks before ever meeting any real resistance, and at worst, blatant opportunists who use the blooming of working-class radicalism as a tool for their personal career advancement, whether they are aware of it or not. The former may be won over as the movement as such consolidates and finds a clearer purpose; the latter must be attacked in the sharpest possible terms, while focusing on the organic demands the working-class brings forward, especially where the opportunists try to moderate those demands into forms more amenable to their liberalism and future careers in the public sector.

While this is certainly nothing new—Marx was still alive when he felt the need to harshly intervene against concessions to the enemies of the revolutionary workers with his Critique of the Gotha Programme, and Engels’ polemic against the ‘respectable’ Herr Professor Dühring is a classic for a reason—let’s stick with the current example of Palestine, where the questions of our time are most acute, because the initial radicalism was fostered far away from the usual thumbscrews of Western social democracy and reformism:

• When the opportunists demand moderation in the face of colonial genocide, they must be answered with uncompromising anti-imperialism that does not weigh ‘domestic politics’ against the lives of tens of thousands

• When the opportunists demand condemnation of radicals, extremists or so-called terrorists, they must be reminded that the real terrorists sit in Washington, Berlin and Tel-Aviv

• When the opportunists demand compromise over the heads of Palestinians, they must be laughed out of the room with the universal and unshakeable right of self-determination for all peoples against their colonial masters

When the opportunists cry out for unity, the answer of Marxists must always be: Unity on what terms? Unity for what purpose? Unity with whom?

Or as Lenin put it quite clearly:

“Unity is a great thing and a great slogan. But what the workers’ cause needs is the unity of Marxists, not unity between Marxists, and opponents and distorters of Marxism. And we must ask everyone who talks about unity: unity with whom? With the liquidators? If so, we have nothing to do with each other.

But if it is a question of genuine Marxist unity, we shall say: Ever since the Pravdist newspapers appeared we have been calling for the unity of all the forces of Marxism, for unity from below, for unity in practical activities. No flirting with the liquidators, no diplomatic negotiations with groups of wreckers of the corporate body; concentrate all efforts on rallying the Marxist workers around the Marxist slogans, around the entire Marxist body.” — Lenin, Unity, 1914

Two parts stand out here and should be addressed in more detail to clarify their relevance for today’s questions of unity:

When Lenin speaks of ‘rallying the Marxist workers’, this does not mean a sort of ridiculous liberal purity test, where workers need to fulfil specific criteria to prove their adherence to Marxism or pass a test on their correct understanding of the M-C-M’ formula. Developing our understanding of Marxism and the understanding of others is part of the revolutionary process, but all proletarians are by definition the revolutionary subject of Marxism, without exception. That is our class struggle, the question is just whether we are conscious of it. For this, workers need to be rallied ‘around the Marxist slogans, around the entire Marxist body’, to separate them from reactionary political lines that contradict their interests.

Similarly, Lenin advocates for ‘unity from below, for unity in practical activities’ and this is key to understanding how to put Marxist unity into practice. Plenty of workers are tied to various reformist, opportunist or outright reactionary organisations and /or political lines, but that doesn’t change a single thing about their actual interests. When social democrats like Bernie Sanders manage to attract thousands of working-class people to their rallies, we must see this as an opportunity. The social democratic political line and its leaders are certainly our enemies, but not those who have come to support it and see it as the correct position; instead, they must be separated from this line by participating in their concrete struggles, and through that, open up an alternative. Marxists must find ways to intervene in these struggles, even if they take place under the umbrella of reactionary organisations, without subordinating themself to those organisations. That is the principle of unity from below.

So, if unity for the sake of unity is not the answer, then what is? How can the inevitable political conflicts that emerge as a result be won?

The answer, in one form or another, is struggle.

On Struggle

About four years ago, in May 2021, Israel was bombing Gaza. The scale of the murder almost seems quaint in comparison to the devastation wrought by the current genocide, but I was scandalised all the same. I went to the protests, I talked to people, and went through the motions in Munich’s political scene, hostile to anyone who stands up for Palestinian rights, then even more than now. I also happened to be a member of the ‘big tent socialist’ party ‘Die Linke’. Sure, I had my disagreements with people in the party and was already on the left-most edge, but I also believed in unity, that terrible, grand meta-narrative that held the party together. Better to be in one party than fight over minor differences, right?

Well, the differences were no longer minor, as their reaction to the brutalisation of Gaza showed, though I would need almost two more years to fully internalise it. While there were others like me who demanded a clear position on Israel’s terror bombing, the vast majority of the local party leadership called for unity—the national elections were close, and fighting about ‘controversial’ and ‘divisive’ topics wasn’t a good look. For some time, that conflict simmered, but in the end, we conceded the fight for the sake of internal harmony; the bombs kept falling, and all the party managed was a pathetic condemnation of violence on all sides.

Today, I know that those in solidarity with Palestine in the party, and I with them, chose unity over struggle and with that gave in to the cheapest kind of opportunism imaginable. We sold the Palestinian struggle, and any pretence at international solidarity, for the hope of a digit more in an election, each of us in our own small way.

It is a crime. But what is there to learn from it?

As I’m finishing up this article, Israel just announced its intention to occupy the entirety of Gaza and ethnically cleanse the north. This isn’t a surprise by any means, but rather the obvious conclusion of their genocidal policy. What is my former party doing? Well, they just affirmed their commitment to ‘Israel’s right to exist’ a week ago, never acknowledging the genocide with a single word. If that is what unity looks like, we have no use for it—in fact, we should fight it tooth and nail.

Most issues plaguing this discussion aren’t that people have fantastical, outdated or downright racist views of Hamas, that they nitpick at this or that struggle line of the PFLP, or that they have a verbal essay prepared to criticise the role of the DFLP. The issue is a fundamental misconception about the nature of politics.

The central takeaway is that we need to stop conceiving of ‘left-wing’ positions as a vague amalgum of opinions, hot takes and views, but of concrete differences in lines of struggle; lines of struggle that only matter in the real world if they are put into action, but matter all the more if they are; lines of struggle that may appear invisible to some, but are too often followed in the exact paths presented by hegemonic ideology; lines of struggle that either lead the developments, or rightfully become irrelevant if they trail behind them as mere appendages. I hate to break it to you, but the resistance and suffering of Palestinians isn’t an excuse to win an argument with someone on the internet or your local reformist party organisation of choice—Palestinians are real people struggling against a real genocide, against real bombs, against real murderers, not against their ghosts invoked in eclectic college book clubs. We should treat this discussion as such. It isn’t a game.

What you or I think about all that, deep in our hearts, is completely irrelevant and worse than useless if it isn’t connected to concrete political action or the preparation of that action through critique or investigation. Yet people treat abstracted opinions as if they somehow stand on equal footing. Why? Because opinions are comfortable and pose no risk, they can be changed and warped at any point. If push comes to shove in the form of repression or social pressure, they can be discarded completely as if nothing ever happened at all, precisely because nothing did happen in actuality. Opinions are dirt cheap and they die fast.

To interact with politics in this way is an expression of liberal ideology. It is pure, unblemished idealism, often resulting from the weakness of Marxist organisations in the actual struggle, while at the same time preserving this weakness. It also happens to be a death trap for the real movement, because it turns the dead-serious into the mundane.

As Mao put it in his perhaps most famous pamphlet:

“[…] Liberalism rejects ideological struggle and stands for unprincipled peace, thus giving rise to a decadent, Philistine attitude and bringing about political degeneration in certain units and individuals in the Party and the revolutionary organizations.

[…] Liberalism is a manifestation of opportunism and conflicts fundamentally with Marxism. It is negative and objectively has the effect of helping the enemy; that is why the enemy welcomes its preservation in our midst. Such being its nature, there should be no place for it in the ranks of the revolution.” — Mao, Combat Liberalism, 1937

To stick with Mao’s argument, we must always differentiate between the two lines that characterise all things political as long as the primary contradiction between capital and the proletariat remains: The bourgeois reactionary line and the proletarian revolutionary line. These lines are an objective reality that is immanent to the real conditions of the class struggle, and our task as communists is to investigate reality through Marxism, thus identifying their respective features, and combating the bourgeois line by putting the proletarian line into action. This is the core of political struggle.

Four years ago, I chose the bourgeois reactionary line on Palestine. Not because I didn’t know any better, but because it was the easier way out, and because the trappings of false unity made it more appealing. I opted for ‘unprincipled peace’ because everything about the type of organisation I was in, one founded on the unity of liberals, social democrats, reformists and unprincipled communists, pointed in that direction. This isn’t surprising, and there is nothing new under the sun. There are many types of liberalism:

“To hear incorrect views without rebutting them and even to hear counter-revolutionary remarks without reporting them, but instead to take them calmly as if nothing had happened. This is a sixth type.” — Mao, Combat Liberalism, 1937

This exercise in self-criticism isn’t meant to be self-flagellation, but rather an example of how false unity can actively harm the practical politics, which are the only type of politics that matter, of otherwise well-meaning people. There was no substantial difference between my theoretical stance on Zionism compared to today, and I still subordinated it to an aversion to internal party conflict. There were many others like me, and you can find them in every single opportunist organisation in the world, since that is exactly what incorrect political lines lead to, especially if unity is seen as a goal in itself.

So next time you hear someone calling for unity on uncertain terms, based on poorly defined politics, your reply should look something like this:

No unity, without a combined struggle. No unity, without a combined purpose.

If that can’t be guaranteed, it is necessary to take a stance against false unity, for the sake of those who are sold downriver by it without a seat at the proverbial table, be they in Palestine or elsewhere.

Everything is at stake, so which line will it be?

Thank you for reading!

Some of you may have noticed that it has been a whole month since my last article, and while I’ve been busy, that isn’t the main reason. I’m just absolutely terrible at sticking to one topic. My drafts are fuller than ever, bursting with half-finished articles about everything, from the concept of the urban guerrilla to the pre-revolutionary Cuban plantation system.

Similarly, this piece went through several iterations that resulted in two other (unfinished!) drafts with related topics. So look forward to a piece on the history and practice of united front tactics, the Third International’s social fascism thesis, and more!

If you made it all the way down here, consider leaving some of your thoughts in the comments. I’m always glad to read your opinions and discussions.

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The United States of America isn’t a nation-state. It never has been; it never can be.

This may be provocative to some, but there is no denying it once the actual structure of the state is understood. This isn’t a historical point of curiosity, but the bedrock on which the United States has been built and continues to stand to this day.

If the United States isn’t a nation-state, then what is it?

Above all, the United States is a settler-colonial state, and it has remained a settler-colonial state for well over three hundred years, going back to when the territories that would go on to form its constituent parts were ruled by the British crown from across the ocean. European settlers of different nationalities crossed the Atlantic, leaving behind increasingly precarious class positions, to seize indigenous land for themself by force. For this purpose, the indigenous peoples were murdered, expelled, and forced into unequal treaties that weren’t worth the paper they were written on, until gradually the settler colony turned into an independent, continent-spanning empire that reigned supreme from coast to coast.

In the meantime, the settlement of the so-called ‘New World’ combined with the globalisation of trade brought a new horror with it: the transatlantic slave trade, resulting in the abduction, purchase and enslavement of millions upon millions of Africans to provide forced labor on the other side of the world. In the prosperous lands of the so-called American South, ripe for exploitation after the native populations had been expelled or exterminated by the settlers, slavery created the foundation for the quasi-aristocratic planter class. This relation would form the backbone of the southern plantation economy, so vital for the primitive accumulation, which paved the way toward fully developed capitalism in North America, by appropriating the labor of the enslaved African masses.

All of this finds its expression through the central ideology of this American settler empire, creating justification for the crimes and consolation through the crimes’ artificially constructed necessity in one: White supremacy.

So far, this should be a relatively agreeable understanding of American history, even if expressed in sharper terms than one would find in the average acknowledgement of historic (always historic, never current) brutality. All but the most reactionary Americans generally conclude that slavery and the genocide of the indigenous peoples aren’t something that should be celebrated long after the fact, and even they will usually admit that racism ‘played a role’ in it. The issue is that the hegemonic narrative starts to become confused and downright bizarre at the latest when assessing everything following the post civil war reconstruction period—a period that is criminally misunderstood by many, which contributes to the confusion—and is given over to historical narratives that are pure expressions of liberal ideology, which insists that equality in the United States is aspirational, and slowly (but surely!) ‘history’ is moving in that direction. Its proponents, often across party lines since internalized white supremacy is genuinely bipartisan, might ask:

Did we not abolish slavery?

(Ignoring the astounding continuity between the modern American prison system and the legal reconstruction of slavery after the Civil War)

Did we not give the indigenous peoples rights to their land?

(Ignoring the forced assimilation once the process of extermination was concluded, and the continued existence of the reservation system on tiny fractions of their land)

Did we not give civil rights to everyone?

(Ignoring the complete banality of formal rights in the absence of equality in all political, economic, and cultural spaces)

Are we not a nation of immigrants? Are we not all human? Are we not all Americans?

This ‘we’—the worst kind of we, the chauvinist’s national we—is imaginary in all capitalist states, but it is especially empty in the context of the US empire. There is no American national identity with any content beyond propagandised adherence to the symbolism, slogans and personality cults of the settler state, mixed with what is essentially commodity fetishism. The exception is the one identity that outright fascists try to revitalize out in the open, and liberals try to obscure with an incoherent ideology of moral progress: Whiteness—an ever-expanding and yet brutally limited category built around the exclusion of the actual nations within the empire’s borders.

Some of these nations carry names and are recognized by the US as a token gesture, and even that much was often bitterly fought for: Sioux, Cherokee, Shawnee, Navajo, and a hundred more indigenous nations split into disparate tribal reservations by the process of genocide, displacement and subjugation.

Just as the settler state fragmented Indigenous nations, it forged new oppressed nations through slavery and annexation. Enslaved Africans, ripped from their home continent, transported across the ocean, and over generations deprived of much of their cultural heritage and even their language, formed a distinct national identity through the shared experience of enslavement, liberation and struggle against white supremacy, the settler state imposed upon them. Similarly, although in less acute circumstances, the people subjugated by the conquest of the western territories once held by the Mexican state were subsumed into the empire, but not into whiteness, and without that, never raised to the status of settlers. When we speak of nations, we mean communities forged by shared history, territory, and struggle—not mere cultural identity. The black nation in America, for example, like the indigenous nations in their modern form, was created through violent subjugation and resistance against it. All of this, from the first settlements to the modern condition, exemplified by the underserved reservation and the ‘inner-city’ ghetto, only leaves one conclusion:

The United States isn’t a nation-state. It is a prison—a ‘prison of nations’.

And it isn’t the first of its kind.

When the Bolsheviks prepared for revolution against the semi-feudal Tsarist state—the original ‘prison of nations’, as Lenin referred to it—the task of national liberation was often at the forefront, and often controversial; from the question of how to deal with bourgeois nationalism to autonomy for the colonized tribal nations of Siberia. The experiences of the early Soviet Union show that dismantling empire requires combating national chauvinism with proletarian internationalism, which necessarily includes the right to national self-determination.

Consequently, the nations chained by the empire must be liberated from it—this goes for the less than United States now, as it did for the decrepit Tsarist Autocracy a hundred years ago. Let’s take a closer look at the similarities and differences, and what concrete lessons there are to learn for today’s liberation struggle.

The National Question — From Empire to Union State

Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality.

This, in three words, can be understood as the official ideology of the Tsarist state in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, and was in many ways its answer to surging bourgeois national movements all over Europe, including within the borders of the empire. We will focus on the ‘Nationality’, which would be better described as national supremacy and primacy of the ‘Great Russians’— we simply call them Russians today, and the name already contains a hint of their supposed role in the eyes of Tsarism, as a guiding nationality for the ‘lesser’ peoples.

Lenin describes the use of this supremacist ideology, as it was expressed by the proto-fascist Black Hundreds movement and endorsed by the Tsar:

“The conditions of life of this vast population [the oppressed nationalities] are even harsher than those of the Russians. The policy of oppressing nationalities is one of dividing nations. At the same time it is a policy of systematic corruption of the people’s minds. The Black Hundreds’ plans are designed to foment antagonism among the different nations, to poison the minds of the ignorant and downtrodden masses […] This dirty and despicable work is undertaken, not only by the scum of the Black Hundreds, but also by reactionary professors, scholars, journalists and members of the Duma. Millions and thousands of millions of rubles are spent on poisoning the minds of the people.” — Lenin, National Equality, 1914

So, how are these conditions resolved, and how do they relate to socialist revolution? The most obvious answer, the ‘common sense’ of today’s liberals, as it was of liberals of the last century, is the establishment of legal equality. This was obvious to everyone except the most reactionary chauvinists. Even the 1906 constitution gave token concessions to the national minorities, and finally, the February Revolution of 1917 abolished the remnants of official national discrimination, especially severe against the Muslim and Jewish minorities of the empire. The Bolsheviks were not needed for equality under the law, instead, they went far beyond. While Kerensky’s government of national defense quickly became a government of national oppression, attempting to keep the prison of nations intact by all means—a cause soon taken up by the White Army, much to their detriment—the Bolsheviks, and Lenin in particular often against fierce opposition, insisted on the uncompromising right to national self-determination and secession by oppressed nations. This position was kept up during the entirety of the civil war—the only debatable exception is the Red Army’s seizure of Baku to secure an oil supply for the nascent proletarian revolution, and even there, a government of Azerbaijani communists took the lead.

For the Bolsheviks, the national right to self-determination was the basis of proletarian internationalism:

“In this situation, the proletariat, of Russia is faced with a twofold or, rather, a two-sided task: to combat nationalism of every kind, above all, Great-Russian nationalism; to recognise, not only fully equal rights, for all nations in general, but also equality of rights as regards polity, i.e., the right of nations to self-determination, to secession […] Complete equality of rights for all nations; the right of nations to self-determination; the unity of the workers of all nations—such is the national programme that Marxism, the experience of the whole world, and the experience of Russia, teach the workers.” — Lenin, The Right of Nations to Self-Determination, 1914

It is no coincidence that Lenin would later stress the negative influences of Great-Russian chauvinism on the early Soviet Union, and with that, the centrality of combating it. It is no coincidence either, but rather a direct expression of this policy, that the Union Treaty of 1922, which formally established the Soviet Union, enshrined the right to secession for the constituent socialist republics, that the Soviet Union returned land seized from China and Mongolia by the Tsarist autocracy once the revolution took root there, and that where policies of russification or national supression were implemented the offending members were expelled from the party without hesitation. This program was applied to all colonized nations, from autonomy for the tribal peoples of Siberia to demanding equal rights for those colonized by the imperialist states across the oceans.

The so-called American left should be ashamed that a party leading a revolutionary conflict in one of the most underdeveloped regions of Europe was miles ahead of them when it came to the question of national self-determination over a hundred years ago. In fact, they often reproduce the exact chauvinism so sharply attacked by Lenin.

Of course, not all of this survived into the era of consolidation under Stalin’s leadership, but that is a discussion for another time—the general principle and its importance should be clear:

The October Revolution did not lead to the foundation of a ‘Great Russian Soviet Republic’, and neither can an American revolution lead to the foundation of an ‘National American Soviet Republic’. The right to national self-determination and secession must be upheld under all circumstances. In fact, these rights become only clearer in the American case, because of the class structure inherent to the settler state. Let’s talk about that in more detail.

Facing the Settler — Finding an ‘American’ Proletariat

The argument that is about to follow is the exact type of argument people in the West who imagine themself as prospective revolutionaries don’t like to hear. That makes the argument all the more important, considering most prospective Western revolutionaries never engage in revolution. I’ll try to be gentle.

Unlike in Tsarist Russia, where the ‘Great Russian’ proletariat became one of the chief revolutionary forces for the reasons discussed in the last section, the vast majority of American settlers, even those among them who are supposedly proletarian, have always been complicit in the reproduction of empire. To be clear: This isn’t a moral judgement on individuals, but rather an attempt to approach the objective class relations within the boundaries of the US state, and understand where revolutionary potential can be found and under what circumstances. Without that, making revolution is an impossibility.

To explain the particular class position of American settlers, we should talk about J. Sakai’s often maligned but rarely seriously interrogated polemic 'Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat’. He didn’t try to be gentle. His fundamental position is that the vast majority of white workers in the US have always constituted a privileged labor aristocracy, ultimately in alliance with the bourgeoisie when it comes to the subjugation of colonized nations. They are settlers, which, in turn, reflects on the self-conception of the American left if they falsely identify them as the primary revolutionary class.

Sakai states this position on the history and present of the American state and with that the American left, explicitly:

“The imperialists even concede that their standard ‘U.S. history’ is a white history, and is supposedly incomplete unless the long-suppressed Third-World histories are added to it. Why? The key to the puzzle is that Theirstory (imperialist Euro-Amerikan mis-history) is not incomplete; it isn't true at all. Theirstory also includes the standard class analysis of Amerika that is put forward into our hands by the Euro-Amerikan Left. Theirstory keeps saying, over and over: ‘You folks, just think about your own history; don't bother analyzing white society, just accept what we tell you about it.’ ” — J. Sakai, Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat, 1983

What are we—those of us not interested in reproducing national chauvinism with our analysis of class relations in the US—to make of this? Well, for now, let’s take Sakai’s arguments seriously.

One of the most destructive tendencies of the American socialist movement has been to view the struggle of the oppressed nations against the empire as ‘merely’ an incidental part of the larger struggle against capitalism. This tendency will acknowledge that white supremacy is a central issue, that indigenous self-determination is vital, that reparations for slavery may be necessary, and so forth, while ultimately seeing all of it as an afterthought compared to the ‘real’ fight for socialism. These ‘lesser’ issues are relegated to the eventual destruction of the white supremacist bourgeois state, which will presumably unfold in the revolutionary process that is, for the foreseeable future, exclusively unfolding in their heads.

On what terms is this real struggle supposed to take place, then? The Bolsheviks understood the necessity of a combined struggle on all fronts, so what do these ‘Euro-Amerikan’, self-declared revolutionaries have to offer? They would never say it out loud because that exposes the blatant white supremacist logic beneath, but ultimately they conceive the revolutionary process as one advanced by the white majority, which should ‘accommodate’ or ‘integrate’ non-white proletarians into the larger struggle. And just in case it needs to be said: No, claiming you ‘don’t see color’ like a caricature of the worst kind of liberal, doesn’t change the ideology of this surface-level integrationist tendency, and its complete inability to conceive of a general liberation struggle against the American bourgeois state by those who are actually subjugated by it.

In reality, and this is absolutely vital to understand, the revolutionary process is one and the same as the struggle for self-determination by the proletarian masses of the oppressed nations. They have never been truly integrated by the settler state, and are now facing it as the most severely exploited people within the empire’s borders.

Ignoring this inevitably reproduces white supremacy, and ultimately is an expression of the settlers’ concrete class interest of maintaining their comparatively privileged position as part of the global imperialist hegemon’s labor aristocracy, petit bourgeois landowners, and at the very top, as the imperial bourgeoisie. This is rarely understood in those terms, but is crystal clear when viewed through the historical failures and capitulations of the American union movement and various communist organisations—as Sakai does—which were dominated by a settler majority.

At best—and it really isn’t good at all—it results in treating the conflicts of the oppressed nations, and with that, the vast majority of the most acutely exploited proletarians, as secondary, as it has been done over and over again by class-collaborationist unions in the United States. Instead, the goal is to win concessions from the spoils of empire.

Sakai makes special note of this in his characterisation of early trade-unionism:

“Underneath the surface appearance of militant popular reform, of workers taking on the wealthy, these movements were only attempts to more equally distribute the loot and privileges of Empire among its citizens. That's why the oppressed colonial subjects of the Empire had no place in these movements.” —J. Sakai, Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat, 1983

At worst, we can see the results in parties like the CPUSA, which gradually turned itself into a sad, parasitic entity attached to the Democratic Party—and with that to the settler state—by abandoning even the semblance of revolutionary action. Why? Because once the Civil Rights Act established formal legal equality, they had exhausted their wedge issue, which initially led them ‘across racial lines’, and reverted to the lowest common denominator for all practically exhausted and theoretically confused communist parties: reformism thinly veiled by red flags. To this day, the CPUSA blatantly denies that anyone except the American bourgeoisie can be understood as settlers, while appropriating the language of national liberation—they, too, have made the ‘prison of nations’ comparison, abusing Lenin’s work only to retreat to the equivalent of a ‘Great Russian’ chauvinist’s position on the matter.

A crass difference can be seen between organisations taking on the role of de facto collaborators with the empire, and those that actually presented a threat to it by focusing on a proletarian liberation struggle, and connecting it to the larger fight against world imperialism. There is a reason why the Black Panther Party became the most advanced communist organisation the US has ever seen before it was supressed, why militants of the Black Liberation Army were killed and hunted down without mercy, why the indigenous-led Red Power movement was torn apart with armed force and the violence of courts, and why even the generally more ‘moderate’ Land Back Movement and Chicano Movement are under continued surveillance and pressure by American state institutions. They present a real threat by uniting the proletarian masses of oppressed nations within the Empire’s borders in the struggle against the bars of their collective prison.

These movements prove liberation must begin where the empire's violence is most acute, not where settlers feel most comfortable.

The Terms of the Struggle — Shattering the Prison

Ultimately, the American left has two choices: continue as the empire’s useful idiots, or finally recognise that liberation won’t come from the settlers, but from those they’ve imprisoned in the boundaries of their state. Of course, it is no coincidence that the largest sections of the so-called left have not recognised this, since it is in their class interest as labor aristocrats to close their eyes, and the others are pulled along by their sway in organisations. Class suicide—actively working against one’s own class interests, in more than words—is rarely an appealing notion, and neither is the prospect of a grueling revolutionary struggle that will, for some time at least, shatter the established value chains, reduce living standards and cause panic among those used to living off the superprofits extracted from the labor of the third world and the land of subjugated nations.

This can be no excuse. Facing reality is always preferable to idealist fantasies and lies, produced to enable a false radicalism that is ultimately destructive. Lenin was quite clear on that matter, and the role of such delusions in revolutionary situations:

“After their first serious defeat, the overthrown exploiters—who had not expected their overthrow, never believed it possible, never conceded the thought of it—throw themselves with energy grown tenfold, with furious passion and hatred grown a hundredfold, into the battle for the recovery of the ‘paradise’ of which they were deprived […] In the train of the capitalist exploiters follow the wide sections of the petty bourgeoisie, with regard to whom decades of historical experience of all countries testify that they vacillate and hesitate, one day marching behind the proletariat and the next day taking fright at the difficulties of the revolution; that they become panic-stricken at the first defeat or semidefeat of the workers, grow nervous, run about aimlessly, snivel, and rush from one camp into the other.” — Lenin, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, 1918

All of this does not mean there is no role for white Americans in this struggle—quite the opposite, in fact, because they have the veil of protection granted by white supremacy others are not afforded—but without understanding their own position, they are bound to reproduce completely dysfunctional and often outright reactionary tactics. And while whiteness is generalized, there are, of course, differences in the concrete class positions of white workers in the United States, ranging from fully integrated labor aristocrats in the empire’s metropoles to the historically superexploited workers of the Appalachians—the fact that this needs to be addressed is already a concession to white fragility, but I want to anticipate the inevitable outrage in the comments somehow.

At the same time, the objective existence of oppressed nations must be seen as an opportunity. The most elemental task of any revolutionary organisation is to find a revolutionary class to make revolution with, not as an appendage, not as an imposition, but as one of them, leading the struggle in the clearest possible terms. This is the task of the vanguard party—not to ‘include’ or ‘consider’ the proletarian masses, but to take a leading position from within the proletarian masses.

Consequently, in the United States, the task of this revolutionary organisation is not to convince oppressed nations or settlers that they must work together, on a vague and entirely ahistorical and anti-materialist basis akin to liberal denial of the most severe expressions of white supremacy, but rather that their collective liberation is one and the same task. This is what the most advanced socialist organisations like the Black Panther Party advocated for, despite distortions to the contrary that attempt to deny the colonial nature of the state:

The dissolution of the American settler empire, the destruction of the bourgeois state, the establishment of workers’ power, and the uncompromising right to self-determination, autonomy and secession for the nations imprisoned in the boundaries of the empire.

The terms of this struggle are clear—the prison of nations must be shattered.

Thank you for reading!

Once again, this article ended up becoming extremely long, which forced me to move some of the discussion of the national question in the Soviet Union, the approach to the colonial question, and the particular approach of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army into another piece—this is becoming a trend, huh?

Well, look forward to that at some point in the not-so-distant future. My drafts are filling up more every day!

If you made it all the way down here, consider leaving some of your thoughts in the comments. I’m always glad to read your opinions and discussions.

All my writing is free and will remain free in the foreseeable future, but if you want to support my work, you can do so here:

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Are you human? Am I?

It depends on who is looking at us.

In the real world, beyond the idealist flights of fancy enshrined but rarely enforced by international law, one’s humanity is a question of circumstances and perception. All of us have the potential to be reduced to a number, a statistic, an accident, a tragedy, a massacre, or, as is most often the case for the countless millions who have been stripped of the opportunity to even have a name, to nothing at all. In fact, from the perspective of the hegemonic observer, they never really existed in the first place.

Some of us are more likely to be human—this, too, is a question of circumstances.

When the American state murders a hundred nameless Yemeni people, the only reason it even remains in the headlines for longer than a day is because someone added the editor of The Atlantic to their internal group chat by accident—and that ends up being the only part that matters. In the mass media discourse, the actual events—for example, the indiscriminate murder of men, women and children by blowing up an entire apartment building—weren’t so much ignored, but rather deemed so utterly irrelevant that most so-called journalists reporting on this story didn’t even consider discussing them with more than a ritualistic remark about ‘alleged’ civilian casualties, if they discussed them at all.

Worse still: The crux of this discussion centered on concerns of ‘national security’—as if compromising the ability of the US military to blow up apartment buildings in Yemen without opposition presented a threat to anyone. How would you feel if your entire life and the life of everyone you know weren’t even worthy of a single mention? If the murder of people like you was presented as a matter, even a necessity, of reasonable policy?

For me, and most of you judging by my subscribers’ demographics, these remain mostly abstract questions—it is astoundingly difficult to lose your humanity if you are white and live in the heart of the imperial core. Outside of those boundaries, humanity is not an innate trait, but rather something that has to be proven and asserted over and over again, and even then, it is only a status granted instead of acquired.

Those who think this ‘logic’ is a simple propaganda tactic of the ruling classes—often, though not always, presented in the form of what is essentially a conspiracy theory of targeted media manipulation—are missing the actual scale of the denial of humanity that is taking place here, and its root causes. The principal and often subconscious ideological stance of the entire Western world, rooted in the colonial slave trade and endlessly reproduced and replayed by the global flow of resources and capital, is that one’s humanity is a question of proximity to empire, and by extension, always a question of proximity to whiteness.

The masses of the Third World aren’t simply dehumanized—the masses of the Third World can’t be human in the first place, to fulfill their structural role in the age of imperialist capitalism in decay.

Let’s talk about what that means for humanity.

Western Exceptionalism — Who Gets a Name?

In 2003, the twenty-three-year-old American activist Rachel Corrie was murdered by the IDF while taking part in a non-violent blockade against the demolition of Palestinian homes in Rafah. They ran her over with a bulldozer.

This made ‘the news’, right in the middle of the Second Intifada, when Palestinians were being murdered every single day. Suddenly, the attention of the Western mass media was turned to Rafah and its ongoing demolition, and even the American and Israeli governments were forced to comment—the former with empty condolences, the latter with outright fabrications, but they commented all the same—while international organisations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch paid special attention to the farcical ‘internal investigations’ of the Israeli state concerning Corrie’s murder.

The reason why Rachel Corrie was granted a name and a face in the headlines, and with that a place in the Western mind, is obvious: She was a white American—not even her name or outward appearance could offer an excuse to separate her from the West—and Americans aren’t supposed to die anywhere near Palestine, much less be murdered by the IDF in Gaza.

Let me be clear: This is in no way meant to denigrate or lessen Rachel Corrie’s sacrifices for the cause of Palestinian liberation—in fact, her commitment to that very cause is what stripped her of the usual veil of protection granted to white Westerners, and made her a target for the systematic violence inflicted upon the colonized by the IDF. The organisation Corrie was a member of, the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), finds a pathway in the struggle by acknowledging and ultimately weaponizing that structure of Western exceptionalism against those who participate in it. By putting Western bodies on the line, they intend to debilitate the Israeli colonial state from unrestricted violence against Palestinians. The results of this strategy are mixed: Israel has murdered several members of the ISM—your humanity is no longer guaranteed once you cross the line and join the Third World in the liberation struggle.

At the very least, even those Westerners murdered by the IDF are allowed to have names. You can find all of them on the ISM Website, and when you search for their names, their whole life story is documented by the mass media and various human rights organisations, exactly because their humanity is acknowledged through the exceptional circumstances of their deaths. Most Palestinians who are murdered are statistics; a number on a seemingly endless and yet still incomplete list—the exceptions exist because they are once again acknowledged in their proximity to the West.

Palestinian writer Mohammed el-Kurd describes this phenomenon using the example of the journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, who was murdered by the IDF in 2022:

“I did not ‘announce’ that Shireen was a citizen of the United States. And when I wrote about her murder, I insisted to my editors that, if I must mention this fact, I would refer to her as a carrier of a US passport, not as an American citizen. Why contribute—even if only with a simple phrase—to a hierarchy of lives where citizenry, like race, class, gender, ‘civility’, plays a role in determining whether someone deserves compassion or due diligence? I wanted the world to stand still over the death of a Palestinian, regardless of qualifiers. But that didn’t matter: within hours, the news spread like wildfire. Her passport was the talking point. Shireen was an American and her alleged Americanness swiftly made her human.” — Mohammed el-Kurd, Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal, 2025

Shireen Abu Akleh was no longer Palestinian, at least not primarily, because her ‘Americanness’ superseded her ‘Palestinianness’ in the invisible and yet tangible hierarchy that cuts through the world and is reproduced every single day by the mass media, the Western state apparatuses themself and their dependents. Because of this, Shireen Abu Akleh was granted a name. Most of those who are ‘only’ Palestinian do not get that courtesy—their humanity is erased and denied in the process.

You can see it happening every single day, and once you start reading ‘the news’ that way—and ask yourself what constitutes ‘the news’ in the first place—it becomes impossible to ignore: Humanity in the Third World isn’t implicit, it isn’t a right, it isn’t even earned, but it is granted by the hegemonic discourse. The West alone decides who gets to be human and who can never be human.

This ideology of Western exceptionalism, while of course an unfathomable falsehood, is tied to and produced by the concrete conditions of the real world, as all ideologies are. The condition it in turn justifies and reproduces is nothing less than the most brutal and widespread mode of exploitation known to humanity in our time: Global imperialism, in its neo-colonial form.

Imperial Accumulation — Who Gets to Eat?

The Third World must bleed because the West must consume.

This is the basic operating principle of the relation between the imperial core and the vast peripheries of the Third World that are, as Michael Parenti put it most concisely, ‘not underdeveloped but overexploited’—this is in itself an adaptation of the core thesis of Walter Rodney’s exceptional work ‘How Europe Underdeveloped Africa’, which you should all read if you haven’t already. Nothing about the fundamentals has shifted in this relationship since the darkest days of direct colonial rule, but its form has adapted, while leaving the most crushing element of this subjugation intact, as Rodney describes:

“The factor of dependency made its impact felt in every aspect of the life of the colonies, and it can be regarded as the crowning vice among the negative social, political and economic consequences of colonialism in Africa, being primarily responsible for the perpetuation of the colonial relationship into the epoch that is called neo-colonialism.” — Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, 1973

While Rodney specifically writes about Africa, neocolonialism remains the primary mode of colonial domination globally. The structural dependence of the Third World on the markets of the West, where resources are still overwhelmingly exported to and capital is even more overwhelmingly exported from, forms the basis of this relationship and with that the basis of the imperialist world system. In this system, the independence of dependent capitalist states can only exist in name, and everything from unequal exchange to the hierarchy of the various global value chains is necessitated by it.

This results in a quite literal division of the world, which goes beyond the fundamental conflict between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, inherent to all capitalist formations. The most acute form of exploitation takes place in the neo-colonies of the Third World, where the vast majority of proletarians are forced to sell their labor power at obscenely low prices to capitalists domestic and foreign, permanently trapping them in conditions that are barely enough to ensure their own basic sustenance, and with that the reproduction of their labor power. The vast surplus extracted this way is divided between a domestic bourgeoisie—only a small portion, since they themselves, often together with their entire state, are subjugated by imperial finance capital and its various institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank—and the ruling bourgeoisie of the imperial core. The superprofits generated, flowing from the neo-colonies to the West, are in turn used to ‘bribe’ (calling it bribery is a simplification, but is close enough for this text) large sections of the proletariat, by paying them comparatively higher wages—wages that exceed the actual value of their productive labor.

The West gets to eat, and the Third World has to work. This is not a moral judgement—the system itself is blatantly immoral—but it is a reality, and this reality creates obvious obscenities that need to be painted over by ideology in order to become digestible.

An example:

• The median income in Burundi, one of the poorest states on the planet, is about 475 US Dollars.

• The median income in the US, one of the wealthiest states on the planet, is about 19300 US Dollars.

Does the average American worker work forty times harder than the average worker in Burundi? Of course, not, and not even the most vulgar Western supremacists would claim so—instead, they will offer you creative economic theories from differences in purchasing power parity, differences in the productivity of post-industrial and ‘developing’ economies, and perhaps even a silent acknowledgment that there is something untenable about it, but that we (by ‘we’ they always mean ‘them’) just have to deal with that until capitalism will magically make everyone wealthier at some point in the far distant future. The graph is going up after all. Promise.

What we are left with is a necessity to abstract the humanity of the Third World, and as a final result, deny it completely. At most, they get to be pitied as victims of an imperfect system that requires child labor, deadly working conditions, and squalid slums where the difference between unemployment and a fourteen-hour workday is the difference between going hungry and eating another day. The poorest of the poor, represented by pictures of women, children and rarely men with haggard arms, pleading eyes and defeated postures, are their acceptable form, allowing us to clear our conscience with laughable donations, useless social media campaigns and tired, half-hearted acknowledgments of privilege.

They can exclusively be ‘the wretched of the earth’, since other conditions and a struggle for a change in conditions threaten to acknowledge their agency as anything but the endless labor reserve of the imperial core, and with that their humanity. For modern capitalism, this concrete acknowledgment of common humanity is unacceptable, exactly because it is the first step in the liberation struggle.

Those who fight the existing conditions, and with that imperialism and the form of the neo-colony, are labeled as criminals and terrorists—sometimes, entire states and their people are by mere association. The imperialists only give them death.

Expected Casualties — Who Has to Die?

In 1996, Madeleine Albright, then US ambassador to the United Nations and later Secretary of State under Bill Clinton, was asked in a 60 Minutes interview if the ongoing economic sanctions against Iraq, which directly led to the deaths of half a million Iraqi children and infants due to lack of access to vaccines, medical supplies and baby formula, were worth it—worth it for the potential victory of US foreign policy by destroying the Iraqi state, that is.

This question, posed in a perfectly frank manner, is in itself already disgusting and an expression of how little the lives of people in the Third World are really valued in the hegemonic discourse. In which other scenario would it be possible to weigh the worth of half a million dead children against entirely abstract political goals? Their humanity and their actuality, not just as numbers but as real human beings with lives ahead of them, families and hopes, are already denied by the terms of the discussion.

Albright’s answer, though? It became infamous because it was shockingly honest:

There is nothing scandalous about this statement, or at the very least, there shouldn’t be once the global dynamic is understood—the real ‘scandal’ is that the relationship between the Third World and the West requires this ‘hard choice’ and ‘price’ as a matter of policy.

When Bill Clinton’s administration, like Bush Senior’s before him, decided to starve the people of Iraq, deprive them of access to basic goods and kill their children, this was only an extension of the logic of imperialism itself. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was nothing exceptional, but the simple fact that it became a liability to the interests of US capital—after the failure of the US-backed war against Iran, the Iraqi state pursued a strategy of self-sufficiency, keeping large sectors of its economy nationalized and foreign investment to a minimum—opened it up to total destruction. Death through Western intervention is an expected condition for the Third World, and so the murder of hundreds of thousands becomes part of the possibilities of rational policy. Half a million children become a number, completely irrelevant compared to the concrete interests of US imperialism. This is the logic of murderous sanctions, and it was the same logic that allowed the Iraq War itself to become policy a few years later.

What else should one expect from a system that normalizes military strikes against civilians, hundreds of times a year? A system where genocide is simply one among many tools in the hands of the ruling classes? A system that calculates for nine million people to die from starvation—entirely preventable starvation, fueled in no small part by overproduction to stabilize prices and ensure profitability—every single year?

As long as this system exists and is continually reproduced by the existing conditions, the Third World has no chance at humanity—the negation of their humanity is the affirmation of global imperialism, and at the same time the negation of imperialism is the process of asserting their humanity over the interests of a tiny minority of monopoly capitalists, stabilizing their profits by keeping billions trapped in conditions that are fundamentally inhumane in the literal sense of the word.

Or as Eduardo Galeano put it, more evocatively and clearly than I ever could:

“The nobodies: nobody’s children, owners of nothing. The nobodies: the no ones, the nobodied, running like rabbits, dying through life, screwed every which way.

Who are not, but could be.
Who don’t speak languages, but dialects.
Who don’t have religions, but superstitions.
Who don’t create art, but handicrafts.
Who don’t have culture, but folklore.
Who are not human beings, but human resources.
Who do not have faces, but arms.
Who do not have names, but numbers.
Who do not appear in the history of the world, but in the police blotter of the local paper.
The nobodies, who are not worth the bullet that kills them.”

— Eduardo Galeano, Los Nadies / The Nobodies

The Third World can’t be human, because facing their humanity would require facing a global system that denies it implicitly, without any blinders or obfuscations, thus ripping apart its flimsy veil of ‘common sense’ and ‘humanitarianism’ to reveal the unblemished monstrosity of imperialism and colonial exploitation beneath.

This is precisely why the Third World must be human, and why their humanity must be asserted without compromise—to fight for this universal humanity is the goal of socialism and the anathema to capitalism.

More about that process next time.

Thank you for reading!

This article ended up exploding in size, so I decided to split it up into a two-part series. The next part, ‘Why the Third World Must Be Human’, discussing the struggle against neo-colonialism and the assertion of humanity through it, will follow soon.

(And by ‘soon’ I mean within the next month at some point, because my drafts are full of articles I want to finish right now, and my time is sadly limited)

If you made it all the way down here, consider leaving some of your thoughts in the comments. I’m always glad to read your opinions and discussions.

All my writing is free and will remain free in the foreseeable future, but if you want to support my work, you can do so here:

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In the past month, there’s a conversation I’ve repeatedly been having with various people in more or less appropriate circumstances—friends, family, political acquaintances, colleagues and oddly enough drunk strangers on the bus at 2 am:

The war conversation. The war questions.

Would you…? What if……

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This might be a controversial one and judging by some of the choice comparisons I’ll be making, potentially criminal in my not-so-lovely, genocide-supporting German home. Let’s try it anyway. What are they gonna do? Search my apartment and confiscate my hard drives for posts I m…

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Suppose you ask a dozen people what fascism is: What will they say?

More likely than not you will get a dozen different answers, and half of them will be vague lectures about how fascism escapes definition because of its inherent irrationality. A seemingly random definition will often follow this—miraculously found despite its supposed irrationality—mixed with various aspects Umberto Eco may have listed (they didn’t check before answering) in his famous ‘Ur-Fascism’ essay and maybe some bits and pieces of Robert Paxton’s ‘Anatomy of Fascism’.

They will talk to you about ultra-nationalism (what is ‘ultra’ about it?), fear of difference (difference in what?), the cult of action (are fascists anarchists now?), half-remembered pieces of Orwell’s (terrible) fables and maybe if you’re lucky, that it has something to do with the working class or the middle class (whatever that is exactly). If you’re unlucky? They’ll call it left-wing, make up things about national socialism, and leave it at that.

None of those points—well, except the last one—are exactly wrong, but they approach the issue at a confused level by looking at the outward expressions of fascism, instead of searching for its interior motive and necessity. The question is less about what fascism is, but rather about why fascism and all its horrors must be in the first place.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with not having a rigorous definition of fascism on hand at a moment’s notice, but especially those who understand themselves as anti-fascists should be able to identify their primary enemies in clear terms, and more importantly the enemy’s support base, or they will inevitably find themselves fighting confused battles along incoherent lines, using dysfunctional tactics against god-knows-what.

Is Trump a fascist? Is MAGA a fascist movement? Is the United States a fascist state altogether? Why not? What gives? What does that have to do with the Nazis? How do we stop them? And what the fuck is finance capital, and why does it need suburban homeowners to shoot communists and union organizers in the head?

These are all interesting questions in their own right, but what is often more practical is to grasp the general terms of an ideology instead of its specific expressions—that way, the trends that produce it can be noticed before they are in full force, and resisted before they find full expression. In the case of fascism, this expression is generalized terror and violence; something best avoided.

I’ll try to approach some of those questions with this article by looking for their general expression in the most desperate, severe, and final weapon of capitalism at a time when it really counts.

Fascism’s Class Base — The Petit Bourgeoisie and Finance Capital

The marriage of interests fascism must accommodate is a rather unhappy one, and nowhere does that dysfunction become clearer than in the death pact it creates between the bottom rung of capital owners and the very top—the pact between the petit bourgeoisie and finance capital, fused by a sudden (seeming) convergence of interests.

Trying to trace the early points of this development is a bit like trying to identify a predator by the corpses it leaves behind in its wake. The task isn’t impossible, but the corpses of the left alone do not make fascism. Commonly cited examples of proto-fascist movements are the arch-reactionary ‘Freikorps’ militias used to crush the German revolution of 1918/19, the antisemitic and chauvinistic ‘Black Hundreds’ Movement supported by the Tsarist regime to carry out some of the vilest crimes of the late Russian Empire, and increasingly the post-reconstruction formations of the Ku-Klux-Klan, using racialized violence against black workers on behalf of a white, quasi-aristocratic planter class.

All of them certainly show elements of fascism, in particular through ideological expression and the origin of its most radical base, but in undeveloped forms. Broadly it can be said that those who stand at the forefront of fascist violence are of a petit-bourgeois background, while the concrete interests they represent are those of whichever form of capital ownership is dominant in their time and immediate circumstances—this, in a microcosm, is the class base of fascism, but it cannot find its full potential without the support of finance capital.

Fascism as a fully-fledged movement was born, or rather developed to a point of functional expression, in the small towns of northern Italy, and the vast stretches of agricultural land between them. This is no coincidence: In the immediate post-WW1 period a sharp line of conflict developed between impoverished and increasingly class-conscious agricultural workers and the owners of the land they worked, themselves increasingly frustrated by socialist organisations reigning in their exploitation of profits.

The small and large landowners, themselves indebted to finance capital through vast sums of credit taken during the meagre years of the war, cooperated with violent self-styled paramilitary groups—most often formed by the sons of the very same landowners after their return from the war—to smash socialist organisations and unleash a wave of violence against rural day laborers who were organized in their ranks. This is the genesis of the squadristi—the blackshirts.

At first confined to rural northern Italy the movement quickly assumed the role of the state—or rather transitioned organized class-based violence to a new form of statehood, away from ‘ordinary’ bourgeois dictatorship to its fascist form—which had failed to adequately represent the interest of landowners against socialist power, and with that the larger interests of finance capital.

From there it was a short way to Rome for Mussolini and his mob because they already had the backing of the real power behind the proverbial (and in Italy’s case literal) throne.

What is the base of this new fascist state? It certainly represents the same interests as ordinary bourgeois states—primarily those of finance capital, the pinnacle of the capitalist class in our age, and the classes in alliance with it. The difference is in the form of its rule, and the measures it takes to ensure its survival.

Georgi Dimitrov, prime anti-fascist theoretician of the Communist Internationale, defined fascism’s class base as follows:

“No, fascism is not a power standing above class, nor government of the petty bourgeoisie or the lumpen-proletariat over finance capital. Fascism is the power of finance capital itself. It is the organization of terrorist vengeance against the working class and the revolutionary section of the peasantry and intelligentsia. In foreign policy, fascism is jingoism in its most brutal form, fomenting bestial hatred of other nations.” — Dimitrov, Main Report delivered at the Seventh World Congress of the Communist International, 1935

Of course, and this is the crux of the issue, finance capital does need to mobilize a mass base to actually conduct this ‘terrorist vengeance’, and here the most precarious elements of the petit-bourgeoisie and proletarians who have no connection to class-based mass organisations are easiest to capture for reactionary measures—the very same people who under different circumstances could be turned into allies for a proletarian movement.

The role of the petit-bourgeoisie, today represented by the small business owner, the local contractor, the disappearing farmer, the struggling landlord and the millions of suburbanites who feel like their very existence is tied to their status as a landowner however marginal, is that of the violent enforcer of the open terrorist dictatorship of finance and monopoly capital—along with the declassed elements of the proletariat, growing every day. They are a tool for this new form of state, and their interests will always remain secondary to monopoly capital, easily discarded if necessary.

There is a reason why Hitler sidelined and destroyed the SA (his initial brown-shirted paramilitary) once his party had taken power, why Mussolini let the squadristi bleed themselves to death in Italy’s colonial wars, and why Franco slowly but steadily worked to diminish the actual fascist movement once it had lost its usefulness after the civil war. The petit bourgeoisie is a means to an end for the terror of the most reactionary sections of monopoly capital, once they have changed the fabric of the state to suit their needs.

Let us now look at the prime function of this terrorist state of capital in motion.

Fascism’s Function — The Abolition of Working Class Power

The most immediate enemy of the nascent fascist movement is the class-conscious working class and its organisations, because of the simple fact that its interests are diametrically opposed to monopoly capital, now holding sway over large sections of the petit bourgeoisie. At the same time, this organized working class is the only principled resistance against the new form of state, turned instrument of terror.

Subsequently, the organisations of the working class need to be crushed without delay when they resist, and then steadily re-integrated into harmless forms by the fascist state, to harness their productive potential.

Famously, after being handed the office of chancellor by the aged President Hindenburg, Hitler cemented his dictatorship with the Reichstag fire by blaming it on the communist party and gaining emergency powers through the Enabling Act of 1933. Where did he turn the violence of the state first? Against the communists, social democrats and their respective unions, shortly followed by all other representative bodies of the working class. This isn’t just an incidental consequence of the particular political situation in Germany or even a simple follow-up of the anti-Marxist tendencies inherent to fascism, but rather the goal of fascism itself—to crush any chance of revolutionary working-class power.

Why did the German Hitlerites call themselves the National *Socialist Worker’s* Party? Why did the Italian blackshirts and their supporters insist, that their National Fascist Party upholds a third position apart from capitalism and socialism? Why does the MAGA movement as such appeal to a vague (and white) working-class identity above all else?

The answer lies in the dual function of fascism—undermining organic working-class organisations, and replacing them with *national* alternatives, which are in truth nothing except the most brutal and open form of exploitation, designed to dupe the working class into compliance.

Let us take a look at the German example:

Upon assuming state power the nazi movement did not only use its open terrorist dictatorship to arrest communists and social democrats while banning unions, but also imposed alternative forms onto the working class. The most influential of these, and most relevant for our purposes, was the so-called ‘Deutsche Arbeitsfront - German Worker’s Front’ (DAF). After banning all independent unions, the nazis made membership mandatory for what was effectively the entirety of the industrial proletariat, ‘representing’ 32 million people at its height. Unlike a typical union organisation, independent or not, capitalists also ‘joined’ the ranks of the DAF.

What was this organisation for then? Strikes were already banned before the DAF was even established, and any bargaining agreements were in the hands of pre-selected NSDAP party officials who in practice followed orders from the employers themselves. The nazis called it a ‘true national community [Volksgemeinschaft] for all Germans’ but of course, nothing the nazis said can be taken seriously—more on this in the next section—without considering the unspoken terms of class rule.

The DAF and its equivalent organisation existed in all fascist forms of state even those not fully realized. They formalized the mass exploitation of millions of proletarians by capital, in even more brutal terms than under ordinary bourgeois rule, while painting it over with a flimsy brush of ‘unity’ and ‘national community.’ Some may call this class collaboration, but this is in actuality a falsehood and a capitulation to fascist propaganda—there is no such thing as class collaboration in fascist reality, instead, the idea of collaboration is fed to the declassed domestic workers, while enabling their full subordination to finance capital in preparation for ruthless imperialist war.

In Dimitrov’s words once again:

“Fascism is war, declared the Congress [of the Communist Internationale]. Coming to power against the will and interests of its own countrymen fascism seeks a way out of its growing domestic difficulties in aggression against other countries and peoples, in a redivision of the globe by unleashing a world war. As far as, fascism is concerned, peace is certain ruin.”—Dimitrov, Fascism is War, 1936

Here we can find an internal contradiction, vital for understanding the fascist ‘mode’ of bourgeois dictatorship: It attempts to construct mass politics around the interests of a tiny, fractional minority, for the exact purpose of making mass politics against the interests of that minority an impossibility—all in the name of keeping the rate of profit intact.

This crass contradiction in its material base can only be covered up, and mutually reinforced, by an equally crass superstructure. Let’s talk about the finer details of fascist ideology.

Fascism’s Ideology — ‘The Class Enemy is no more!’

Fascist ideology is in many ways a sort of mirage. Smoke and mirrors. A shadow on the wall, decorated by muscular men in uniforms, mass rallies and bloody violence.

This, of course, doesn’t mean that fascists of different stripes and different levels of influence didn’t genuinely believe in these delusions. There is no need to turn the Hitlers and the Himmlers of the world into entirely rational actors in order to understand that the material base of fascism implies rational (and horrific) goals—the fact that those goals have to be considered rational under imperialist capitalism is a damning indictment of the economic system that produces these outcomes, not an excuse.

Acquiring Lebensraum (Living Space) in the East can be a project of extermination in the service of a mythology of racial supremacy, while also fulfilling the need of an aspiring, self-sufficient imperialist hegemon to acquire vast agricultural lands through settler colonialism.

Forcing millions of enslaved workers into taking part in the mass production of German armaments and heavy industry can be an expression of a delusional ideology demanding that the ‘Untermensch—subhuman’ is used as a base for menial labor while the Aryan ‘Herrenrasse—master race’ must struggle for their destiny, while at the same time providing a convenient way to fuel the unsustainable war economy of fascist regimes, that are necessary for further imperial conquest.

In short—and Michael Parenti put it best in his work on ‘rational fascism’—the ideology itself is confused, nonsensical and contradictory, but all of that serves to cover up the most radical, reactionary and brutal form of imperialism known to humankind. This is something perfectly rational for a system that needs to fuel its economy with the destruction of hundreds of millions, detached from all morality.

In fact, this ideological confusion serves a very specific purpose of covering up the contradiction that exists in the material base—a contradiction between a fanatical mass movement in the service of the narrowest section of society imaginable: Monopoly capital. This internal confusion isn’t just a coincidence, but rather part of the program, since fascism must be able to adapt to a variety of different national circumstances while fulfilling the need to empower capital to crush its enemies with ruthless efficiency.

Here too we can find the role of antisemitism, uniquely developed in German national socialism but present in all fascist movements to some degree, ironically including Israeli fascism—this deserves its own article, which I might write at some point—re-appropriated in the form of an international arab conspiracy. Sartre cut through to its functional necessity when he said:

“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words.”—Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, 1944

It would be too vulgar to simply attribute this fanaticism and radical rejection of rationality to contradictions at the base since the superstructure itself also feeds back into the material base, particularly when it comes to its social reproduction. Why else would the nazis have invested considerable effort into carrying out their ‘final solution’ even when it was eating up resources dearly needed for the war? Was this in the rational interest of monopoly capital? Of course not. Here the fascist movement itself, radicalized throughout the war, subsumed the interests of capital into a pure expression of genocidal ideology.

Fascism needs a scapegoat because it tries to convince the majority of the population that their enemies are eternal, insidious, magical and untouchable—all while their real enemies are already in power—to justify unending struggle, inside and out.

This is the final core aspect of fascism—it is inherently self-destructive because, in its attempt to paint over the contradictions of capitalism, it only intensifies them into absurdity and horror.

Whatever fascists say about themselves and their supposed aims can’t be trusted. Everything about their supposed beliefs can be discarded at a moment’s notice because it only exists in the service of violence against their enemies. All they can do is try to cover up the sheer horror and primal urge that Umberto Eco described quite well in his essay on ‘Ur-Fascism’. Nothing about this is complicated or needs any further analysis. Capitalist horror is stripped of its final layers of metaphor, decoration and fetishism while turning toward open terror against all who would stand against it.

That is fascist ideology—smoke and mirrors and terror, with a dose of unending struggle against false enemies.

Thank you for reading.

Next time I’ll talk about how fascism can be resisted, fought and ultimately defeated. If you want to read that and support my work, you can do so here:

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