Ideology

blindpig · Post by **blindpig** » Wed Jul 30, 2025 2:33 pm

Theory and practice of communist party spirit in literature

Often, following Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Sobchak, Solzhenitsyn, Astafyev, Aksyonov and some other "masters and daisies" of artistic words are included among the destroyers of the USSR, whose anti-communist works, interviews and actions did a disservice to Soviet opportunism and Western fascism in overcoming the "horrors of Leninism-Stalinism". High-ranking opponents of communism understood well that the traditional respectful and attentive attitude towards the socio-political views of writers in Russia could play a cruel joke on the CPSU, whose authority was rapidly falling into the abyss by the time of perestroika. At the same time, anti-communist hysteria found artistic expression in numerous works that were legally published only during the years of “democratization and glasnost,” when waves of petty-bourgeois reading material, which had thrown off the “shackles” of totalitarian censorship and the restrictions of tam- and samizdat, poured onto the Soviet citizen from all sides. Moreover, a number of writers who participated in the destruction of the USSR did so as if in absentia, “from the other world,” so they were unable to enjoy the fruits of the “struggle for freedom and independence” in the form of epidemics of alcoholism, drug addiction, idiocy, AIDS, fascism, racism, chauvinism, prostitution, illiteracy, immorality, and other psycho-physiological and spiritual ailments that swept over Russia and neighboring countries in the nineties.

The majority of those writers who were “lucky” enough to live under capitalism did not calm down, continuing to slander Marxism from monarchist, liberal and fascist positions [1], filling the shelves of bookstores with slanderous and pornographic fiction. Subsequently, along with anti-communist propaganda, specific political propaganda flourished in the literary environment, the form of which was determined by which leadership was closer to a particular writer: sympathy for American or European imperialism was expressed in “anti-authoritarian” sermons of new democratization, demanding the overthrow of pro-Putin governments through “color revolutions” [2]; sympathy for Russian imperialism resulted in propaganda of Orthodox patriotism and abstract anti-Westernism, allowing for fragmentary and controlled re-Sovietization [3].

In this context, it is worth noting that the leaders who created and strengthened the Soviet Union understood well how great the political significance of literature was during the eradication of illiteracy and the construction of the first phase of communism, what influence literature could exert on the minds of the still petty-bourgeois-minded and thinking masses. That is why, for example, the Communist Party headed by Stalin was engaged in the gradual centralization of literary activity, party control over literature as one of the most important areas of communist propaganda. Unfortunately, Khrushchev, who came after Stalin, used literature to attack the Leader, preparing the supporters of the "thaw" for subsequent battles on the literary front of the "new thinking" era. In turn, the Brezhnev-Suslov experience of partial restoration of communist party spirit in literature only temporarily and fragmentarily slowed down the development of de-Stalinization of literature, without reversing this process. The onset of perestroika brought the amateur artistic activity of the sixties to the level of the ideological "mainstream", thus dealing a powerful blow to the Soviet ideology of "developed socialism", once again demonstrating what an important political role literature can play. This simple truth is also understood by modern politicians, therefore even today, when "film, play and song" have surpassed "book" in popularity, major writers cannot complain about the lack of attention from the ruling classes, no matter what kind of attention [4]. At the same time, despite the crisis of post-Soviet literature [5], modern Marxists should not have any doubts about the importance of literature as an ideological compass in the future communist construction, which requires a certain attention to literary issues. However, before reflecting on the literature of the future, it is necessary to study the theory and practice of the literature of the past.

Chapter 1. On the relationship of literature to reality
Not the poet who writes smoothly
And weaves sonorous rhymes.
But the one whose verse breathes with struggle
And calls the world to new forms.
Only he is the poet and bard of the universe,
Who, having long forgotten Parnassus, Composes hymns
to the movement of modern life
Every hour.
But are you worthy of being called
a poet, bard and singer,
When your lot is to bow
Before a hackneyed word.
I. Loginov

Since its inception, literature has always been an instrument for justifying or criticizing the existing social order; writers of all times and nations have either praised or condemned the reality around them, without the opportunity to live in society and be independent of it. At the same time, while some openly declared their preferences, others proclaimed themselves supporters of the idea of "pure art" [6], as if hovering above social contradictions and hiding the interests of its representatives under the guise of being above class and non-partisan. In reality, it turned out that representatives of the second, formalist-non-partisan trend, whether they wanted it or not, still fought on the side of one of the warring parties. It is worth noting, however, that in the history of literature, theorists and practitioners of "pure art" are not represented as richly as open supporters of slavery, feudalism or capitalism [7]; Only in the 20th century did the ideologists and lackeys of bourgeois slavery discern the full anti-human potential of formalism, pushing its variations to leading positions in world literature. Such a change in the political and cultural "landscape" required a worthy response from Marxists, which was Lenin's article "Party Organization and Party Literature", which will be discussed below. However, before turning to the theory of communist party spirit in literature, it is worth dwelling in more detail on the substantive side and history of anti-communist party spirit in the form of the ideology of "art for art's sake".

The philosophical and aesthetic foundations of “pure art” were formulated by Kant in his famous book “Critique of Judgment”: the inconsistency and contradictory thinking of the German idealist, which found a place in his epistemology, did not bypass his aesthetic teaching, according to which the knowledge of beauty is an impartial perception of form [8]. But Kant only laid the theoretical foundation for the formalistic concept, which later became one of the dominant trends in European and world art. The growth of its influence was mainly associated with the negative reaction of a significant part of the intelligentsia to the results of the French bourgeois revolution, to the bloody forms that the struggle for freedom, equality and fraternity acquired during the years of the Jacobin dictatorship and the subsequent era of restoration-revolutions [9], which brought new bourgeois values of worship of the “golden calf” into European reality. "Pure art", in their opinion, seemed to hover above the social contagion, creating fantastic worlds alien to the vices of capitalism; it was presented as a way to overcome, on the one hand, the excessive politicization of enlightenment literature, and on the other, the dirt of the new reality, which the realists allegedly called to reflect. But, having subjected the ensuing reign of lucre and commercialism to just criticism, they did not move from the dead point of superficial anti-bourgeois criticism, finding themselves trapped in their own illiteracy and snobbery. It is impossible to come to terms with capitalism, and even more so to offer a communist alternative, therefore formalism turns out to be incapable of rising above the ideology of "pure art", leaving the development of the positive content of society and art of the future to other thinkers. In other words, the collapse of the ideals of the bourgeois revolution, the spread of the idea of the insolubility of social contradictions, the absence of a scientifically developed alternative to capitalism - all this led literature to formalism, non-partisanship and isolation in itself, to the degradation of literature to the level of empty entertainment, a variation of escapism. The ideology of "art for art's sake" was most concretely formulated by the French poet Théophile Gautier [10], who asserted the following:

"... In art, the subject is indifferent and its value is determined only by the degree of the expressed ideal and the perfection of the artist's style. <...> Art for art's sake is creativity, freed from all aspirations except the aspiration for perfection of expression. The modern school in art aims to express the beautiful with complete dispassion and absolute disinterest of the artist, who does not strive to achieve success thanks to any tendentious hints alien to the chosen subject. We are convinced that only in this consists the philosophical understanding of art. <...> A work of art should not be a paper wrapper for a bitter moral and philosophical candy; "To seek in art any other benefit than the expression of beauty means to express the limitations of a mind incapable of grasping the breath of the sublime and rising to great generalizations... <...> Let every artist always avoid putting art at the service of a philosophical school or a political party, let carts loaded with various theories slowly drag along deep ruts, the artist has the right to believe that, having created a harmonious line, a beautiful face, a harmonious torso, in which the search for the eternally beautiful is expressed, he has done no less for the progress of humanity than any practitioner. <...> Art for art's sake does not at all mean form for the sake of form, but it does mean that the purpose of art is the expression of beauty, that it must be free from all extraneous ideas, free from serving any doctrine" [11].

However, in contrast to non-party literature, the beginnings of a communist understanding of literature appeared, embodied in the works of Russian pre-revolutionary materialists of the 19th century, such as Belinsky, Chernyshevsky, Dobrolyubov, and Pisarev, who called on literature to angrily denounce the existing misanthropic order, arguing that a writer who had the opportunity to write only thanks to the daily, hard labor of peasants and workers had no right to ignore the most important problems of his time. Polemicizing with aestheticism, they propagated the national character in literature, the need for literature to participate in the people's struggle for liberation from exploitation, speaking out against Annenkov, Druzhinin, Botkin, and other domestic supporters of the ideology of "art for art's sake" [12]. The logic is clear: what kind of pure and classless art can we talk about when the majority of the population is spiritually and physically oppressed, when the people are forced to die in the sweat of their brow for the sake of the happiness and well-being of carefree vegetating gentlemen, when the repressive system of the state suppresses the development of a scientific worldview, implanting obscurantism and idealism in science and everyday life? How can a person who calls himself the "conscience of the nation" and shouts about his own intellectual and moral exceptionalism - how can he close his eyes to the blatant injustice of the existing system, to the dominance of ignorance, which hinders the progressive development of the Motherland and all of humanity? Unwilling to put up with such a state of affairs, revolutionary democrats declared war on the ideology of "art for art's sake": under the conditions of harsh tsarist censorship, it was literature that, in their opinion, should become the main instrument for educating the working masses, a way of conveying to the people the idea that they are able to change the existing inhuman conditions; a writer must first and foremost be a citizen, a fighter for the people's happiness, a "singer of truth." The literary criticism of the revolutionary democrats was thus a unique form of criticism of the political and philosophical foundations of the existing system, a form brought to life by the specificity of the historical moment; therefore, they perceived writers as potential allies obliged to support literary criticism in its noble aspirations, to help it in the difficult task of exposing the feudal imperialism of the Romanovs.

A scientific breakthrough in the science of artistic words was Lenin’s teaching on the communist party spirit of literature [13], which he set out in his article “Party Organization and Party Literature”:

“Literature must become a party literature. In opposition to bourgeois morals, in opposition to the bourgeois entrepreneurial, mercantile press, in opposition to bourgeois literary careerism and individualism, “lordly anarchism” and the pursuit of profit, the socialist proletariat must put forward the principle of party literature, develop this principle and implement it in life in the fullest and most integral form possible. What does this principle of party literature consist in? Not only in the fact that for the socialist proletariat literary work cannot be an instrument for the profit of individuals or groups, it cannot in general be an individual matter, independent of the general proletarian cause. Down with non-party writers! Down with superhuman writers! Literary work must become part of the general proletarian cause, a “cog and screw” of the one and only great social democratic mechanism, set in motion by the entire conscious vanguard of the entire working class. “Literary work must become an integral part of organized, planned, united social democratic party work” [14].

Developing the principles of the Russian materialists of the 19th century, Vladimir Ilyich identified literary work with party work, with specifically political work, contrasting "free scribbling" with constant and purposeful party work. The so-called proletarian discipline was supposed, according to Lenin, to become a form of external control over the activities of writers and publicists, whose internal workshop traditions often did not allow them to abandon the ideology of "freedom of creativity". The lordly individualism that flourished in the conditions of capitalist decadence instilled in writers a love for the anarchic phrase about freedom of creativity, which greatly complicated the intelligentsia's understanding of the concept of freedom in its scientific, rather than philistine, everyday sense. Among writers, the traditional opinion became that literary creativity is valuable not because it reveals the essence of social phenomena, educates and directs, but simply because it ... exists; as if the mere fact that the creator deigned to set down his "spiritual self" on paper was enough to proclaim the freedom and intrinsic value of his work as a model for imitation and an example for worship. It is not difficult to discover in the opinion written above not only the permanent source of intellectual arrogance and vanity, but also the function of protecting and justifying class society that such literature plays; for the growth in quantity and the decline in quality of imposed models of thought and behavior are inversely proportional to the understanding of the common man, what he should be guided by in his activities, what he should rely on, and according to what scenario he should live . This is the "politics of literature", when the apparent non-partisanship of writers is actually revealed as political activity to propagate harmful pro-bourgeois ideas and views, to disorganize and demoralize the masses, because the more opinions there are on a particular issue, the more difficult it is for the common man to find among these opinions the truth that accurately reflects reality and directs his activity in a socially progressive direction . And since social existence determines the consciousness of those who do not possess a scientific worldview , the overwhelming majority of the population, under the pressure of capitalist relations of violence and venality, often think like philistines and egoists.. That is why Lenin asked in his article: what kind of freedom of creativity can we talk about in the conditions of the brutality of feudal-capitalist imperialism, in the conditions of unbridled reaction, police lawlessness, mass material and spiritual impoverishment of the population, the dominance of military and political adventurism of the ruling classes, the increasing pace of militarization and colonization of the Earth? In reality, writers who try to justify their own cowardice, lack of will and shamelessness are simply trying to hide behind the slogan of non-partisanship, disguising their betrayal and/or non-participation in the fate of the Motherland and Humanity. Moreover, non-partisanship is another side of anti-communist partisanship [15], because “freedom of creativity under capitalism,” whether its supporters and preachers want it or not, has as its consequence an open or hidden embellishment of reality, a complete or partial disregard for its horrors, which contributes to the normal functioning of the system of stabilizing capitalism by dumbing down the population and diverting its attention from social contradictions. And no matter how much writers tried to prove their intellectual independence, they often obeyed this rule, taking the position of those who pay more, which, for example, was proven by the laureates of Stalin prizes, who at first obediently and hypocritically received tens and hundreds of thousands of Soviet rubles, and then, after well-known events, vied with each other in helping dear Nikita Sergeyevich in the difficult task of debunking the cult of personality.

Thus, in his article, Lenin proclaimed the rejection of lordly individualism, which had a destructive effect on both writers and readers. The scientific-centralist thesis on the supremacy of truth over “free” opinion was applied to that area of human activity that had previously seemed untouchable and incapable of working in the “order-execution” mode. Even literary critics, who by that time had become an integral part of the “literary space,” did not allow themselves the “impudence” to point out to writers the need to carry out their activities within the framework of party discipline. It is easy to imagine what reaction such statements by Lenin provoked among supporters and sympathizers of social democracy from among the intelligentsia. For example, one of the main representatives of Russian symbolism, the poet Valery Bryusov, soon after the publication of Vladimir Ilyich’s article, came out with sharp criticism of the theory of communist party spirit in literature:

“…There is least of all in his [Lenin’s] words a true love of freedom. <…> According to the precise meaning of his definition, both literatures are not free. The first is secretly connected with the bourgeoisie, the second is openly connected with the proletariat. The overwhelming majority of the population adopts one or another view not consciously, but spontaneously, under the pressure of the dominant or opposition ideology; the advantage of the second can be seen in the more frank recognition of its slavery, and not in greater freedom. <…> We cannot help but see that the Social Democrats sought freedom exclusively for themselves, that the pariahs standing outside the party got crumbs of freedom by chance, for a time, while the threatening “down with it!” does not yet have the meaning of an edict. The words of the Social Democrats about universal freedom are also “hypocrisy,” and we, non-party writers, must also “tear off the false signboards.” <…> …Members of the Social Democratic Party are allowed only to criticize particular cases, individual aspects of the doctrine, but they cannot be critical of the very foundations of the doctrine. Those who dare to do so must be “chased out.” This decision reflects the fanaticism of people who do not admit the thought that their convictions could be false. <…> But why is party literature produced in this way called truly free? How much does the new censorship statute being introduced in the Social Democratic Party differ from the old one that reigned in our country until recently? <…> Catherine II defined freedom thus: “Freedom is the opportunity to do everything that the laws allow.” Social Democrats give a similar definition: “Freedom of speech is the opportunity to say everything that is in accordance with the principles of Social Democracy.” Such freedom cannot satisfy us, those whom Mr. Lenin contemptuously calls “Messrs. bourgeois individualists” and “supermen.” For us, such freedom seems to be only an exchange of one chain for new ones. <…> “Down with non-party writers!” exclaims Mr. Lenin. Consequently, non-party membership, i.e. freethinking, is already a crime. <…> …In our view, freedom of speech is inseparably linked with freedom of judgment and respect for the convictions of others. The most precious thing for us is freedom of search, even if it leads us to the collapse of all our beliefs and ideals. Where there is no respect for the opinion of another, where he is only arrogantly granted the right to “lie”, without wanting to listen, there freedom is a fiction. <…> After all, even a Social Democratic writer will consider himself (even if mistakenly), working for his party, acting of his own free will, just as I, a non-party writer, consider myself. <…> …A whole school has arisen nearby, a new, different generation of writers and artists has grown up, the very ones whom he, not knowing them, calls by the mocking name of “supermen”. For these writers - believe me, Mr. Lenin - the structure of bourgeois society is more hateful than it is to you. In their poems they branded this system as "shamefully petty, unjust, ugly", these "modern little men", these "gnomes". They set their entire task in achieving "absolute" freedom of creativity in bourgeois society as well.And as long as you and yours are marching against the existing “unjust” and “ugly” system, we are ready to be with you, we are your allies. But as soon as you raise your hand against freedom of conviction itself, we immediately abandon your banners. The “Koran of Social Democracy” is as alien to us as the “Koran of autocracy” (an expression by F. Tyutchev). And since you demand faith in ready-made formulas, since you believe that there is no longer anything to seek for truth, since you have it, you are enemies of progress, you are our enemies. <…> The Social Democratic doctrine has no more dangerous enemy than those who rebel against the idea of “arche” so dear to it. That is why we, the seekers of absolute freedom, are considered by the Social Democrats to be the same enemies as the bourgeoisie. And, of course, if the life of a social, “classless”, supposedly “truly free” society were to be realized, we would find ourselves in it as outcasts, as poetes maudits (“damned poets”), as we are in bourgeois society” [16].

As practice shows, political shortsightedness and social illiteracy are ineptly concealed behind the phrase-mongering about freedom: the “arrogance of non-participation” characteristic of the anti-communist intelligentsia, when “advice from the outside,” which implies a complete disregard for party-political life, is elevated to a principle, found its vivid manifestation in the above-cited naive reasoning of Bryusov. In general, non-party intelligentsia is a disease of the mind, arising and progressing under the influence of adventurism and infantilism. Indeed, why should a writer think about such mundane things as the essence of freedom? After all, one can absolve oneself of responsibility for one’s activities by becoming, like Bryusov, a supporter of the liberal-anti-scientific interpretation of freedom, identifying non-party membership and freethinking, playing the role of a sage-writer standing aside from the struggle of classes and parties. Why should he think that the idea of relativism and pluralism, of the impossibility of knowing objective truth, which became dominant in European intellectual circles thanks to the light hands of Hume, Kant and Mach, is a delusion generated by the need of the ideology of capitalism to breed entities that hinder scientific knowledge of nature and society? Why should he comprehend the chaos happening around him from a party-class position, if he can, secluded in his “ivory tower”, reflect on abstract humanism? If he can write what he wants, how he wants, when he wants, while neglecting the scientific understanding of social development, without taking into account political and economic circumstances, the domestic and foreign policy situation, without wanting to study philosophical and social theories capable of leading humanity out of material and spiritual poverty? Bryusov and intellectuals like him have always been distinguished by political hypocrisy: while declaring their commitment to progress and “everything good,” their desire to fight the existing evil, they at the same time distance themselves from communist parties, scientific and combat detachments, which are the only ones capable of taking power and using it to qualitatively change the social structure. But why does this happen? Most likely, because deep down they understand: “they can’t handle it.” Ironically, the truth of this assumption is confirmed by the experience of another writer who, by force of circumstances, found himself in political and party leadership: when the time came to do real work, when the time came to make a revolution, and not to talk about it, Trotsky, incapable of anything other than bluster and graphomania, was gradually dismissed from all the positions that had been entrusted to him “for past services.” So Bryusov, having correctly sensed which way the wind was blowing, and fearing that with the advent of communism, they would demand social science competence from him as a writer-specialist, hastened to explain to his intellectual friends why the idea of communist party spirit was harmful and why he and Lenin were “not on the same path.”From the reaction of Bryusov and similar non-party advisers [17], it is clear that Lenin’s theses hit the mark: for the first time in the social democratic press, the opposition of the individual and the general, widespread among writers, when subjective irrational desires and motives were placed above the objective needs of the development of the entire society, was so specifically criticized.

The written history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggle. The proletariat cannot fight successfully without its general staff and without an authoritative leader of this staff, without a party and without its leader. Literature is also a front in the class war, and if we have in mind propaganda, agitation and theoretical literature, then victories and defeats on it are practically as important as victories and defeats in politics. Consequently, a writer is also a member of the party, a participant in the revolution, a builder of a new society, obliged to submit to the decisions of the party centre and to carry them out; for it is difficult to speak of victory in the class struggle when individual members of the party (even those possessing certain talents in the field of elegant literature) sabotage party discipline, disobeying the orders of the centre, practising anarchism, voluntarism, adventurism, individualism and other forms of opportunistic deviations. Not every writer and not every propagandist is capable of possessing Marxism to the required degree “here and now,” therefore, in order to compensate for this deficiency, ideological leadership is necessary from the most literate theorists of scientific centralism, carried out in the form of specific instructions and personal example [18], and not abstract decrees and slogans. In a sense, Lenin, trying to centralize literary work, extended the discussion of the first paragraph of the party charter beyond the narrow political issues, trying to call on writers to openly propagate their socio-political views. After all, if even liberal-bourgeois writers often stop flirting with non-party membership for the benefit of the common anti-communist cause, openly taking the side of bourgeois party membership, then what should communist writers, who are on the bright side of history, be afraid of?

One of the decisive factors influencing writers' inclination to non-party membership is the synthesis of psychological personality disorders (in the form of emotional instability, narcissism, etc.) and bourgeois survivals in consciousness, requiring certain concessions from the party to the intelligentsia's "spirit of free thought." Understanding this, Lenin and then Stalin had a special attitude toward writers, built relationships with them in a specific way, taking into account all the features of their "creative character," which predetermined the well-known successes that Soviet literature achieved under their leadership. At the same time, we must not forget that such a step is only a temporary retreat of the communists on the path of introducing dialectical-matist thinking into the consciousness of wide circles of the progressive intelligentsia, a retreat that in no way denies the need for scientific censorship, which is an instrument for bringing subjective views into agreement with the objective necessity of social development, an instrument for providing assistance to writers who are illiterate in Marxism but not devoid of literary talent, and for freeing their consciousness from anti-scientific delusions. Therefore, it is not surprising that the greatest successes in the implementation of the principles of communist party spirit in literature were achieved by writers directly connected with communism and party work: Makarenko, Ostrovsky, Pavlenko, Gorky, Fadeyev. That is why Lenin wrote:

"How much would party work through the newspaper... and literary work gain if it were more closely linked with party work, with systematic, continuous influence on the party! So that there would be no 'raids', but a continuous onslaught along the entire line, without stopping, without gaps, so that the Bolsheviks would not only attack all sorts of blockheads piecemeal, but would conquer everything and everyone, just as the Japanese conquered Manchuria from the Russians" [19].

Lenin set the task of denying the previous anti-communist literature as a sum of anti-scientific fantasies, as an instrument photographing the dirt of reality, and in its place affirming a new communist literature as an instrument of Marxist education and enlightenment of the people, as an instrument of displaying in artistic images the practice of building communism . The Party, headed by Stalin, solved this task to the best of its ability and capabilities with the utmost care and patience, building the right relations with writers by, for example, material and spiritual "flirting" with them. By the way, wishing to falsify the Marxist understanding of the relationship of literature to reality, individual bourgeois researchers attempted to break Lenin's theory and Stalin's practice of communist party spirit in literature. In particular, in November 1963, the North American socialist journal Monthly Review published an article by Mark Shleifer, in which he claimed that “as long as Lenin was alive, the Soviet Union recognized, respected, and defended the autonomy of art” [20]. It is obvious to anyone even superficially familiar with the Marxist understanding of art that there is no contradiction between Lenin’s and Stalin’s visions of the party spirit of literature. Both Lenin and Stalin understood perfectly well that the centralization of literature was a matter of time and circumstances, that the autonomy and contradictory nature of literary movements in the early USSR was a necessary preparatory stage for the subsequent scientific centralization of literature as an effective instrument of the communist offensive against the bourgeois remnants in the consciousness of the people:

"We are communists. We have no right to sit idly by and allow chaos to spread as it pleases. We must strive to direct this development with a clear consciousness, to shape and determine its results" [21].

Unfortunately, among modern domestic leftists, the problem of party spirit in general and the problem of party spirit in literature are practically not studied, therefore today it is difficult to find in modern Marxist publications an actualization of the principle of party spirit in relation to the modern level of development of science and culture. Exceptions are the magazine "Proryv" and the newspaper "Proryvist", on the pages of which the essential significance of the principle of party spirit for the modern theoretical form of class struggle is noted, research is conducted on the study of the influence of bourgeois party spirit on the state of public consciousness [22]. It would seem that hundreds of pages written by classics and devoted to the problems of party spirit in science, philosophy and art allow modern Marxists not to waste valuable time defending the need to apply the principle of party spirit. However, here there is a clash with an old problem, personifying the entire so-called "popular Marxism": slogans and formal agreement with them exist, but the implementation, the embodiment of slogans in practice is for most representatives of the left movement "a thing in itself". The constantly repeated theses about the party spirit of sciences are perceived by the majority of modern Marxists as an empty formality that does not require understanding, as an abstraction devoid of concrete content: pompously praising the Leninist principles of party spirit, they admire the genius of Einstein and the honesty of Zemskov, bow before the insight of Fromm and the profoundness of Ilyenkov. Speaking about party spirit, many Marxists do not bother themselves with a detailed explanation of this phenomenon, but limit themselves to a formal statement of the importance of party spirit for a Marxist. Thus, the majority of those interested in Marxism will say that party spirit is an ideological orientation of a worldview that expresses the social, political, economic, cultural and other interests and ideals of various groups of people: any scientist, philosopher, artist, whether he wants it or not, whether he is aware of it or not, pursues in his activities the line of a certain political "party" (in the broad sense of the word). In such a simple way, seemingly apolitical creative and scientific activity turns out to be a politically engaged defense of one or another social system, one or another way of thinking. Such a basically correct, but superficial understanding was well formulated by the already mentioned Pisarev, who asserted:

"The disagreement of parties is very natural, necessary and hopeless, because the real reasons for opposing opinions lie in the opposition of interests. Any attempt to reconcile the parties would be useless and senseless. Instead of reconciling the parties, we must want each party to define itself more clearly and agree to the last word. Only then can society recognize its true friends and give final victory to that trend of thought which most closely corresponds to the real needs of the majority " [23].

A more mature Marxist will add to this definition of Pisarev a class approach, emphasizing that party spirit, among other things, is a concept that points to the class structure of society, which even a philosophizing metaphysician or an aestheticizing graphomaniac cannot ignore; since there are antagonistic classes, it means that there are antagonistic parties expressing the interests of these classes. Those of the “communists” who have tried to study Marxist works in detail can even cite as an example the concrete application of this principle by the classics: the party spirit of philosophy and natural science in Anti-Dühring and Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, the party spirit of literary criticism in the correspondence of Marx and Engels with Lassalle [24] and Lenin’s articles on Tolstoy. But examples only point to a general tendency and show how, behind the tinsel of scientific terms, one can and should see quite definite class interests. The task of modern Marxists is to see a universal method of studying reality behind the examples demonstrated by the classics . Postulation alone is not enough, as is shown, for example, by the content of encyclopedias, textbooks and dictionaries [25] edited by Soviet professors, where theses on the importance of proletarian party spirit coexist with criticism of the “cult of personality” and preaching the “democratic nature of science” [26]. True, even under Stalin, the propaganda of communist party spirit was still in the form of a predominantly unconscious fulfillment of the Central Committee’s resolutions, rather than a consequence of an internal understanding of the essence of events taking place in the USSR and the world; therefore, Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization discredited communist party spirit only formally, since the majority of the party and the Soviet people trusted it.Stalin, acted according to his will, but did not understand him, not having had time or not wanting to make the leap from the realm of ignorance to the realm of freedom. Consequently, communist party spirit, based on the objective laws of development of society, presupposes the highest degree of consciousness of Marxists, guided by it in their activities, which contradicts the mechanical agreement with the resolutions of congresses and plenary sessions, so widespread in Soviet times. It is worth noting that the categorical falsification of the existing Leninist-Stalinist party spirit, replacing it with the extremely weak party spirit of “anti-Stalinist Leninism” in the form of absurd propaganda of “norms of collective leadership,” has reduced the perception of the thesis about the importance of party spirit to the level of an annoying formality, an intra-party and even intra-state joke, which gave rise to the well-known joke among the people about Rabinovich, “wavering in accordance with the wavering of the party line,” which is why many modern self-proclaimed Marxists, under the influence of such post-Stalinist sabotage, are suspicious of the thesis about party spirit in general and the party spirit of literature in particular. Those of the modern left who do not deny the importance of the principle of party spirit in the work of communist propaganda persistently follow the traditions of their Soviet predecessors, because, as has already been pointed out, the party spirit declared in their slogans finds no place in their own theoretical constructions: unanimously repeating about party spirit under Marx and Lenin, the overwhelming majority of them forget about party spirit in the context of Stalinist and modern practice. In discussing the party spirit of science, modern leftists slide into outright and unprincipled bourgeois objectivism: the party spirit of natural science, realized by Lenin and continued in the publications of Proriv devoted to the criticism of relativism and idealism in physics, is perceived by them as eccentricity, sectarianism and obscurantism [27]; the party spirit of history, implemented by Stalin in the "Short Course in the History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks)" and continued in the publications of "Proryv" dedicated to refuting the slander against the Lenin-Stalin USSR, is perceived by them as "pure madness", conspiracy theories and "folk history" [28]; the party spirit of biology, implemented by Lysenko, is perceived by them as an unsuccessful experiment in the influence of ideology on pure science [29]. Thus, a sad situation arises in which almost everyone talks about party spirit, but almost no one follows this principle. The leading role in this is played by the intellectual laziness of modern leftists, their inability to conscientiously study Marxism from primary sources, and not from popular retellings from Soviet textbooks or modern videos.

In the above passage, Pisarev points to certain "needs of the majority" in accordance with which potential liberators of the people must act. The very reference to the needs of the majority with the simultaneous instruction to act in accordance with these needs sounds "popular" and advantageous in the context of street agitation, but not in the context of the scientific-theoretical problems of the party spirit of literature. Despite the attractiveness of such slogans, Marxists are obliged to recognize them as erroneous and harmful, misleading people with respect to the goals and methods of communist practice. The reference to the "needs of the majority" as a guiding point of literary activity is precisely where revolutionary democratic ideology comes into conflict with Marxist-Leninist science , for communist party spirit is a tendentious reflection of the objective needs of social development . The essence of anti-communist party spirit is its anti-scientific nature, that is, the subjectivity of the aspirations and motives of people who are guided by it in their activities; such a form of party spirit reflects the interests of individual classes, estates, parties, guilds, states, the majority, the minority, but in no way the needs of social development itself, the satisfaction of which, if it occurs, then as if by chance, spontaneously, not according to the cunning plan of cardinals, emperors and presidents, but "by touch", due to the needs of contemporary politics and economics. Real success in the matter of fundamentally increasing the material and spiritual quality of life of the majority is achieved only where and when the decisive role in the leadership of the majority is played not by its (the majority's) needs, but by the Communist Party, headed by an authoritative Marxist theorist, capable of directing the forces and energy of the working majority into a creative channel . But as soon as unscrupulous and self-interested populist anti-communists stand at the head of the majority, material and spiritual impoverishment becomes a fact of everyday life, "knocking on every door". It is no coincidence that it was precisely the unreasonableness of the needs of the majority that became the factor holding back the construction and contributing to the destruction of communism in the USSR:

“… The majority of modern people all over the world consider only such a state of affairs to be fair, in which it is good first of all for themselves, their beloved, and not for their neighbor and their children. If this were not so, there would not have been the bourgeois “perestroika” in the USSR, the worldwide competition of everyone against everyone, blood feuds, mass contract killings, mafia “showdowns” and world wars. The majority of modern people…, regardless of religious affiliation, are still aggressively egotistical and absolutely incompetent in matters of the meaning of life and happiness” [30].

Communist party spirit does not start from the abstract needs of the majority, for under modern conditions the needs of the overwhelming majority of the world's population are unscientific and naive [31], but from the "needs" of objective necessity, the knowledge of which is possible only with the help of dialectical materialism applied to the study of social processes. Party spirit, which does not set as its goal the removal of the "civilization" of private property by communism, does not pursue the goal of destroying the foundation that divides people into parties, is a variation of unprincipled cunning aimed at the seizure and retention of power by the defenders of a historically specific type of party spirit. Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin consistently pursued the line of the "party of truth" in their activities, which allowed them, without falling into leftism and inappropriate r-r-revolutionarity, to achieve communist victories over their anti-communist "friends", who understood party spirit as mechanical adherence to memorized formulations diluted with anti-Marxist positions on revolution, democracy, power, the state, trade unions, philosophy, etc., not forgetting to accuse the Bolsheviks and their followers of totalitarianism, leaderism and calls for unquestioning submission to party decrees. They do not realize that unquestioning submission is necessary not to party decrees, but to the "decrees of truth"; therefore, to be a communist party member does not mean to agree with the Communist Party in everything, because even it is not immune to mistakes, as the practice of the post-Stalin CPSU has proven. Unfortunately, modern Marxists have not yet taken into account in their activities the positive and negative lessons from the history of communism; nevertheless, hope dies last.

In Soviet times, attempts were made to interpret the category of nationality in the light of Marxist-Leninist teaching [32], but these attempts only prevented the penetration of a genuine understanding of the dialectical-materialist theory of literature and communist party spirit into the consciousness of the Soviet intelligentsia. In this context, it is important to note that the revolutionary-democratic and Marxist-Leninist theories of literature are not identical in content , no matter how much some “theoreticians” claim to the contrary [33]. In fact, the similarity between revolutionary-democratic nationality and communist party spirit, expressed in the demand for high civic consciousness of the writer, should not mislead modern Marxists, since the category of nationality is only a form of pre-Marxist party spirit in literature, which does not correspond to the new, Marxist stage of development of literary criticism . The naive democratism of nationality is forgivable for revolutionary materialists, but it is not forgivable for Soviet and modern communists, who are obliged not only to copy the best thoughts of their predecessors, but to deny them, deepening and actualizing social science. In fact, the limitations of the category of nationality were revealed by Andrei Zhdanov in his reports on the magazines "Zvezda" and "Leningrad":

“Literature is called upon not only to meet the demands of the people, but more than that, it is obliged to develop the tastes of the people, raise their demands higher, enrich them with new ideas, and lead the people forward ” [34].

Namely: not to lag behind, but to help the party lead the people, to direct the masses towards the party and the construction of communism, to facilitate the involvement of the masses in communist construction, to raise the quality of public consciousness. In such a case, literature should raise the intellectual and spiritual level of the people, which is impossible without writers following communist party spirit, without them following party instructions and resolutions [35]. It is no coincidence that Lenin calls the education of the masses “the main task of the press during the transition from capitalism to communism” [36]: the construction of a new society, especially in the conditions of an aggressively minded capitalist environment, cannot but coincide chronologically with the education of a new man, in which fiction plays a far from insignificant role. Representing a somewhat simplified form of cognition of objective reality, literature is a kind of bridge between ignorance and reason, because the tools and methods with which literature enriches the consciousness of the individual reading it, in some way anticipate the tools and methods of scientific and theoretical cognition, accessible at the next, qualitatively new stage of human development. Good literature conveys to large masses of people in understandable and visual images the correct ideas and meanings that lay the foundation for their future worldview system, allowing to simplify the process of subsequent cognition of philosophical and social science truths, laying in the subcortex the correctness and inevitability of the ideas of goodness and justice, simplifying the subsequent work on the creation of a communist person; the indicated cognitive and educational functions of literature were reflected in the famous phrase of Stalin, who called writers "engineers of human souls." Bad literature works in a similar way, instilling in people a love for evil and bad, corrupting morals and ethics, speculating on Marxist illiteracy, glorifying scoundrels, philistines, bandits, liars, greedy people, enterprising businessmen and other elite of capitalist society. Declaring their non-partisanship, such writers at the same time propagate the bourgeois way of thinking and life, instill harmful ideals in the population, slander communists and the communist system, disseminating anti-communist falsification under the guise of "individual artistic interpretation".

But not everything is so simple with “good literature”. In order to write a work of art that more or less corresponds to the communist party spirit, good intentions alone are not enough; a scientific worldview is necessary, which allows good intentions to be embodied in scientifically realistic images. Consequently, the absence of a scientific worldview in the minds of writers is the reason why all progressive world literature, primarily critical realism, is unable to rise above talented but uninformed criticism of class society. It was precisely the ignorance of what feudal or capitalist imperialism is that prevented such great writers as Shakespeare, Dickens, Balzac, Pushkin, Lermontov, Tolstoy and others from finding the path to salvation and directing their readers along this path. The fragmentary insights of the pre-revolutionary Gorky only confirm the rule: even the most sincere writers who are not Marxists are not able to independently reach the ideas of communism and, consequently, create in their works the images of the People of the Future, capable of leading humanity out of the impasse into which the dominance of ignorance has led it. Understanding this and foreseeing the consequences of the spread of the ideology of autonomy and freedom of creativity among left-wing writers, Lenin wrote about the fundamental importance of combining communist party spirit and fiction for the fate of not only Russia, but also all of humanity. Another thing is that the revolutionary democratic thesis on the importance of taking into account the needs of the majority is appropriate within the framework of the fight against decadence and formalism, which are locked in the morbid subjectivism of salon snobbery. However, it is important not only to defeat subjectivism among writers, but also to replace it with a consistently scientific understanding of literature, which does not boil down to an endless “chase for the majority.” In this aspiration, revolutionary democrats resemble the ideologists of anti-feudalism, who successfully identified the interests of private business with the interests of the people, forcing the French proletarians and peasants to die on the barricades for the victory of "enlightened capitalism" over "ignorant feudalism". When the ideologists of the bourgeoisie spoke out against the ideologists of feudalism, they did not think about the expanded reproduction of society, they were not concerned with the problem of commodity-money relations, and they were alien to the experiences regarding the destructive consequences of the global domination of capitalism. Even the most advanced representatives of the bourgeoisie, represented by the French or German enlighteners, and various utopian proto-communists, were mistaken in formulating their fantastic concepts not on the basis of the dialectical methodology of thinking, but on the basis of metaphysics, formal logic, and everyday "wisdom". From the above it follows that all non-communist political parties were and are an instrument of class struggle in the hands of slave-owning feudal capitalists.Their goals and methods do not contradict the “laws” of a private property society, and therefore they can rightly be called parties implementing a party-political struggle for economic dominance, including with the help of literature.Their differences, manifested in different views on the internal and external policies of the state, are relative, while the identity of their anti-communist essence is absolute . The revolutionary democrats, who sense the unreasonableness of the system of exploitation existing in Russia and Europe, but do not see the paths and instruments of its scientific and practical denial, fell into the same trap. For this reason, they created a revolutionary democratic party spirit, later transformed into an anti-communist populist party spirit, which can be overcome only with the help of truly conscientious, dialectical thinking, which places the knowledge of truth at the forefront, and not the desires of the majority.

The only way to destroy party spirit as a principle (including the party spirit of literature) is the dialectical negation of class society, the way to destroy the foundation of politics – private property, protected by a centralized apparatus of material and spiritual violence. Communist party spirit is thus an important, but temporary element of conscientious thinking, since as communism is built, the number of people consciously following communist party spirit will also increase [37], which, according to dialectical theory, will bring closer the complete destruction of party spirit as a property of human society. In other words, a party striving for a communist, scientifically organized society is the only form of a party striving for the destruction of party spirit as a principle , therefore the desire to get rid of party spirit in science and art can be satisfied only when… communism triumphs over the entire planet. Future communist social relations will be devoid of party spirit not because their scientists will be unprincipled and unprincipled objectivists, but because society itself will not contain in its structure features that generate a fundamental opposition of subjective interests. The party spirit will disappear into oblivion, occasionally reminding us of itself in stories about the class struggle of the past.

By asserting that party spirit is an immanent property of class society, regardless of the development of political institutions and economic (egoistic) relations, Lenin deepened the concept of party spirit to the point of recognizing a unique communist party spirit based on the tendentious propaganda of objective laws of social development. By applying his conclusions to the field of literature, he developed a theory of communist party spirit in literature, which was relatively successfully tested by Stalin, which is confirmed by the achievements of Soviet literature up to the mid-fifties. Despite this, the number of studies written in Soviet times on the issues of party spirit in literature, unfortunately, did not translate into quality, because philosophers, aestheticians and literary scholars are people who are actually non-party (even if they have a party card), narrow specialists, and not Marxists, and therefore their reasoning about party spirit was limited to the framework already outlined by Lenin and Stalin. In fact, Soviet philosophers and literary scholars merely recounted Lenin's general theses in different words, arguing over individual unimportant issues, pedantically comparing their formulations with those of the classics and looking for inaccuracies in the formulations of their "sworn colleagues" in the departments. The very idea that the problem of party spirit in literature is directly connected with the problem of party spirit in general, with the principles of the formation and existence of the Communist Party, was quickly erased from the consciousness of professors and associate professors who reflect on party spirit but do not risk dealing with issues of party building; after all, it is much more convenient to leisurely recount Lenin in different words than to politically fight the destructive processes brought to life by democratic centralism and post-Stalin adventurism.

As can be seen, communist party spirit in literature was only a form of actualization of Lenin's party theory applied to the sphere of artistic words, an integral part of the general dialectical materialism of the construction and functioning of the communist party. Consequently, the development of the science of literature is impossible outside the development of communist party theory, which alone is capable of helping to answer the question of how useful or harmful this or that work is for communism, how accurately the practice of building communism is reflected in it. The principles of precisely this communist party spirit were laid at the foundation of the subsequent Stalinist practice of party leadership of Soviet literature; that same Soviet literature, the history of whose ascending and descending development has convincingly and clearly confirmed the correctness of Lenin's propositions.

To be continued…

Bronislav
07/29/2025

(Notes at link.)

https://prorivists.org/107_lit/

Google Translator

blindpig · Post by **blindpig** » Tue Aug 12, 2025 3:37 pm

Exorcising the ghosts of the imperial left: Domenico Losurdo and the class war inside Marxism

Originally published: Exorcising the ghosts of the imperial left: Domenico Losurdo and the class war inside Marxism on July 31, 2025 by Prince Kapone (more by Exorcising the ghosts of the imperial left: Domenico Losurdo and the class war inside Marxism) (Posted Aug 11, 2025)

Reading in the Ruins: Marxism, Betrayal, and the Battle for the Future
This is not just a book review. It’s a dispatch from the ideological frontlines of a world teetering on the edge of annihilation, where nuclear weapons, climate collapse, and AI-powered technofascism are all governed by the same iron law of profit. Into this chaos comes Domenico Losurdo, philosopher and partisan, armed with a scalpel sharper than any critique produced in the gated seminar rooms of Western academia. His book, Western Marxism: How It Was Born, How It Died, How It Can Be Reborn, is not just an autopsy of a failed theoretical tradition. It’s a funeral for the kind of Marxism that refuses to fight—and a call to arms for the rest of us who are tired of watching theory become therapy for cowards in tenured chairs.

We live in a moment where the most celebrated “left” thinkers are endorsed by NATO-funded journals, offered slots on the Foreign Policy Top 100 list, and deliver TED Talks for Google. What passes as Marxism in the imperial core has become, to borrow Losurdo’s phrase, a politics of defeat: obsessed with failure, allergic to power, and deeply invested in moralistic sneering at those who dare to build. This book enters like a molotov through the stained-glass windows of Verso Books and the New Left Review, shattering the illusions that critical theory, in its Western iteration, ever meant to liberate anyone.

Losurdo’s method is not subtle—but neither is the betrayal he confronts. He traces a precise historical and class rupture: 1914 and 1917. The former marks the collapse of the Second International, when Europe’s socialist parties lined up behind their own bourgeoisies to wage imperialist war. The latter, of course, is the Bolshevik Revolution, where the working class, peasantry, and oppressed nationalities actually seized power and attempted to remake the world. From that moment forward, Marxism bifurcated. In the East: revolutionary practice. In the West: revolutionary rhetoric. One took up arms and expropriated the ruling class. The other picked up pens and began a century-long career in symbolic subversion and ideological retreat.

But Losurdo doesn’t stop at the betrayal—he names the class that benefited from it. Western Marxism, he shows, is not merely a school of thought; it is a political expression of the imperial petty bourgeoisie: academics, intellectuals, and cultural producers situated safely in the heart of empire, clinging to their university salaries, their speaking tours, and their fragile liberal reputations. These are not people committed to revolution. They are people committed to performing its language, while collaborating in its defeat. They publish on the suffering of the world without lifting a finger to end it. They mourn the dead of Vietnam, Cuba, and Burkina Faso while ridiculing the revolutions that tried to liberate them.

This is why Losurdo’s book resonates not as theory, but as diagnosis. Like Lenin writing from the trenches of Red Petrograd, he is not interested in abstract purity or fashionable jargon. He is interested in what works. He names the disfigured remains of Marxism in the West for what it is: an ideology of retreat that confuses cowardice for caution and impotence for insight. He calls out the priests of this new church—Adorno, Althusser, Sartre, Hardt and Negri, even Žižek—not to dismiss their contributions wholesale, but to rip away the aura of radicalism from their politics of permanent evasion. They are not dangerous revolutionaries. They are licensed radicals. Court jesters with citations.

This review, then, is not just an assessment of Losurdo’s book. It is a weaponization of his method. At a time when Western Marxism functions like a hospice for disappointed liberals and ex-communists, Losurdo’s analysis restores the revolutionary heartbeat of Marxism by reminding us that the struggle never stopped—it just moved East and South. It was in the rice paddies of Vietnam, in the sugar fields of Cuba, in the barefoot militias of Angola, in the People’s Communes of China. And it is there, in the concrete resistance of actual people against actual empires, that Marxism was reborn—not as theory but as fire.

If the Western Marxists want to mourn, let them. We have no time for elegies. Our task is resurrection—not of an abstract “Left,” but of Marxism as a living weapon in the hands of the global poor. And to do that, we must begin where Losurdo begins: by burying the corpse of critique and building something that fights.

The Class Politics of Critique: When Theory Serves the Master
If the first casualty of imperial war is truth, then the second is theory—because nothing reveals a thinker’s allegiance more quickly than the question of state power. Losurdo understands this. He knows that the central fault line separating revolutionary Marxism from its Western caricature is not the interpretation of Marx’s early writings, nor the fine print of dialectical method, but a single, burning question: do you stand with those who take power to end oppression, or with those who critique them from the safety of empire? In this, Western Marxism has betrayed not only the revolution, but the very class it claims to speak for. It has become the philosophy of those who flee the field of battle and mock the wounded on their way out.

Losurdo doesn’t just theorize this betrayal. He names it. He tracks it through the hallowed halls of Frankfurt, through the self-important salons of Paris, through the postmodern drift into abstraction. He shows how thinkers like Adorno and Horkheimer, intoxicated by their own refinement, openly sneered at the anticolonial revolutions of the 20th century. How Althusser’s “anti-humanism” became a euphemism for disengagement. How Sartre’s so-called anti-imperialism was often a populist theater of guilt without revolutionary commitment. And how the entire tradition increasingly reeked of moral superiority and Eurocentric despair.

But Losurdo digs deeper—he refuses to stop at ideological critique. Instead, he interrogates the material conditions that produced this shift. Western Marxism, he argues, is the ideological excretion of the imperial core’s class contradictions. It is a product of the global wage differential that enabled the rise of a labor aristocracy in the West, and of the professional-managerial intelligentsia that floated atop it. These are not merely cultural workers with opinions. They are salaried functionaries of the knowledge economy, whose radicalism rarely leaves the page. They do not want to overthrow capitalism—they want tenure within it. Their Marxism is not a weapon, but a credential.

This is why, as Losurdo shows, the CIA had no problem funding them. Through cultural fronts like the Congress for Cultural Freedom, imperialism propped up a “respectable Left” that would attack socialism in the name of critique while advancing the ideological aims of the empire. The real enemies—Leninists, Maoists, anti-imperialist revolutionaries—were demonized as Stalinists, totalitarians, or worse. But Adorno? Arendt? Marcuse? They were safe. Because their Marxism had already been defanged—stripped of its class allegiance, its organizational form, its revolutionary horizon. What remained was critique without consequence, rebellion without power, theory without teeth.

The result, Losurdo argues, is a Marxism that confuses its own impotence for ethical superiority. A Marxism that dismisses the victories of the oppressed—from Vietnam to China to Angola—as failures because they do not conform to the fantasy blueprints of white men in Paris. A Marxism that mourns the horrors of capitalism but recoils in horror at its negation. In short, a Marxism that has become a boutique product of the theory industry: marketable, fashionable, and entirely compatible with empire.

And yet, the most damning part of Losurdo’s argument is not what he says about these thinkers—it’s what he reveals about their function. Western Marxism is not just wrong. It is structurally necessary to the reproduction of imperial ideology. It provides the moral alibi for the liberal intelligentsia. It allows professors, artists, and media personalities to posture as radicals while disciplining real revolutionaries. It is the velvet glove over the iron fist. The lecture series that justifies the drone strike. The footnote that buries the insurrection.

That is why this review—like Losurdo’s book—is not interested in academic debates about which school of thought better interprets Marx. We are interested in whether your theory serves the people who bleed. Whether your politics aligns with the factory worker in Vietnam, the farmer in Burkina Faso, the villager in Gaza. Or whether it serves the colonial metropole that pays your salary and rewards your cynicism with prizes, publications, and podcast slots.

Losurdo draws a clear line in the sand. And so do we. This is not a debate between competing theories. It is a class war inside Marxism itself. On one side: those who side with empire’s enemies, who engage with the contradictions of power, who see theory as a weapon. On the other: those who manufacture critique for imperial consumption. Who denounce revolution as authoritarianism, dismiss development as state capitalism, and reduce global class struggle to footnotes in their dissertation.

Which side are you on?

The Anticolonial Blindspot: When the West Refused to Learn from the World
At the heart of Losurdo’s indictment lies a truth so glaring that only Western Marxists could have ignored it: the greatest revolutionary achievements of the twentieth century did not happen in Paris, London, or New York. They happened in Havana, Hanoi, Beijing, and Algiers. And yet, for decades, the so-called radical intelligentsia of the West treated these uprisings not as the vanguard of socialist struggle, but as unfortunate deviations—quaint nationalisms, vulgar third worldisms, tragic detours from the “real” revolution that never quite managed to arrive on European soil. It’s not that they misunderstood anticolonial revolution. It’s that they actively disdained it. Losurdo’s phrase is sharp and unambiguous: it was “a meeting that didn’t happen.”

In chapter after chapter, Losurdo exposes the deranged mental gymnastics required to ignore the tidal wave of anticolonial victories that shook the world from 1945 to the 1980s. These weren’t isolated skirmishes—they were the most advanced forms of class struggle on the planet. The Vietnamese people humiliated the U.S. war machine. Algerian peasants defeated French fascism. The Chinese peasantry overthrew feudalism and imperial occupation in one of the most ambitious social transformations ever undertaken. And yet, while bombs fell and empires crumbled, the intellectuals of Europe were busy writing long essays on melancholy and the dialectic, wondering aloud whether real change was still possible.

But this was no accident. It was the result of a Eurocentric framework that saw revolution as a Western property, a dialectical entitlement of the white industrial proletariat. When revolutions erupted elsewhere—especially under peasant or nationalist leadership—they were derided as insufficiently Marxist. Too messy. Too violent. Too religious. Too populist. And above all, too successful. For a tradition built on fetishizing failure and romanticizing defeat, actual victory posed a philosophical crisis. Losurdo diagnoses it precisely: Western Marxism is only comfortable with the oppressed when they lose. The moment they seize power, build a state, or nationalize their resources, the Western left turns against them.

Consider this: Ho Chi Minh read Marx in Paris, studied Lenin in Moscow, and organized a communist movement in Southeast Asia under direct imperial occupation. He led his people in defeating both French and American colonial armies. But where is the legacy of Ho in Western theory? Where is Fanon? Where is Amílcar Cabral? Where is Sankara? These men died with a gun in one hand and The Communist Manifesto in the other, but they are treated by Western Marxists like exotic footnotes—if they’re mentioned at all. Meanwhile, Slavoj Žižek gets top billing at every book fair and lecture hall, despite having cheered on the privatization of Yugoslavia and supported NATO’s war in Ukraine. The message is clear: only the Marxism of the imperial center is permitted to think. Everything else must be explained away, dismissed, or ignored.

This is not just ideological arrogance—it is class treason. By refusing to take seriously the anticolonial revolutions of the twentieth century, Western Marxists revealed their loyalty to empire. They clutched their copies of Negative Dialectics while the U.S. dropped Agent Orange on rice fields. They waxed poetic about the “death of the subject” while socialist movements were building schools, electrifying villages, and collectivizing agriculture across Asia and Africa. They declared the Soviet Union a “bureaucratic nightmare” while Moscow trained thousands of doctors, engineers, and anti-imperialist militants from the Global South. They claimed to speak for the oppressed while mocking the only movements that ever actually freed them.

Losurdo doesn’t let them off the hook. He shows how Adorno’s contempt for revolutionary violence in the periphery mirrors Horkheimer’s bizarre defense of U.S. military interventions as protectors of “human rights.” He exposes Althusser’s posturing anti-humanism as an ideological cop-out that insulated the Western left from engaging with the messy realities of liberation struggles. He ridicules Negri and Hardt’s metaphysical babble about “Empire” while they erase the very real empire of NATO, IMF, and AFRICOM. And he decimates the romanticization of 1968, revealing how it functioned more as an anarcho-aesthetic tantrum than a revolutionary moment, disconnected from—and often hostile to—the movements of the colonized.

What Losurdo demands—and what Weaponized Information affirms—is a rupture with this parasitic tradition. We do not need more critiques of power from those who have never risked their lives in struggle. We need a return to the historical materialism that locates theory in the movements of the oppressed, not in the footnotes of the Frankfurt School. We need a Marxism that centers the plantation, the colony, the sweatshop, and the drone strike—not the lecture hall. And we need to be unapologetic in our defense of the socialist states and anti-imperialist revolutions that have fought, and continue to fight, to carve out spaces of survival against the barbarism of the West.

In this sense, Losurdo does not merely critique Western Marxism—he invites us to bury it. Not with sorrow, but with clarity. To acknowledge what it was: a class formation, an ideological buffer, a decadent tradition whose refusal to align with anticolonial revolution rendered it politically obsolete. Its death is not a tragedy. It is a necessity.

The Theory Industry and the CIA: Manufacturing the Compatible Left
To understand why Western Marxism became what it is, you have to follow the money. You have to map the institutions, the networks, the grants, the publishing deals. You have to examine who funds what, who gets translated, who gets tenure, who gets the platforms, and who gets purged. And when you do, you uncover the dirty secret at the core of Losurdo’s entire analysis: much of what we call “radical theory” in the imperial core was manufactured, curated, and subsidized to be just that—radical enough to seem dangerous, but harmless enough to never threaten power. This is not speculation. It’s historical fact. And Losurdo calls it by name: the compatible left.

This so-called left is the one that cries over Che Guevara’s diary but supports sanctions on Cuba. That mourns Walter Rodney but dismisses socialist China as “authoritarian.” That quotes Fanon in a thesis while opposing armed struggle in Palestine. The compatible left is the one that dances around imperialism while playing court jester to capital. And as Losurdo makes clear, it didn’t emerge by accident. It was built—deliberately, strategically, and with enormous investment—by the institutions of imperialism itself.

Enter the CIA. Not the boogeyman of conspiracy, but the historically documented architect of cultural warfare. Through fronts like the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the CIA spent millions funding journals, university departments, literary prizes, art exhibitions, and philosophical movements across Europe and the Americas. Their goal was not simply to discredit the Soviet Union. It was to redefine the very meaning of leftism—to produce a “respectable socialism” that would denounce communism, reject anti-imperialist struggle, and remain permanently allergic to the seizure of power.

And it worked. Journals like Encounter, Der Monat, and Preuves published Adorno, Arendt, and other darlings of the anti-communist intelligentsia. Conferences promoted liberal “humanist” Marxism as a civilized alternative to Leninism. “Radical” thinkers who condemned U.S. policy were excluded. Those who condemned actually existing socialism were amplified. The Frankfurt School, which began as a radical analysis of capitalist domination, was integrated into the cultural counterinsurgency machine. Its quietist turn wasn’t just philosophical—it was political. Horkheimer supported U.S. intervention in Vietnam. Adorno had no time for revolutionary struggle, only for psychoanalysis and atonal music. These weren’t just bad takes. They were ideological positions that aligned with imperial interests.

And yet this entire operation succeeded in painting itself as critical. As radical. As Marxist. This is the genius of the theory industry—it packages submission as sophistication. It sells cowardice as complexity. It promotes a politics of resignation wrapped in the aesthetic of resistance. Losurdo lifts the veil on this intellectual theater and exposes the actors for what they are: salaried ideologues of empire. Their function is not to challenge power, but to manage dissent. Not to ignite revolution, but to exhaust it.

In a particularly scathing passage, Losurdo turns his attention to Žižek—the Slovenian philosopher who built an entire career on blasphemous provocation and carefully sanitized heresy. A man who came of age undermining socialism in Yugoslavia, campaigned for privatization, and later cheered NATO’s proxy wars—all while posing as a Marxist. Žižek, like others in his orbit, is a textbook case of what Losurdo calls the “radical recuperator”: someone who performs revolution while disarming it, who appropriates its language while sneering at its victories.

This is the cultural function of Western Marxism in the neoliberal order. It is not meant to organize workers. It is not meant to build parties. It is not meant to overthrow imperialism. It is meant to manage the imagination. To keep critique contained within the university, safely quarantined from struggle. And to ensure that any genuine attempt to build socialism—especially by non-Western people—will be met with moralistic condemnation from the left flank of the empire itself.

Losurdo’s brilliance lies in connecting the dots. He doesn’t just critique the content of Western Marxism. He locates its material basis. He exposes its patrons. He names the class that benefits from it. And he reminds us that in capitalism, even theory is a commodity—and the market pays best for that which justifies its own reproduction. This is why so many “radical” philosophers are invited to speak at NATO-sponsored forums while Cuban doctors are blocked from international conferences. It’s why the socialist governments of Venezuela or Nicaragua are demonized, while imperial technocrats in Davos are applauded for their “concern about inequality.” It’s why decolonial studies flourishes in the academy, but revolutionary anti-imperialism is still met with silence or scorn.

What Losurdo offers is not nostalgia for Soviet orthodoxy or a demand for intellectual conformity. He offers something far more dangerous: a call to reconnect theory to struggle. To build a Marxism that is accountable not to citation metrics or grant committees, but to the masses of the world. A Marxism that does not speak about the oppressed, but speaks withthem—and fights for them.

This is our task as revolutionaries. To tear the mask off the theory industry. To expose the NGO-ification of the left. To destroy the idea that “radical” means unreadable jargon and performative irony. And to return to the truth that theory, if it is not a weapon, is a luxury of the ruling class.

Rebellion as Style, Revolution as Crime: The Messianic Drift of Western Marxism
One of the most damning contributions of Losurdo’s book is his unsparing critique of the aestheticization of rebellion that saturates Western Marxism. In the hands of the imperial intelligentsia, revolution is not a process, not a dialectic of seizure and construction—but a performance. A vibe. A mood. Stripped of strategy, severed from mass struggle, rebellion becomes a consumer affect: the leather jacket of politics. You can wear it, tweet it, quote it—but you never have to win with it. Because winning, in this ideology, is betrayal.

Losurdo names this tendency “messianism”—a theological inheritance masquerading as radicalism. At its core is the idea that the revolution must arrive like a lightning bolt from the heavens. Pure. Unstained. Absolute. It cannot grow, struggle, stumble, or adapt. It cannot build hospitals or ministries. It cannot negotiate contradictions. It must rupture everything. And so, the very messiness of real revolutions—Lenin’s NEP, Mao’s rural industrialization, Fidel’s alliance with Black radicals, Sankara’s land reforms—disqualifies them. They are sullied by reality. Impure. Tainted by the sin of power.

That’s why Western Marxism loves the rebel but fears the revolutionary. It adores the moment before power is seized, but condemns what comes after. It celebrates uprising as catharsis but recoils from construction as compromise. Losurdo makes the comparison explicit: it’s Christianity in disguise. Badiou’s “Event,” Žižek’s “Act,” the cult of 1968, the permanent fetish of failure—all of it is infused with messianic longing for a rupture that transcends history, delivers grace, and spares us from responsibility. It is, quite literally, the religion of the petty bourgeoisie: salvation without sacrifice, transformation without work, communion without commitment.

But the Global South has no time for these fantasies. When imperialism is at your throat and hunger is knocking at your door, you don’t wait for the Messiah. You organize. You take land. You nationalize. You make mistakes and learn from them. You build the people’s army, the people’s clinic, the people’s education. You take power and defend it. And if you have to deal with bureaucracy, contradictions, and enemies inside and out, so be it. That’s the price of revolution. But in the West, where theory is protected by tenure and failure is rewarded with book deals, the idea of revolution is romanticized precisely because it never arrives. It is a ghost story told by those who fear the living.

This messianic drift also enables the rejection of any socialist project that does not conform to the aesthetic expectations of the Euro-left. They reject China because it’s too pragmatic. Cuba because it negotiates. Vietnam because it trades. They want revolutions that don’t defend themselves, parties that don’t discipline, movements that don’t make decisions. They want to have communism without the state, equality without development, and struggle without war. What they refuse to admit is that this dream is not revolutionary—it’s imperial. It is the expectation that the oppressed will deliver liberation to the West in the form of spectacle, without ever threatening its material privileges.

Losurdo rips this fantasy to shreds. He reminds us that Marx and Engels never wrote that the revolution would be perfect. They wrote that it would be material. Historical. Born in blood and contradiction. They understood that socialism would arise not from the mind of the philosopher, but from the muck and fire of collective struggle. And that the task was not to imagine a new world from scratch, but to transform the existing one, with all its weight, violence, and potential. As they put it in The German Ideology: “Communism is not a state of affairs to be established, an ideal to which reality will have to adjust. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.”

That movement does not come from critique. It comes from power. From organizing. From revolutionaries who seize the means of production, dismantle the imperial state, and set in motion a new mode of life. And yes, they will make mistakes. So did the Paris Commune. So did the Soviets. So did every people who ever fought back. But the question is not whether they lived up to your fantasy. The question is whether they advanced the struggle against exploitation and empire. Whether they put the poor in charge. Whether they changed the world in the name of the oppressed. And if the answer is yes, then you do not condemn them—you learn from them.

The Western left needs to grow up. It needs to stop worshipping rebellion like a fetish and start building the political infrastructure needed for liberation. It needs to shed its messianic delusions and confront the hard, disciplined work of revolutionary organization. It needs to bury the ghost of 1968 and study 1949, 1959, 1975. And most of all, it needs to understand that the future will not be made by philosophers. It will be made by the people—their victories, their contradictions, their sovereignty.

Losurdo’s critique is not gentle, and it is not designed to comfort. It is designed to clarify. He is not offering a better theory. He is offering a better side. And his question echoes through every page of this book like a thunderclap: Are you with the empire and its court jesters? Or are you with the people, building power brick by brick, with blood in the mortar?

Resurrecting Marxism in the Belly of the Beast
What, then, remains for those of us trapped in the imperial core? For those of us surrounded by the glittering ruins of Western Marxism, where theory has become a burial ground and solidarity is often just a hashtag? Losurdo doesn’t end with despair—he ends with a call to arms. And not the empty call of slogans and LARPing revolts, but the disciplined invitation to rebuild Marxism in the West—not as a theoretical school, not as a fashion statement, but as a weapon in the hands of the people. This is not revivalism. It is insurgency. It is counterinsurgency against the ideological counterinsurgency that has passed for leftist thought for half a century.

For Marxism to be reborn in the West, Losurdo insists, it must do the thing Western Marxists have refused to do for generations: learn from the Global South. Not extract concepts, not borrow vibes, not romanticize failures—but actually study the successes, understand the contradictions, and join the world-historical project of decolonization and socialism. It must recognize that the core of the class struggle today is not in Berlin or Berkeley—it is in Accra, Caracas, Shenzhen, Ramallah, and Soweto. That’s where the global proletariat is fighting and building. That’s where power is being contested. That’s where Marxism lives.

To realign with this struggle, Western Marxism must undergo a ruthless ideological detox. It must expel the parasite of Eurocentrism, abandon its addiction to moralism, and sever its unholy alliance with liberalism and imperial technocracy. It must renounce its fetish for rebellion and embrace the reality of revolution. It must drop its cult of critique and learn what it means to be useful to movements that actually intend to win. As Losurdo reminds us, the test of theory is not its novelty, but its utility in advancing liberation. Not how many citations it has, but how many prisons it breaks, how many famines it ends, how many guns it forces the empire to lay down.

This means returning to the Leninist principle of practice as the criterion of truth. It means rebuilding organizations rooted in working-class struggle, particularly among the colonized, racialized, and hyper-exploited sections of the class. It means forging a principled internationalism that sides with the resistance in Gaza, the revolutionaries in the Philippines, the land defenders in Colombia, the socialists in Mali, the survivors in Haiti, and the builders in China—not as allies, but as comrades in a shared global war against capital and empire.

But it also means organizing in the imperial core itself. Not retreating into academic detachment or nihilist apathy, but building revolutionary instruments that can crack open the soft underbelly of the beast. It means confronting the class contradictions within the settler colonial working class, exposing the labor aristocracy, and naming the material wages of whiteness and empire that buy loyalty and blunt solidarity. It means fighting for a revolutionary rupture that does not just seek reform, but rupture—on behalf of those whom this system devours.

This is not glamorous work. It’s not as sexy as publishing a new interpretation of Adorno or another reinvention of the dialectic. But it’s the work of revolution. It is the task of breaking with the compatible left and forging a line of demarcation between those who serve the oppressed and those who serve themselves. Losurdo makes it clear: the rebirth of Marxism in the West can only happen by aligning ourselves, materially and politically, with the anticolonial, anti-imperialist front of the global proletariat. Anything less is capitulation.

It is here that Weaponized Information plants its flag. We are not interested in theory for theory’s sake. We are interested in the theory that builds power, dismantles empire, and trains the class to think like a ruling class in formation. We are here to bury the dead, rescue the living, and arm the future. If that means rejecting the pantheon of the Western Marxist canon, so be it. If that means standing with the maligned revolutions of the South against the polite condemnation of Western intellectuals, so be it. If that means building underground when there’s no stage left to stand on, so be it.

Losurdo’s final gift to us is not a new theory—it is clarity. Clarity about where we are, who we are up against, and what must be done. The West will not save Marxism. It never did. But from within its rotting carcass, revolution can still grow—if we have the discipline to unlearn, the humility to follow, and the courage to fight.

Class War in Theory: Choose Your Side
This book is not a mirror—it’s a blade. Losurdo doesn’t want your admiration. He wants your defection. From the ideology of critique to the politics of power. From the melancholia of the West to the rebellion of the South. From a Marxism that performs radicalism to a Marxism that wages war. If you came here looking for an intellectual review, you’re in the wrong place. This is a line of demarcation. This is theory in uniform.

We are not interested in the debates that dominate the seminar rooms of decaying empires. Whether Adorno was more refined than Althusser, whether Gramsci can be safely neutralized by liberal cultural studies, whether Foucault’s whispers about power can substitute for a rifle in the hands of the oppressed. These are not our questions. Our question is this: does your theory take the side of the colonized, the exploited, the revolutionaries of the earth—or does it stand in the way?

Because that’s what’s at stake. In a world hurtling toward climate apocalypse and nuclear annihilation, there is no neutral ground. Your critique of China is not brave if you can’t name the U.S. empire. Your concern about authoritarianism is meaningless if you ignore the hunger embargoes, drone wars, and IMF strangleholds imposed by the liberal world order. Your Marxism is hollow if it cannot recognize the construction of socialism in the Global South as the single most important project of human emancipation in the modern era.

Losurdo’s final lesson is Lenin’s first: you must name the class enemy. Not abstractly, but concretely. That means naming NATO, the U.S. war machine, the ruling class foundations funding academia, the billionaire donors behind the compatible left, and the managers of despair who publish defeat as wisdom. It means refusing the rituals of “balance” and the academic fetish for complexity that paralyzes commitment. It means choosing the barricade over the bookshelf, the commune over the column, the cadre over the critic.

In 1918, while imperialist armies tried to crush the Bolshevik newborn, Lenin didn’t write poetry. He wrote The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky. He understood that the battlefield of theory is not a sideshow—it’s the ideological front of the class war. Losurdo picks up that banner. And now we must pick it up too. Against the opportunists. Against the careerists. Against the sadness merchants who sell paralysis in the language of radical skepticism. Against the whole rotting structure of Western Marxism that tried to make peace with power.

Let us be clear. The future is not written by think pieces. It is written in trenches and classrooms, prisons and parliaments, factories and fields. And in every one of these arenas, the question echoes: which side are you on? Losurdo does not ask us to answer with words. He asks us to answer with action. With alignment. With discipline. With struggle. That is how Marxism will be reborn—not through citation indexes or conference panels, but through commitment to the global war against imperialism and capitalism.

https://mronline.org/2025/08/11/exorcis ... e-marxism/

blindpig · Post by **blindpig** » Wed Aug 13, 2025 2:52 pm

Losurdo vs. Liberalism: Slavery, Extermination, and the True History of the “Community of the Free”
Posted by Internationalist 360° on August 12, 2025
Prince Kapone

A Weaponized Intellects Book Review of Domenico Losurdo’s Liberalism: A Counter-History

Part II

The Janus Face of Liberalism: Freedom for Some, Chains for the Rest

Liberalism likes to wear its Sunday best. It arrives in the world dressed in the fine robes of “rights,” “liberty,” and “progress,” quoting Locke and Jefferson as if they were saints of a universal creed. In the official portraits, it is the philosophy that toppled kings, tamed tyrants, and handed the torch of reason to the people. But Domenico Losurdo’s Liberalism: A Counter-History tears this portrait down from the museum wall and forces us to look at the blood on the frame. He doesn’t ask us to admire liberalism’s moral vocabulary—he asks us to trace the property deeds, the slave ledgers, the land charters, and the body counts that built it. And when you do, the mask slips. You see the two faces of liberalism: one smiling on the white citizen of the metropole, the other turned toward the plantation, the reservation, the colony, and the ghetto with a scowl of pure domination.Losurdo’s method is historical vivisection. He takes liberalism’s canonical thinkers—not the caricatures handed out in high school civics, but the actual men in their time—and cuts into the living contradiction between their universalist language and their exclusionary practice. Locke, the “father of liberalism,” who penned paeans to natural rights while drafting the constitution of the Carolina colony to protect hereditary slavery. Jefferson, apostle of liberty, who measured freedom by the acreage of stolen Indigenous land and the number of enslaved Africans he owned. Mill, the great champion of liberty, who insisted that despotism was the appropriate government for “barbarians” so long as it led them toward “civilization.” In Losurdo’s account, these are not tragic hypocrisies or personal failings. They are the architecture of liberalism itself—an order built to deliver political liberty and economic opportunity to a bounded community of settlers, colonizers, and masters, while excluding the vast majority of humanity to preserve the privileges of the few.
The genius of liberalism, as Losurdo lays it bare, is that it learned to speak the language of freedom while institutionalizing new forms of unfreedom. The liberal revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were not global declarations of human emancipation; they were the founding charters of “exclusion clauses” that defined who counted as part of “the people.” Citizenship in the United States was born shackled to race, property, and gender; the French Revolution’s Rights of Man coexisted seamlessly with colonial massacres in the Caribbean and North Africa. The liberal order did not fail to live up to its ideals—it realized them fully within the fenced-in gardens of the white, propertied citizenry. The rest of the world was rendered an open field for exploitation, dispossession, and extermination.

This is why Losurdo insists we must strip liberalism of its Sunday clothes and see it for what it is: not the natural antithesis of tyranny, but a system of double bookkeeping—freedom in the metropole, despotism in the colony; rights for the citizen, chains for the subject. It was, from its inception, a political technology of the settler colonial order. The so-called “freedom” it enshrined was always premised on the violent control of labor—whether through slavery, indenture, or wage servitude—and the seizure of land from those deemed outside the circle of humanity. Liberalism’s proudest achievements—parliamentary government, freedom of the press, civil equality—were never extended as gifts to the world; they were rationed privileges for those inside the citadel, paid for by the suffering of the colonized.

Losurdo’s counter-history demolishes the fairy tale that liberalism’s global expansion was a civilizing mission. What expanded was not the franchise of rights, but the reach of the “white man’s republic” in all its variations. Every colonial frontier was a laboratory where liberal states tested the limits of their own hypocrisy. In India, the British Empire honed its techniques of legal segregation and economic plunder under the banner of improvement. In the Americas, genocide against Indigenous nations was justified as the march of progress. In Africa, the “civilizing mission” meant forced labor, stolen resources, and the suppression of any political autonomy. Liberalism’s liberty was never meant to be universal—it was a property right, guarded at gunpoint.

For those of us trapped inside the ideological bubble of the imperial core, Losurdo’s work is not just history—it is an act of political defection. It demands that we stop treating liberalism as a neutral terrain we can occupy or a set of ideals we can “redeem.” The structure is rotten because it was built to be rotten. The double standard is not a flaw—it’s the foundation. To imagine liberation through liberalism is to imagine a plantation without slavery, a colony without conquest. It is to imagine an empire that rules without domination. And history, in Losurdo’s telling, leaves no room for such fantasies.

If we take his lesson seriously, then the task before us is not to rescue liberalism from itself, but to confront it as a class project of the settler bourgeoisie—a project that has adapted over centuries to protect the privileges of the few against the demands of the many. That means recognizing that every gain made within the liberal order has been wrenched from it through struggle—often bloody, often led by those it sought to exclude entirely. It means understanding that the “universal” rights enshrined in its charters were won by the revolts of the enslaved, the strikes of the exploited, the uprisings of the colonized—and that these rights will always be clawed back unless the system that created their exclusions is dismantled.

Losurdo leaves us with no illusions. Liberalism is not a neutral inheritance we can put to better use; it is a weapon forged in the workshops of empire, still sharp, still aimed at the throats of the world’s majority. Our task is not to polish it, but to break it—and to build, in its place, a political order rooted not in the exclusions of the past, but in the revolutionary universalism of the oppressed. That is not a project for seminar rooms. It is a project for movements, for barricades, for the very people whom liberalism has spent centuries excluding from its false promises. And that is exactly where Losurdo points us: away from the myth of liberal salvation, and toward the reality of revolutionary liberation.

The “Unique Twin Birth”: Liberalism and Racial Slavery

Liberalism loves to narrate its own birth as a miracle of human freedom—parchment constitutions inked in the bloodless language of “rights,” enlightened gentlemen raising toasts to liberty under candlelight. Domenico Losurdo drags this fairy tale into the daylight and makes us look at the other half of the birth: the auction block. The plantation. The iron collar. The whip. For every clause extolling the rights of man, there was a matching clause defending the absolute dominion of one human being over another. This is the “unique twin birth” of the modern West: the rise of liberal political forms inseparably bound to the consolidation of racial chattel slavery.

John Locke, often canonized as the philosopher of liberty, wrote the Carolina Constitution in 1669, a document that gave masters “absolute power and authority” over enslaved Africans. Thomas Jefferson could draft the Declaration’s soaring claim that “all men are created equal” while personally holding hundreds of Black people in bondage and dispatching troops to dispossess Indigenous nations. These aren’t embarrassing contradictions for liberalism—they are the operating instructions. The “rights” of the free citizen were defined, expanded, and enforced through the simultaneous codification of the enslaved as property.

The United States’ self-anointed “Founding Fathers” were not outliers but the vanguard of a transatlantic order in which liberal legality and slaveholding aristocracy merged seamlessly. In Britain’s imperial core, Parliamentarians thundered against the tyranny of the Crown while profiting from the Royal African Company’s human cargo. In France, the champions of 1789’s “Rights of Man” sat in the Massiac Club, lobbying to preserve slavery in the Caribbean as the economic lifeblood of the Republic. Across the Atlantic world, property rights were the sacred altar—and the human beings reduced to property were the burnt offerings.

John C. Calhoun, arch-defender of slavery in the U.S., made the logic explicit: slavery was not an unfortunate deviation from liberty, but a “positive good” that stabilized democracy for the white citizenry. His jurisprudence didn’t stand outside the liberal tradition—it grew from its very soil. By protecting the sanctity of property above all, liberalism produced a political system where democracy for some was built on the permanent unfreedom of others.

Losurdo’s point lands like a hammer: liberalism’s golden age was also the golden age of the transatlantic slave trade. Its celebrated theorists and statesmen were architects not only of parliaments and constitutions, but of slave codes and manhunts. The “community of the free” was never a universal project—it was a gated community, ringed with chains and patrolled by overseers. The political liberty of the West did not grow in opposition to slavery; it grew because of it.

The Architecture of Exclusion

If the “unique twin birth” of liberalism tied its fortunes to slavery, the next stage was to build an architecture sturdy enough to keep the enslaved, the colonized, and the dispossessed permanently outside the gates. Domenico Losurdo names the blueprint clearly: a spatial and legal segregation between the “sacred space” of rights and the “profane space” of unfreedom. In the sacred space—the metropolitan core—citizens enjoyed the protections of law, property, and political voice. In the profane space—the colonies, plantations, and reservations—those protections evaporated, replaced by naked domination. The boundary between the two was not a flaw in the system; it was the system.

This was liberalism as a Herrenvolk democracy: full rights for the settler-citizenry, disenfranchisement and terror for those on the wrong side of the color line. In the United States, Indigenous nations were treated as obstacles to expansion, their treaties shredded the moment they interfered with settler appetites. Even freed Black people in the North found their rights suspended by “Black Codes” that ensured liberty was a conditional privilege, not a guaranteed inheritance. The same logic ran through the British Empire, where colonial subjects in India, Africa, and the Caribbean were governed not by the rights Parliament boasted of at home, but by martial law, curfews, and the whip.

The case studies are damning. In revolutionary France, the Massiac Club—an alliance of colonial planters and their metropolitan allies—organized to protect slavery in Saint-Domingue, terrified that the language of liberty might seep into the sugar fields. In the United States, Indigenous sovereignty was dismissed with the stroke of Andrew Jackson’s pen, as the Trail of Tears carved death into the landscape. In Britain’s colonies, millions lived and died under ordinances that gave governors dictatorial powers, all while London congratulated itself on being the world’s beacon of freedom.

Losurdo forces us to see that this exclusionary architecture wasn’t a temporary oversight waiting for moral enlightenment to fix. It was a structural necessity. The wealth that sustained the sacred space—the coffee houses of London, the salons of Philadelphia, the boulevards of Paris—was siphoned from the profane space through exploitation, expropriation, and extermination. Liberalism’s moral vocabulary depended on this geography: rights could be exalted precisely because their boundaries were enforced with brutality.

This is where the liberal myth dies. The system did not slowly expand its circle of rights out of an innate moral progress. It expanded only when the excluded forced it open—through slave rebellions, anticolonial revolts, general strikes, and wars of liberation. And each expansion was met with new mechanisms to redraw the boundary, to reestablish the exclusion under fresh names. The architecture remains, even if the façade changes. In the so-called liberal order, someone must always live outside the gates for those inside to feel free.

Master Race Democracy on a Planetary Scale

By the nineteenth century, the liberal “community of the free” had perfected its internal architecture of exclusion. The next logical step was to globalize it. What Domenico Losurdo calls “master race democracy” was not a rhetorical flourish—it was a political formula: democracy for the in-group, domination for the rest. Liberalism’s trick was to fuse popular sovereignty with racial supremacy, to make the ballot box and the bayonet work in tandem. Inside the core, white citizens could debate tax rates and tariffs; outside, entire continents were carved up in drawing rooms and “pacified” with gunboats.

This was not hypocrisy. It was design. The same Britain that celebrated the Reform Acts was torching villages in India, starving Bengal through famine policies, and machine-gunning Sudanese fighters at Omdurman. The United States, self-anointed cradle of liberty, waged wars of extermination against Indigenous nations, then exported the template overseas in the Philippines, where “benevolent assimilation” came with waterboarding and concentration camps. France, home of “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité,” bathed Algeria in blood for over a century, perfecting counterinsurgency techniques later exported to Vietnam.

This planetary apartheid was sustained by a moral vocabulary that cast colonial slaughter as civilization’s advance. The “civilizing mission” became the liberal alibi for every atrocity: the burning of villages, the seizure of land, the forced labor regimes that underwrote Europe’s industrial takeoff. In the liberal imagination, the world was divided between those mature enough for self-government and those condemned to political childhood—a childhood policed by Maxim guns and imperial edicts. And always, the criteria for maturity aligned neatly with the skin tones and cultural markers of the colonizers.

Losurdo’s concept slices through the liberal self-image like a hot knife. Master race democracy was not a perversion of the ideal—it was the ideal’s condition of possibility. The flourishing of rights at the core required the negation of rights in the periphery. The citizen-soldier in London or Boston could feel secure in his liberties precisely because those liberties were subsidized by the unfreedom of others, whether in the cane fields of the Caribbean, the mines of Southern Africa, or the railroads of India.

This is the throughline from the age of sail to the age of drones. The racialized division of humanity remains the skeleton of the liberal order. Today’s NATO interventions, IMF “structural adjustments,” and tech-driven surveillance regimes are updated versions of the same logic: freedom for the metropole, discipline for the rest. The master race democracy has traded the gunboat for the sanctions list, the missionary for the human rights NGO, but the planetary hierarchy is intact. Losurdo’s warning is clear—this is not a system that can be persuaded to include everyone. It is a system that exists to exclude, and it will adapt every tool of modernity to keep it that way.

Crisis, Radicalism, and Containment

Every so often, history delivers a shock powerful enough to rupture the liberal order’s smug façade. The Haitian Revolution was one such earthquake. Enslaved Africans—dismissed by Enlightenment Europe as subhuman—rose up, armed themselves, shattered Napoleon’s army, and declared the first Black republic. They did more than abolish slavery; they proved that the Enlightenment’s “universal” rights could be made truly universal, if wrested by force from the hands of their hypocritical authors. For the liberal elite, this was not a triumph of their ideals—it was a nightmare made flesh.

Liberalism’s response was immediate and vicious. The Haitian state was blockaded, isolated, and saddled with a crippling indemnity to France—a ransom for daring to exist. In the United States, the Founding Fathers tightened the chains, passing laws to smother any whisper of revolt. Across the Atlantic, British and French liberals recast their rhetoric, retreating from universality to guarded particularism: rights for “our” people, order for everyone else. Haiti had exposed the contradiction too clearly; liberalism’s survival depended on re-drawing the boundaries of who counted as human.

This cycle repeated itself across centuries. Reconstruction in the United States briefly promised equality for the formerly enslaved, only to be strangled by terror, disenfranchisement, and the codification of Jim Crow. The decolonization wave after World War II—fueled by anti-fascist struggle and socialist revolutions—forced the liberal powers to grant formal independence to colonies they could no longer hold by brute force. But independence came with strings: coups orchestrated by the CIA and MI6, assassinations of leaders from Lumumba to Allende, and economic chains forged in the boardrooms of the IMF and World Bank.

In each case, liberalism adapted to crisis not by expanding freedom, but by perfecting containment. Rights could be conceded—temporarily, strategically—if doing so preserved the deeper architecture of racial capitalism. The Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act in the U.S., for example, were real victories won by mass struggle, but they came alongside the expansion of the prison-industrial complex and a bipartisan war on the Black working class. In the Global South, postcolonial democracies were tolerated only so long as they embraced “free markets” and aligned with Western strategic interests. Step out of line, and the full machinery of regime change whirred into motion.

Losurdo’s lesson is that liberalism’s crises do not produce its transcendence—they produce its refinement. Each rupture is followed by a counter-offensive that recaptures the emancipatory language of the oppressed, empties it of revolutionary content, and repackages it as proof of liberalism’s moral leadership. The Haitian rebels are recast as abolitionist mascots; Martin Luther King Jr. is embalmed in nonviolent sainthood while his anti-imperialist politics are erased; Nelson Mandela’s armed struggle is reduced to a morality tale about forgiveness. The message is always the same: you may fight for freedom, but only on terms set by the “community of the free.”

This is why the left’s flirtation with “reclaiming” liberalism is a dead end. The system has centuries of practice in absorbing insurgency and turning it into an instrument of rule. The point is not to reclaim it, but to rupture it entirely—to build a political order that does not require periodic massacres and exclusions to function. For Losurdo, and for us, the true inheritance of every emancipatory crisis lies not in the concessions wrung from the ruling class, but in the moments when the oppressed seized power for themselves and refused to give it back.

The Twentieth Century Catastrophe

If the nineteenth century was the age when liberalism perfected its machinery of exclusion, the twentieth was the age when that machinery spun out of control. Two world wars, the rise of fascism, and the extermination of millions were not the negation of liberal ideals—they were their logical culmination under the pressure of global crisis. Losurdo strips away the sentimental lie that fascism was a total break from the liberal tradition. In truth, the so-called “catastrophe of the twentieth century” was prepared, enabled, and in many cases openly applauded by liberal states—so long as it served their colonial and class interests.

From Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia to Hitler’s war in Eastern Europe, the ruling circles of Britain, France, and the United States calculated not in moral absolutes but in imperial advantage. Liberal Britain maintained cordial relations with fascist Italy until the Duce’s colonial ambitions threatened British holdings. The U.S. extended no real aid to the Spanish Republic against Franco, while American corporations like Ford and IBM continued doing business with Nazi Germany well into the war. These were not “failures to act” born of naivety—they were deliberate choices to tolerate fascism when it protected private property and colonial order.

The colonies themselves were laboratories for the very technologies of domination later deployed in Europe. The concentration camp—celebrated as a Nazi innovation—had already been tested by the British in South Africa and the Spanish in Cuba. Aerial bombardment of civilians was pioneered by the liberal powers in Iraq and India long before Dresden or Guernica. Even the racial pseudoscience that undergirded fascism’s genocidal policies found its roots in the immigration laws, segregation codes, and eugenics movements of liberal democracies. Hitler himself praised America’s race laws as a model.

After the Allied victory in 1945, the liberal order emerged with its image burnished as the savior of civilization. But the old exclusion clauses remained firmly in place—only updated for the postwar era. The same powers that condemned Nazi occupation clung to their colonies in Africa and Asia, crushing independence movements with massacres from Madagascar to Malaya. France’s “Fourth Republic” slaughtered Algerians; Britain drowned the Mau Mau revolt in blood; the United States replaced European colonialism with its own military bases and client regimes. Liberalism’s anti-fascist credentials were never extended to the colonized.

In the metropole, the welfare state was expanded as a bulwark against socialist revolution—social democracy as a kind of prophylactic against communism. But in the Global South, liberalism offered no Marshall Plan. Instead, it enforced structural underdevelopment through the Bretton Woods institutions, ensuring that “independent” nations remained dependent on Western markets and finance. The Cold War became the new pretext for interventions, coups, and counterinsurgencies, from Iran to Indonesia to Chile, all justified in the language of “freedom” and “democracy” while drenched in the blood of their supposed beneficiaries.

Losurdo’s counter-history makes plain that the horrors of the twentieth century were not deviations from the liberal path—they were the price of its survival. Fascism was liberalism’s unruly cousin, disciplined when necessary but never wholly disowned. Colonial slaughter was not an embarrassment, but a necessity for maintaining the metropolitan standard of living. And when the ideological winds shifted, the same powers that had tolerated dictatorship rebranded themselves as champions of human rights—weaponizing the memory of fascism to justify new wars of domination.

The catastrophe, then, is not just the sum of the century’s crimes—it is the ongoing capacity of liberalism to commit them while posing as humanity’s moral compass. The lesson for our time is brutal but clear: so long as liberalism defines the political horizon, catastrophe is not the exception. It is the rule.

VII. Strategic Relevance for 2025: Liberalism in Its Technofascist Form

Losurdo’s counter-history is not an academic indulgence—it’s a weapon for exactly this kind of moment. In August 2025, the United States is again under Donald Trump, not as an accident of history or a grotesque deviation from the “liberal democratic order,” but as the culmination of its trajectory. The empire has not been hijacked—it has chosen its pilot. Trump is not the antithesis of liberalism; he is its distilled essence in the age of crisis, its executor in the transition from neoliberalism’s polite decay to the openly repressive architecture of technofascism.

What Losurdo shows us is that the “community of the free” has always been built on systems of unfreedom—slavery, colonialism, apartheid, genocide—preserved by the violent exclusion of those who would claim its promises for themselves. What we face now is not a new morality, but a new technology of control. The same white supremacist, settler-colonial order that gave John Locke the language to justify slavery now gives Mark Zuckerberg the algorithms to engineer consent. The same imperial hubris that let Jefferson draft liberty into existence while owning human beings now empowers corporate war cabinets to draft climate catastrophe and economic strangulation into the policy blueprint of the twenty-first century.

Trump presides over this with the shamelessness of someone who doesn’t need to pretend. Under him, the state and the capitalist class have fused their operations into a seamless war machine: border fortresses that stretch into the digital ether; “free markets” run by monopolies large enough to dictate global policy; social media weaponized into a psychological battlefield; and austerity imposed with the same calculated cruelty as colonial famine. The liberal state once justified its violence under the banner of “progress” and “civilization.” Trump’s America dispenses with such pretense. It offers domination in its purest form: unapologetic, unvarnished, and algorithmically optimized.

This is why the nostalgia for “pre-Trump liberal democracy” is not just naive—it’s suicidal. The bipartisan imperial class that now feigns horror at Trump’s excesses are the same architects of the system that made him inevitable. The Clintonian dismantling of welfare, the Obama-era expansion of the surveillance state, the Bush wars of conquest—all laid the groundwork for this moment. Trump’s ascendance is not a hostile takeover; it is the homecoming of a political tradition whose democratic vocabulary was always paired with the grammar of extermination.

In Losurdo’s historical frame, what we call “technofascism” today is simply the latest upgrade to what he calls “master race democracy.” Where the nineteenth-century model relied on physical conquest, industrial supremacy, and racial slavery, the twenty-first-century model relies on digital conquest, financial supremacy, and data slavery. It is settler-colonialism in the cloud: territory mapped in server farms, populations governed by predictive analytics, and dissent neutralized through the choke points of corporate platforms. And under Trump 2.0, this system is being hardened into permanence, not rolled back.

For Weaponized Information, this means our strategic task is not to rehabilitate liberalism’s corpse, but to bury it. The same liberal order that once waged war on Haiti for daring to be free is now waging hybrid war on every nation that resists its dictates—from Caracas to Gaza, from Beijing to Bamako. It is doing so with a political face that the ruling class finds useful precisely because it can dispense with the old hypocrisies. Trump’s technofascism is not a rupture from the liberal project—it is its full and final translation into the political economy of the digital age.

If Losurdo’s counter-history teaches anything, it is that the choice before us has never been between “good” liberalism and “bad” illiberalism. It has always been between the continuation of a global system of domination—now wrapped in the circuitry of technofascism—or the revolutionary overthrow of that system in all its forms. The liberal order, in Trump’s hands, is simply done pretending. That clarity is a gift, if we have the discipline to use it.

First Published on Weaponized Information https://weaponizedinformation.wordpress.com/

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2025/08/ ... -the-free/

blindpig · Post by **blindpig** » Thu Aug 14, 2025 2:25 pm

Bill Buckley: US Oligarch Organic Intellectual

The Godfather of the Modern American Right
Roger Boyd
Aug 12, 2025

I am currently reading an excellent book Messengers Of The Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics by Nicole Hemmer. One of the things he covers is the role of the Conservative commentator William F. Buckley, who founded the National Review in 1955. Left out of Buckely’s personal narrative, and the Wikipedia page on him, is that his father was an oil developer in Mexico before being expelled from that country. After he transferred his oil interests to Venezuela, he became very successful with holdings in Canada, Florida, Ecuador, Australia, the Philippines, Israel and Guatemala.

Buckley was born into a rich oil family and had therefore never experienced the vicissitudes of the market that he so thoroughly supported. He became what some have called “the invisible oligarchy”, the son of wealth who became an organic intellectual within the media; pushing an oligarch friendly agenda that worshipped private property and the “discipline” of the market for the non-wealthy. He graduated from the National Autonomous University of Mexico in 1943 and was then commissioned as a second lieutenant in the US Army; stationed in the US and never seeing combat. He then attended Yale University from which he graduated with honours in 1950. This was then followed by two years at the CIA, which was known to prefer hires from the upper classes during the post-war years.

Buckley wrote a book about his experiences at Yale, a highly critical one, entitled God and Man at Yale which was published and promoted with the aid of US$19,000 from the Buckley family; about US$228,000 in 2025 money. So much for the “free market of ideas” that Buckley pushed, some people have much more money to push their ideas than others. The book ended up selling 35,000 copies, pushing for free market economics and “Christian” values, the combination of the Prosperity Gospel that was very intentionally being spread across the US in the post-war years. Buckley then published a second book in support of the risible Joseph McCarthy, McCarthy and His Enemies, that hit bookshelves in the middle of the 1954 McCarthy-Army hearings. He then founded the National Review in 1955, with Buckley holding all of the magazine’s voting shares. He was the publication’s editor-in-chief until 1990.

Buckley’s father had been one of the founding donors for Clarence Manion’s right-wing radio program, which began in the fall of 1954. Manion would become the most politically influential of the first generation of conservative radio hosts, and he was a founding director of the company that owned National Review. This tight connection between Buckley and Manion, and their media outlets, was not generally mentioned by either man. Such highly contentious radio shows could not rely upon business sponsorship, so instead they were funded by donations from the conservative rich. This is the insidiousness of oligarch money in a supposedly democratic system, they can spend what to them are relatively small amounts of money on political ventures that can be supported and built over decades and held in reserve to be used when needed. Just like the German industrialists and Hitler in the 1920s. This is what a section of the US capitalist oligarchy did in the 1950s and 1960s, biding their time while building up the infrastructure of a new right wing movement.

The vibrant radical left wing press of the early twentieth century had been very negatively impacted by the Red Scares that followed both world wars; with the post-WW2 McCarthyism continuing through the 1950s and early 1960s. At the same time the expansion of the unions that could fund labour-oriented papers that was facilitated by the 1935 Wagner Act was halted by the passing of the 1947 Taft Hartley Act which in effect gutted much of the Wagner Act. Labour union membership peaked at 35% in the 1950s before starting its decade long decline to only 11% in 2020; predominantly in the public sector. The co-opting of union groupings such as the AFL-CIO into corporatist and even anti-communist arrangements also greatly restricted the possibility of funding for radical media. The world that Buckley and Manion railed against did not in fact exist, communism and socialism had both been very thoroughly banished from the United States.

The battle was really between one wing of the US capitalist oligarchy, the socially liberal internationalists who benefitted greatly from the New Deal compromise with the working class and the markets opened up by the US Empire and the socially conservative nationalists who were generally against foreign wars. With many of the latter coming from the same oil and gas background that Buckley did. In this period, both newspapers, and the increasing presence of television, were dominated by the need to keep the corporate advertisers happy; anything critical of US foreign policy or the “American Way” of business directly threatened business revenues and even solvency. There was no “left wing press”, only another wing of the capitalist oligarchy. The voices of working people, of communists and socialists, had been thoroughly silenced. With the CIA actively paying thousands of journalists, working with editors and publishers, and even creating their own “left-wing” anti-communist journals. Even Gloria Steinem spent time as the director of a CIA-funded organization that sent non-communist American students to international youth festivals. And Ronald Reagan was doing the rounds selling the wonder of “American Capitalism” to the general population.

The National Review fulfilled the ideological role of helping to define the mainstream American right as an integration of traditionalism, libertarianism and anti-communism that still dominates in the present. The magazine acted as a meeting, support and discussion place for the organic intellectuals of Buckley’s part of the US capitalist oligarchy. Since its beginning the publication has never been able to exist just on subscription fees and advertising (with many advertisers steering clear of such a contentious magazine). Instead it has consistently relied upon donations from the rich, a loser in the “market place of ideas” kept alive by oligarch largesse. Conservatives such as Buckley tend not to practice the free market ideas that they push within their own lives, and as comfortable progeny of wealth have never felt its cold discipline.

Buckley’s greatest media exposure came with his hosting of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) public affairs show Firing Line from 1966 to 1999; it was the longest running public affairs show with a single host in US television history. It was produced by the Southern Educational Communications Association, which was part of South Carolina Educational Television (operated by an agency of the state government). The show had started out on commercial television but was not profitable and was therefore moved to PBS, produced by a state operated agency. Buckley had once again lost in the “market place of ideas” only to be resurrected by a southern US state government agency. His whole media presence was subsidized by a segment of the oligarchy and by the tax payers!

When full employment, the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement combined to radicalize segments of US society there was little ideological or organizational infrastructure left from which could draw guidance. The socialist and communist organizers and organizations had been to all intents and purposes eradicated, the non-capitalist media long gone and the unions fully co-opted into the management of the status quo. The different movements generally lacked the cohesion and coordination to really challenge bourgeois oligarch dominance. When the Black population started to produce such groups and individuals, such as the Black Panthers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King in his later years, the state was swift to eliminate them through the security state penetration of their organizations, outright violence and long-term incarceration.

When in the 1970s, the US oligarch class decided that it must alter the ways that it ruled society to address both falling profitability and other challenges at home and abroad it could rely on a well-developed intellectual and ideological network of individuals (such as Buckley) and organizations (such as the National Review, Council for Foreign Relations, Ford Foundation and a proliferating set of oligarch-funded think tanks). The organs of capitalist oligarch ideological control must be kept well funded and open to change to reflect new circumstances, while such working class organs must be kept down and attacked whenever necessary; and with all means necessary.

After five decades of neoliberalism, the American right has moved far past the politics of William Buckley with even quite a few current Democrat politicians to his right on many issues. But in the 1950s he was part of the oligarch-funded movement to overcome the New Deal and travel back to the days of the 1920s and before. President Trump is doing his best to maintain this journey, gutting regulatory agencies and even taking chunks out of university research and Medicaid. What Buckley never truly understood, and Trump certainly does not, is the central role of the state in facilitating the success of advanced capitalism. The US state of the 1890s could in no way facilitate the advanced technological development of the present, but that is the state that the nationalist and conservative parts of the US oligarchy now seem to want.

https://rogerboyd.substack.com/p/bill-b ... ch-organic

I remember Buckley well, I despised him. He was a frequent guest on daytime talk TV like David Frost and Mike Douglas(I think). He was snotty, arrogant and hatefully upper class. I did not know that South Carolina, my longtime place of residence, was responsible for giving him a platform but am not surprised. Just yesterday I heard Gov Henry McMaster(Foghorn Leghorn) parroting Trump on the 'emergency' crime situation in DC. Such historical consistency...(I came here for the snakes))

blindpig · Post by **blindpig** » Sun Aug 17, 2025 4:34 pm

Omnia Vincit Amor: From Unrequited Love to Revolutionary Love

Unrequited love. I am sure this concept is familiar to many, both men and women. I will not be verbose in its description, but everyone who has ever experienced it will agree that it causes... pain in the soul and heart to such an extent that in moments of strong emotion you want to scream.

"You love this person, but you can't be with them" - this is the main contradiction that contains the essence of unrequited love. The way out of it is not the same, but is often mistakenly reduced to destruction of varying degrees. Consisting, for example, in its violent suppression within oneself, i.e. in distraction from this person to a career, sports, "hobbies", "creativity" or, worse, escapism, bourgeois in its essence, destroying the human personality (video games, alcohol, pornography, drugs, etc.). As a result, the person you loved becomes gray and ordinary for you again. You will no longer look at him with the same tenderness and love, the fire in your heart will go out, it will become hollow. But it is worse if your love for this person becomes possessive, which leads to the rejection of his refusal and ultimately the transformation of what you called love for him into its opposite - hatred. Then you are ready to cause this person any mental and physical pain, if only he were with you. We can see this in the example of such a phenomenon as "stalking" (i.e. persecution of a person), which is a problem in bourgeois society.

However, a deep examination of this issue through the prism of communism provides another solution to the contradiction of unrequited love. A solution that will not hurt either you or the other person, which will not only preserve your feelings, but also enrich them.

First, let's remember one truth. If you truly love, you would do everything for the happiness of this person, wouldn't you? However, if he sees his personal life without you and believes that he will be happier this way, then you should accept this too. True love does not require anything in return, not even reciprocity. This is a simple-looking but difficult-to-perceive formula for many, which nevertheless must be accepted. But accept with joy and sincerity. The only question left is how and where to direct the fire that has engulfed your heart?

Before looking for a solution, you need to understand what love really is. It would be a mistake to reduce love exclusively to feelings. Love itself is not a feeling as such. Feelings are only a very important component of love, giving it an important emotional coloring and subjective perception for a person. In fact, true love is nothing more than a very high type of relationship between people. It is a conscious altruistic act, and not just emotions. It is your feelings that should depend on your high attitude towards this person, which will lead to their enrichment. Feelings should flow from the attitude , and not vice versa. In the area of unrequited love, the importance of this dependence is even more pronounced, because an unstable contradiction arises between the nature of the attitude and your feelings.

If your love was not accepted, but you found the nobility and strength to continue loving, and also to preserve sincere feelings and bright thoughts towards this person, and did not stoop to their mistaken protest rejection or, even worse, anger, you have already taken a big step.

The best way out of the contradiction between attitude and feelings, between your love for this person and the impossibility of being with him, is a qualitative transformation of the very nature of the relationship, which leads to the enrichment of your feelings. What I myself experienced and called the path of "revolutionary overcoming."

Then unrequited love becomes not a reason for flight or violence, but fuel for the struggle for a better world. Not just an experience, but a revolutionary practice. For a communist, such a practice is a struggle for a world where the one you love will also be free and happy. This path requires not the suppression of love, but its radical transformation - through your high communist consciousness.

For us, there is no cause more honorable than the struggle for communism. In it, we are driven above all by love. Out of love for the oppressed, we hate the oppressors: capitalists, fascists, obscurantists, rapists, haters... Out of love for the world and the people who inhabit it, out of a high sense of duty to the present and the future, we walk this thorny path. Marx wrote that true happiness lies in struggle.

Therefore, comrades, the best solution for you is to direct your love for this person in the most altruistic and creative direction, which is communism. For by fighting for communism, you are fighting for this person as well. Think about him. You like his smile, his laughter, his inner and outer beauty, you like it when he feels good and is happy . Having spent your life forces on building a society where the happiness of each is a condition for the happiness of all , you realize your love for him sincerely and with pleasure. Beware of temptations on this path. Your struggle for the future should not be reduced to the hidden hope that this person will love you only for this. This is an escape into egoism. Instead, you should be driven by the fact that this person is happy, as all people will be happy in the future.

Marx, while still a high school student, wrote:

"History considers those men great who, working for the common good, themselves became nobler. Experience considers the happiest man who has made the greatest number of people happy..."[/i]

Love can be a personal pain for you, as it was for me. That's normal. But it's also beautiful, because it tests us. It gives us the opportunity to love sincerely, strongly, and truly. Realizing this will be your catharsis, which will change you. Nothing gives you more strength than the knowledge that your loved one will be better off, especially if you contributed to this "better off."

But what should we do now to achieve this “better”? The respected editors and other authors of the newspaper and magazine have already answered this question. Conscientiously study and develop Marxist-Leninist theory, engage in continuous self-education, fight opportunism, and always live up to the high moral image of a communist . The short-term goal that the newspaper and magazine set for us is the formation of a Communist Party of a new type, the Party of Scientific Centralism . The long-term goal is the construction of communism . If you make enough effort, then rest assured… you and those you love will live to see socialism (the first phase of communism) in our country. I believe in this, at least. They will be able to see with their own eyes the happiness that we have achieved for all of them in a long struggle.

In the words of Marx:

“Then we will experience not a miserable, limited, egoistic joy, but our happiness will belong to millions, our deeds will then live a quiet but eternally effective life, and over our ashes the hot tears of noble people will flow.”

I would like to appeal to you with all sincerity:

Comrades! Do not hide your burning hearts and do not extinguish them! Take them out of your chest and carry them ahead, without fear of getting burned. The light and warmth they radiate will change the world! They will blind and burn the haters and oppressors, melt the chains of slavery, physical and spiritual.

But like Danko's heart, their light will show the way to the oppressed. Like Prometheus' fire, their warmth will warm them. For our hearts do not belong to us, but will be the property of all humanity and all those dear to us. Like guiding stars, like beacons on the path to a world where love will become a natural state and the basis of healthy relationships in society.

For those we love and for whom we fight.

Omnia Vincit Amor!

A. Trofimov
08/16/2025

https://prorivists.org/108_love/

Google Translator

blindpig · Post by **blindpig** » Mon Aug 18, 2025 1:41 pm

Revolutionary Suicide and the Surrender of Western Marxism: Huey Newton and the Revolution They Won’t Die For
Posted by Internationalist 360° on August 15, 2025
Prince Kapone

We crack open Revolutionary Suicide—Huey P. Newton’s battle cry from inside the belly of the beast—not to light candles for the past, but to pull weapons from it. This is Newton as he was: street-hardened, self-taught, and dead serious about smashing capitalist power. And it’s an indictment of the Western Marxists who keep treating revolution like a grad school seminar, flinching every time the struggle picks up a gun.

I. Born Under Occupation: Childhood in the Colony

Huey Percy Newton entered the world in 1942, in Monroe, Louisiana, a small Southern town where the smell of pine trees mixed with the stink of Jim Crow. His family carried the dust of the South to Oakland, California, chasing the half-myth of wartime jobs and West Coast freedom. What they found instead was the same plantation logic, wrapped in industrial smoke and redlined neighborhoods. Newton’s childhood was not one of romanticized hardship; it was a laboratory of colonial survival.

The segregated schools in Oakland didn’t just fail him—they refused him. By the time he graduated high school, Newton was functionally illiterate, an indictment not of his intellect but of the colonial education system’s design. Western Marxists talk about alienation in the workplace; Newton lived alienation before ever clocking a shift—alienation from knowledge itself, the first step in ensuring that the colonized remain subjects, not citizens.

The real curriculum was in the streets. The “brothers on the block” schooled him in the politics of the corner, the economy of the hustle, and the science of reading a man’s intent from across the avenue. This was not the romantic lumpen mystique of Parisian cafés or the sanitized proletarian of Western Marxist imagination. This was the lumpenproletariat of the colony: captives in a stolen land, trained in the arts of evasion and confrontation because the police were a standing army of occupation.

Newton’s petty crimes were not the cause of his political awakening—they were the symptoms of a society that had already declared war on him. Stealing was not pathology; it was redistribution at the level of bare necessity. Every police stop, every handcuff, every night in a holding cell was an education in the material force of the state. Where Western Marxism sees the state as an abstract apparatus to be analyzed in journals, Newton met it in the form of billy clubs and pistols.

This is where the first seeds of revolutionary suicide took root—not in death wish, but in the recognition that the system would kill him slowly if he didn’t choose the terms of the fight. The West’s Marxists rarely speak of this. They theorize “class struggle” as if it were an elective course, not a daily struggle to stay alive. Newton understood that in the colony, every day you draw breath without submitting is an act of rebellion. In that reality, there is no “pure” proletariat untouched by colonial relations—only the colonized poor, fighting to turn survival into politics.

From the start, Newton’s life was a living refutation of the Western Marxist habit of abstraction. There was no seminar to enter, no union hall to join, no intellectual club to validate his analysis. There was only the block, the cops, and the necessity to outthink and outmove both. It was in this crucible that the man who would found the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense began to form—not as a “leader” preordained by theory, but as a colonized man who refused to die quietly.

II. The Education of a Revolutionary: From Illiteracy to Law Books

Newton’s second birth did not happen in a hospital—it happened in the Oakland Public Library. After graduating high school unable to read at a college level, he refused to accept the role society had assigned him: a permanent inhabitant of the ghetto, fit only for hustles, prisons, or graves. He taught himself to read by wrestling with Plato’s The Republic and poring over law books until the language of the oppressor bent to his will. Every page was an act of theft—stealing back the tools that white supremacy had denied him.

In Western Marxist circles, “self-education” is too often romanticized into a quaint intellectual pastime. For Newton, it was a matter of survival. The books were not ends in themselves; they were weapons. He learned the law not to admire its architecture but to use its own statutes as a shield—and when necessary, as a spear. He understood that knowledge in the hands of the colonized must be both defensive and offensive, because in the colony the law is not neutral terrain—it is enemy territory.

This was the foundation upon which the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense would be built. Newton’s study of law, history, and revolutionary theory was not a retreat from the streets but a return to them with sharper tools. He absorbed Marx, Lenin, Mao, and Fanon, but never as sacred texts to be recited at conferences. For Newton, the test of theory was whether it could stop a cop from cracking your skull or plant a breakfast program in the neighborhood. Western Marxists read revolution as literature; Newton read it as a manual.

It was in this period that he connected deeply with Bobby Seale, a fellow Oakland native with a shared understanding of what it meant to live under constant police occupation. Their friendship was forged not in cafés or lecture halls, but in the urgency of street corners and community meetings. Together, they studied revolutionary movements worldwide—not to imitate them wholesale, but to translate their lessons into the language of Black Oakland.

In these years, Newton developed the kernel of his most devastating critique of white left orthodoxy: that Western Marxism’s class analysis, stripped of the colonial question, is a dead letter for the colonized. A strike in Paris or a factory occupation in Chicago may unsettle capital, but in the colony, the front line runs through the tenement hallway and the police cruiser’s spotlight. Newton’s education was not in “pure” class struggle, but in colonial war, and he knew the white left would never lead that fight because they did not live it.

By the mid-1960s, Newton had armed himself—not with rifles yet, but with the kind of knowledge that made rifles politically effective. He was ready to turn study into structure, friendship into organization, and rage into a disciplined vanguard. The Black Panther Party was about to be born, and with it, the most serious challenge to the settler state from within its borders since Reconstruction.

III. From Law Books to Loaded Rifles: Founding the Black Panther Party

The founding of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in October 1966 was not an abstract leap from theory to action—it was the inevitable next step for men who had studied the enemy’s rulebook and found its weak points. Newton and Bobby Seale, armed with law books, political theory, and a working knowledge of Oakland’s streets, drafted a ten-point program that fused the uncompromising demands of the colonized with the universal principles of socialist transformation. It was, in essence, the declaration of a government-in-exile—one that spoke for a people whose citizenship had always been a legal fiction.

The armed patrols that followed were not random acts of bravado. They were a dialectical synthesis of Newton’s street experience, his legal training, and his study of global liberation movements. California law permitted the open carry of firearms, and Newton understood that legality could be weaponized—not as a shield of compliance, but as a trap for the state. Panthers would follow police patrols, rifles slung over their shoulders, law books in hand, reciting statutes that limited police authority. The message was simple: the days of colonial impunity were over.

This tactic struck terror into the police because it exposed the gap between the letter of the law and its enforcement. For white gun owners, the Second Amendment was a sacred shield; for Black revolutionaries, it was a provocation to be met with batons, bullets, or new legislation. The Mulford Act, signed by Governor Ronald Reagan in 1967, made open carry illegal in California—a law drafted specifically to disarm the Panthers. In a single stroke, the state confirmed Newton’s thesis: the law bends to preserve white supremacy.

Here lies one of the starkest lines between Newton’s praxis and Western Marxism’s paralysis. While Western Marxists held seminars on “the state as an instrument of class domination,” Newton sent a contingent of Panthers into the California State Capitol with rifles to demonstrate the point. Theory without such praxis is not merely incomplete—it is complicit, because it allows the colonial order to proceed unchallenged in the streets while remaining a debating society in the academy.

The Panthers’ visibility was as strategic as their firepower. Newton understood that imagery could be as potent as bullets. The iconic photograph of him seated in a wicker chair, spear in one hand and rifle in the other, was not accidental—it was revolutionary theater, an inversion of colonial iconography. Western Marxists often scoff at “symbolism,” yet the colonized understand that symbols are themselves a battlefield. The wicker chair was not comfort—it was throne, tribunal, and firing line.

In these opening years, the Panthers embodied a total rejection of both liberal reformism and Western Marxist abstraction. They moved in disciplined formation, legally armed, legally informed, and politically clear. They were not a protest movement begging for inclusion; they were the embryonic form of a counter-state. And for that, the U.S. government would soon declare them the single greatest threat to its internal security.

IV. Blood on the Streets, Bars on the Windows: Prison, Trial, and COINTELPRO’s Open Season

The night of October 28, 1967, shattered whatever illusions remained about the “legality” of Black self-defense in America. Newton, driving in West Oakland, was pulled over by Officer John Frey. The confrontation escalated in seconds. Shots were fired. Frey lay dead, another officer wounded, and Newton himself was bleeding from the stomach. The details, disputed and distorted by police and press alike, mattered less to the state than the opportunity they presented: here was the perfect chance to remove the Panther’s central strategist from the field.

The arrest turned Newton into a lightning rod for the contradictions of U.S. justice. His trial was a legal lynching dressed in courtroom procedure. The state wanted a conviction not simply for the killing of a cop, but for the audacity of arming Black people, organizing them into a disciplined force, and making them visible on the world stage. Newton’s cell became both a cage and a pulpit. He read voraciously, wrote strategically, and turned his own incarceration into an indictment of the prison-industrial counterinsurgency—a system Western Marxism often treats as a metaphor rather than a battlefield.

Outside the walls, the “Free Huey” campaign became a mass rallying cry. Rallies of thousands took place in Oakland and across the country. Celebrities, students, radicals, and revolutionaries wore buttons with Newton’s face, turning his captivity into a political spectacle the state could not fully contain. This was not a cult of personality—it was a concentrated expression of solidarity around a political prisoner whose fate symbolized the colonial condition of Black America. Newton understood that his own survival depended on this external pressure; he also knew that the campaign was an organizing school in its own right.

Behind the scenes, the FBI’s COINTELPRO program was moving with surgical precision. J. Edgar Hoover labeled the Panthers “the greatest threat to the internal security of the United States” and set in motion an all-out war to dismantle them. Infiltrators spread lies, stoked factional splits, and manipulated existing tensions. Police raids escalated from harassment to outright assassinations, as in the murders of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in Chicago in 1969. The aim was total neutralization: to make leadership paranoid, rank-and-file fearful, and the public confused about who the Panthers really were.

It’s here that the fault line between Newton’s revolutionary realism and Western Marxism’s safe distance yawns open. Newton’s life under siege was not an academic case study—it was a counterinsurgency operation in real time, waged with informants, courtrooms, rifles, and chemical dependency as weapons. To read Revolutionary Suicide without absorbing this is to miss the marrow of the text. Newton’s reflections on his trial, on the “logic” of the state, and on the necessity of political clarity under fire are not mere autobiography—they are a manual for surviving repression that Western Marxists have never dared to test in their own contexts.

By the time Newton was released in 1970 after his conviction was overturned, the battle lines were redrawn. He walked out of prison to a hero’s welcome, but the war had already shifted. The Panthers had grown in numbers and visibility, yet they were already bleeding from within—wounds inflicted by the state and widened by the contradictions of building revolution under siege. For Newton, the question was no longer whether the state would come for them again—it was how to organize when the enemy was already inside the gates.

V. Survival Pending Revolution: From Patrols to Programs, from Spectacle to Structure

When Huey Newton emerged from prison in 1970, the Black Panther Party was no longer just a band of armed militants patrolling the streets of Oakland. It had become a national force—chapters in dozens of cities, an international office in Algiers, and a name recognized in every newsroom and FBI memo. Yet Newton knew that firepower and bravado could not alone sustain a revolutionary movement under siege. The spectacle of the gun had opened space; now, that space had to be fortified with the infrastructure of dual power.

The Panthers rolled out their “Survival Programs” with the precision of a military campaign. Free Breakfast for Children fed tens of thousands every morning. Free health clinics offered screenings for sickle-cell anemia, a disease largely ignored by the white medical establishment. Clothing drives, free busing to prisons for family visits, legal aid, liberation schools—each program was a small breach in the walls of capitalist neglect. Newton called them “survival pending revolution,” a phrase that refused both reformist delusion and adventurist fantasy. These were not charity; they were organized, disciplined acts of self-determination under siege.

Western Marxism—ever allergic to praxis that isn’t filtered through the seminar—has often dismissed this turn as a retreat from armed struggle, a lapse into community service. Newton saw it differently: without a mass base that felt the revolution in their stomachs and in their children’s bodies, the vanguard was a hollow shell. Guns without bread were a dead end. Bread without guns was surrender. The dialectic required both, and the Panthers, for a time, managed to walk that razor’s edge.

But the state’s counteroffensive never paused. Police raids targeted clinics and breakfast sites with the same ferocity they had shown toward armed patrols. Informants whispered lies about theft, favoritism, and ideological betrayal. Newspapers recast the programs as propaganda stunts. Even success was turned into a weapon against them: the more people the Panthers served, the more the state feared their legitimacy, and the harder it moved to crush them.

Newton, reading Mao and Fanon alongside the day’s intelligence reports, understood that survival programs were not a substitution for revolution—they were training grounds for the masses and a shield for the Party. Every bowl of oatmeal, every blood test, every legal defense was a seed planted in hostile soil. Yet he also understood the danger: survival could become its own horizon if the revolutionary engine stalled. The challenge was to keep the political horizon in view while feeding a generation born into empire’s famine.

This was a lesson Western Marxists refused to learn then and refuse still: that the material needs of the oppressed are not a detour from revolutionary theory—they are the ground from which it grows. The Panthers’ survival programs were a living negation of the ivory-tower detachment that treats revolution as an intellectual debate rather than a sustained confrontation with the structures of deprivation.

In Revolutionary Suicide, Newton threads these programs into his own life story, showing how his political imagination had been sharpened not only by armed patrols but by the concrete act of meeting people’s needs. This was the science of revolutionary suicide in practice: risking annihilation not only in the gunfight but in the daily grind of building an alternative society under the gun of the state.

VI. The Long Fall: Repression, Disintegration, and the Cost of Vanguard Life

By the late 1970s, the Black Panther Party was a shadow of its former self. The war waged by the U.S. state—through COINTELPRO, local police terror, and unrelenting media demonization—had done its job. Comrades were murdered in their beds, locked away for decades, or driven into exile. The rest faced a daily grind of harassment, infiltration, and engineered factionalism. No movement, no matter how disciplined, could emerge from such a sustained counterinsurgency unscathed.

Huey Newton bore the weight of this collapse personally. In Revolutionary Suicide, his tone shifts from the audacity of armed patrols to the isolation of a man whose ranks have thinned, whose trust has been eroded, and whose days are marked by courtrooms and funerals. The Panthers’ community programs—once the beating heart of their strategy—were gutted by raids and dwindling resources. Chapters folded. The international office in Algiers closed. A movement that had once struck fear into the core of empire now fought just to survive the next police raid.

The pressure was unrelenting. Newton’s exile in Cuba—intended as a refuge—became a cage of displacement. His return to Oakland brought no relief. By the early 1980s, he was entangled in the quicksand of drug addiction, caught between the memory of revolutionary glory and the crushing reality of political defeat. Western Marxists, from the safety of tenured chairs and NGO offices, would later point to Newton’s descent as proof of personal failure, a moral collapse. But this is the coward’s critique. It ignores the reality: the vanguard had been left for dead by a Left that refused to share its risks, and smashed by a state that knew exactly how to kill a revolution without ever admitting to murder.

Even in the spiral, Newton’s mind remained sharp. He spoke candidly about his mistakes—about the dangers of centralizing too much authority, the corrosive effect of suspicion under siege, and the toll of trying to lead a war while under constant surveillance and threat. His final years were marked by flashes of brilliance, but also by the loneliness of a man who knew too much about what it costs to challenge empire seriously. That loneliness would end violently: in 1989, Newton was shot dead in West Oakland by a member of the Black Guerrilla Family, another casualty of a fractured movement and a poisoned terrain.

In the Western Marxist imagination, “failure” is a moralized abstraction—something to dissect in books, assign to students, and file away as a cautionary tale. For Newton, failure was material: comrades buried, organizations dismantled, dreams deferred by a bullet or a cell. To indict him without indicting the state that engineered his fall is to participate in the counterinsurgency.

Revolutionary Suicide does not hide this trajectory. It forces the reader to confront the inevitability of death—whether slow or sudden—when confronting a system built on genocide and exploitation. Newton’s life, in its rise and its collapse, is a warning and a challenge: you can survive by submitting, or you can risk everything for liberation. Either way, the system will come for you. The difference is whether you meet it on your knees or on your feet.

VII. Weaponizing Revolutionary Suicide for the 21st Century Frontlines

To read Revolutionary Suicide today is to confront a problem that has only deepened since Huey Newton walked Oakland’s streets with a law book in one hand and a shotgun in the other: the vast gulf between those who talk about revolution and those who live it. Newton was not interested in performance politics, in slogans detached from material struggle, or in the moral pageantry of Western Marxism’s seminar rooms. He lived in the crackling space between life and death that every genuine revolutionary must inhabit—where the question is not whether you will die, but how.

Western Marxism treats revolution as a hypothetical, a literary genre, a distant ideal that can be endlessly theorized without ever being tested. Newton’s memoir annihilates that comfort zone. He takes the reader into the back of police cars and into the holding cells, into the cramped Panther offices and the tense silences of a stakeout, into the joy of watching a child eat a free breakfast and the anguish of identifying a comrade’s body. He collapses the distance between “politics” and survival. There is no separation. They are the same.

For the Black Panther Party, survival was not a retreat from militancy—it was militancy. The community programs, the armed patrols, the political education classes, the international solidarity work—each was a weapon. Each was an act of building dual power under siege. And each, when stripped of its context and rebranded by liberals, became the very mythology Newton warned against: a de-fanged, museum-ready Panther that exists only to inspire, never to threaten.

In the wreckage of the 21st century—where empire is in open decay but doubling down on its technofascist machinery—the lessons of Newton’s life are not optional reading. They are operational directives. Organize with discipline, because the state will exploit every crack. Serve the people materially, because rhetoric alone will not feed a hungry child or defend a vulnerable community. Be prepared for the full weight of repression, because the moment you matter, you will be marked. And above all, understand that revolutionary suicide is not about seeking death—it is about refusing to live on your knees.

Newton wrote for a generation that was already under siege. We live in one where siege is the default condition for anyone opposing the ruling order. The question he poses—implicitly and explicitly—is whether we will continue to die reactionary deaths in isolation, in addiction, in quiet despair, or whether we will embrace the only death worth having: the one that comes from confronting this system with our whole lives. In that choice lies the only path to liberation.

Revolutionary Suicide is not a relic. It is a live weapon. The only way to honor Newton is to pick it up, aim it at the heart of empire, and fire.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2025/08/ ... t-die-for/

blindpig · Post by **blindpig** » Sun Aug 24, 2025 5:13 pm

The Mirage of the Antiwar Right
August 23, 2025

Ted Cruz (Left) and Tucker Carlson (Right). Photo: Middle East Eye.

By Justin Podur – Aug 19, 2025

On the so-called (online) “civil war”

Liberals have discredited themselves supporting genocide, loosening their control over the public discussion. Right-wingers have rushed in to fill the vacuum, but the America First (& Israel A Close Second), antiwar right will not lead the US out of support for genocide. Facing massive public disgust, the antiwar right have been put forward by a Zionist media establishment as a shield for conservatives. They are here to save the right-wing from deserved contempt, not lead their people to an anti-genocide struggle. Serving as a rhetorical curtain to hide authentic anti-imperialist voices from the public, ultimately, they too, serve the racist, Zionist agenda.

The controversy is fake. It isn’t the enemy of my enemy – they aren’t enemies at all.

Over the past few weeks, something called a “civil war” on the “antiwar right” unfolded online, in which far-right and farther-right influencers went on one another’s talk shows and then streamed, saying mean things about one another.

Much of it was ad hominem; a lot of it involved globally irrelevant insider US political discussion. But a portion of it was about US foreign policy. That latter portion involved these right-wingers discussing the source of their criticism of US support for Israel’s genocide and trying (and failing) to find enough common ground to work together, before crashing and burning calling one another federal agents (unusual since all are supporters of police and of federal agencies).

Let’s put some time into understanding

how this “antiwar”, right-wing position is manufactured;
how the things these figures have said might be satisfying to listen to for those fed up with Israel’s genocide and liberal support for it; and
why there will be nothing of any anti-genocide value coming from any of these figures – indeed, there is good reason to think that the whole thing is contrived – and to the benefit of the genociders.
1. Manufacturing the “antiwar right”: Genocide debate culture and the antigenocide bloc’s abusive relationship with Piers Morgan
Before he went on Piers Morgan’s show, George Galloway told his viewers that Piers Morgan was irrelevant and no one should go on there and give Morgan relevance. But Morgan, a right-wing TV broadcaster who, pre-2023-genocide, was known outside of the UK for his commentary on various celebrities, reinvented himself as the host of debates about Gaza.

Initially, he was famous for belligerent hounding of pro-Palestine guests with “DO YOU CONDEMN HAMAS?” (a practice he still follows like praying the rosary).

But when Egyptian-American comedian Bassam Youssef went on the show and achieved some viral moments, mainly through the use of his comedic talent of mockery, anti-genocide viewers started to join the game, watching and looking for “gotcha” moments in the debates to share. Many, including Galloway, eventually went on the show, producing more viral clips to send around.

In the process, Morgan managed to position himself, through the selection of guests and his treatment of them, as the arbiter of legitimate voices on both sides, pro- and anti-genocide. When the anti-genocide audience neared exhaustion of Morgan’s incitement and abuse of pro-Palestine guests, Morgan would throw in an adversarial interview with an Israeli official or paid agent. This is part of the abusive relationship between leftists and Morgan: these dramatic moments of confrontation with Israeli genociders keep leftists hoping Morgan will find humanity. He won’t, but his keeping up the act keeps the viewers from giving up.

The Oxford Union, and now Jubilee’s show Surrounded, have also used the debate format as engines for the production of viral video clips, with explosive success during this genocide. The debate form is itself a type of propaganda, because of what it assumes: two or more people, acknowledging one another’s humanity and a good-faith framework of rules, using argument and counter-argument to try to help the audience determine the truth, sharpening and discovering their own positions in the process.

Morgan (and Oxford and Jubilee) exploits those assumptions to hide what is actually happening: a production stage-managed by the genociders, who win regardless of whether their side wins or loses.

Morgan chooses who debates whom, and irrespective of who “wins” on that day, the person setting up the debate (Morgan in this case) who holds the power to promote or de-emphasize specific voices. In this way the debate host (or the host of a big podcast) holds the power to control the opposition*.

[*Anti-imperialists will still go to these debates because the calculation of whether to boycott or attend is a tactical one, which is probably why Galloway first boycotted and then attended. We need visibility to make our points too and have to trade that against all the benefits the genociders get from these debates. It’s a powerful propaganda system indeed if you’re willing to participate in it even knowing what it is.]

With one exception (Fuentes, whose brand is based on being excluded and supposedly leading a movement of the excluded) every one of the antiwar right voices discussed in this article has been on Morgan’s show.

Just a couple of America and England Firsters having a friendly chat in Saudi Arabia

A right-wing figure can be created as an antiwar voice by the simple expedient of Morgan hosting a debate and putting them in that position.

2. The temptations of the antiwar right and the creation of the mirage
Given that the right-wing is (in the US) big, richly resourced, and actually controls state power, it may give (false) hope that the rise to hegemony of an antiwar right could stop the genocide. Given that part of the right-wing presents itself as anti-establishment and wanting to overthrow the system, it might give the (false) hope of an anti-system alliance of right and left to overthrow the genocidal system.

Here’s how the antiwar right created and nurtured these false hopes, creating an antiwar mirage that leads to nowhere in the weeks leading up to this “civil war”.

Tucker Carlson. He rightly ridiculed Ted Cruz’s use of the text of the Book of Genesis (12:3) – where God told Abraham that he would bless those who blessed him – to support the 1948-created Zionist project. By interviewing Iranian President Pezeshkian, he rightly demystified the idea of an American journalist talking to a head of state designated as an enemy (Iran).

But like Bernie Sanders, AOC and others, he sees what he’s doing as ultimately looking out for Israel. “I’m not even anti-Israel,” he said. “I like Israel.” If Tucker is America First, then like the liberals he opposes, his America includes Israel (A Close Second).

Candace Owens. She rightly called Israel’s atrocities against children “demonic” and “satanic”. Full of righteous contempt for the Israel lobby’s work to silence all opposition, she has modeled the courage of not backing down in the face of name-calling and cancellation efforts. She’s been bringing details of the Epstein network of sexual violence to her large audience. And while she supported Israel for many years, she “will never support Israel again.” Unlike many online influencers she also reads. Actual books. And changes her views based on new information, which fills anti-imperialists with the (false) hope that she might be brought to that position, becoming a powerful communicator for the cause (she won’t).

A friendly bet for charity

But she also presents to her audience the imperialist invention of “Judeo-Bolshevism” and tells them that the Nazi holocausts were equalled or surpassed by Bolshevik atrocities. In her discussion with Nick Fuentes, she said she’s increasingly skeptical of the whole history she’s been taught (to which Fuentes’s only retort was “you sound like a leftist…”), but doesn’t recognize that anti-communist atrocity propaganda is also a huge part of the history she’s been taught (lies about Indigenous peoples genocided by the Anglo-Americans, about Haitians during their 1804 revolution against French slavers, about Indian sepoys during the failed 1857 war against Britain, about Africans resisting the Scramble for Africa…) When it comes to this genocide, this means she has no way to investigate the false atrocity propaganda about October 7. Indeed, she argues that the whole event was orchestrated by Netanyahu (on whom Candace, like liberals, hyperfocuses, and therefore, like other Zionist liberals, fails to recognize the breadth and depth of support for atrocity in Israeli society).

Dan Bilzerian. Most anti-imperialists saw Bilzerian for the first time when he took an interview with Piers Morgan and argued that mainstream Jewish religious beliefs include a belief in the innate superiority of Jewish people, mentioning references in the Talmud about Jesus burning in excrement for eternity and insults about Mary. Bilzerian challenged Morgan’s lies about October 7, pointed out that most Israeli settlers are in fact from Europe (while Palestinians are from the region and likely descendants of West Asian Jewish people), and remained unfazed in the face of Piers’s accusations of anti-semitism.

But, like Candace, Bilzerian’s opposition to Israel is connected to opposition to “Judeo-Bolshevism”, and he cites incorrect figures about Bolshevism being fundamentally a Jewish movement and a falsified history of Bolshevik massacres. He cites Winston Churchill on “Judeo-Bolshevism”, as if he does not understand that the reason Churchill (a Zionist and keen genocider himself) made this claim was to explain his support for Zionism! Like Candace, he questions imperialist and liberal talking points about Israel and is skeptical about what liberals say about Hitler, but shares liberals’ (and Hitler’s, and Churchill’s) talking points about communism and Russia. Bilzerian notes his own Armenian origin and the fact that the Young Turks (the 20th century regime, not the liberal youtube channel) committed a genocide against Armenians in 1916, but ignores the facts that a) it was Turkish and Kurdish personnel who committed that genocide b) that the current Turkish government denies that genocide, emphasizing instead that Israel joins Turkey in that denial.

Bilzerian’s main business is the sale of scammy lifestyle courses which are marketed using photo and video montages of him doing high-end tourist activities surrounded by models and expensive items. He wants nothing to do with anti-imperialists, who want nothing to do with him.

Andrew Tate. Tate was one of the early people to debate Piers Morgan on the genocide and expressed righteous anger at the atrocities committed by the Israelis.

For people who had watched Piers Morgan bullying his pro-Palestine guests, watching Piers, who was obviously physically afraid of Tate, trying and failing to take up his usual bully role, was at least different.

Morgan the Lion vs Jeremy Corbyn

Morgan the Mouse vs Andrew Tate

But Tate – like Bilzerian – is ultimately on the web to create a funnel to his business, which is also selling scammy courses about how to get rich, as is apparent from even a quick glance at his twitter feed. If you like what he says about the immorality of genocide, you have the opportunity to help make Tate richer by taking one of his courses about how to get more money. In a live stream with Nick Fuentes, Tate said that he was concerned that conservative support for genocide was discrediting the conservative movement as a whole. People may lose interest in demeaning women if the messengers are genocidal: “Stop supporting genocide! It’s a bad look for conservatives!”

These political positions are nothing more than market niches for these people, internet funnels to different businesses and different age demographics (with Tucker and Candace marketing to older, Tate and Bilzerian to younger demographics). Tucker and Candace present a conservative lifestyle, while Tate and Bilzerian follow what conservatives call a “degenerate” one.

All of these flaws and worse come together with Nick Fuentes. Fuentes leads a movement, which he calls the groypers, who self-identify as racist/racialist, white nationalists, and take the posture of being downtrodden and excluded by the establishment right (they are neither downtrodden nor excluded). He is a believer in Race/IQ, believing that the origin of inequality is the biological dysfunction of the oppressed, arguing with Candace, who believes the origin of inequality is cultural dysfunction of the oppressed*. As a racial darwinist, Fuentes isn’t motivated by solidarity, humanitarian considerations, or empathy – in the hours I watched I didn’t hear him call it a genocide or express any human lament about the atrocities. His world view is of a darwinian struggle of races, and his complaint is that a “race” other than the one he identifies with is deciding on matters of war and peace when it’s his “race” that should be making those decisions.

*Speaking of selling courses, I do have a hundreds-of-hours-long podcast which is sort of a course on all of history since 1492. Among other topics, we did an episode on scientific racism, and on social darwinism, 19th century inventions to justify the Scramble for Africa. Plenty of references there too. Cost of my course is $0.

Fuentes seeks to lead a movement of what he calls white people which he thinks need to take over all the institutions and loci of power, presenting this as if it were a novel strategy and not the history of the Anglo-American Empire from the 1750s to the 1950s. Fuentes hasn’t specified how highborn he is in this rarefied multicentury hierarchy, but self-made successes are extremely rare and most people with millions of followers are better connected than they care to admit. Regardless, Fuentes’s analysis is based on false claims about science, history, power, and ideology. He’s claimed that one reason right-wingers are flocking to his channel is because he was the first to see (in June 2025) that Trump was under Israel’s control and was going to go to war with Iran. This was a commonplace insight among anti-imperialists since the breakdown of the last ceasefire in March 2025.

3. Keeping anti-imperialism behind a thick curtain of right-wing noise
Historically Zionists have always preferred the anti-Jewish right – with whom Zionists share the same racial darwinism and the same biblical references to armageddon – to the anti-imperialist left, with its internationalist connections to the Global South.

Anti-imperialists want a stop to the plunder and genocide; when the right fight among themselves, it’s about how to divide the spoils. The left believes in equality: the right, in natural hierarchy. This is the irreconcilable difference and it makes the antiwar right a mirage.

When you search for voices that are against Israel’s genocide, you’ll see these viral debate clips and enter the right-wing marketing funnels. The internet is flooded with them for a reason: to make it much harder to find anything real. Debates where the pro-Israel side routinely gets trounced and where the anti-Israel side gets one “gotcha” moment after another – are still wins for Morgan. These successes are as valuable for the propaganda system as algorithmic suppression or banning the phrase, “I support Palestine Action.”

Right-wingers can look super-insightful saying obvious things that leftists know because unlike right wingers, actual leftists are almost entirely boycotted by the mainstream*.

*You’re thinking of exceptions. I know the exceptions. What’s important is the quantity and the pattern.

There’s a solid incentive for liberals and right-wingers alike to create and promote a very visible antiwar right: to ensure that someone that isn’t a leftist is out there saying every possible thing, so that you can hear any specific viewpoint from someone other than a leftist.

In the video where Fuentes defends himself from Tucker and Candace’s accusation that he’s working for the police, he shows a supposedly exculpatory video of himself at the January 6 protest telling the crowd to advance and disregard the police. People who have been to Palestine protests have a good idea how it would legally go for someone who did that. At least he wasn’t supporting Plasticine Action…

Another subtle note from that video, is when Fuentes is praising Trump’s 2016 term, he says “we achieved some modest reforms”. Among them? Moving the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. “We achieved some modest reforms”, he says in his video. “He cut the corporate tax rate, moved Israel’s Embassy, did some minor stuff on the border, it was negligible.” (9:22).

Fuentes, now positioning himself as the foremost and original critic – not only of Zionism as he emphasizes, but of Jewish people racially – nonetheless calls it a modest (positive, by implication) reform for Trump to have moved the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a “reform” that Israel had desperately wanted for decades. Perhaps it’s a meaningless slip. Or perhaps it’s a slip that reveals that for Fuentes, like the rest of these people, anti-Israel positioning is fake, just seeking a slice of the audience to turn into revenue.

In the interview with Candace, Fuentes explains and endorses the idea that slavers didn’t believe that slavery should be abolished because Africans have low IQs. With his level of knowledge and intellectual curiosity, even if he was morally on the right side of history (he’s not), he would be a liability to whatever side he’s on. Tucker argued that he is a liability – to the anti-war right.

This is “shit-coating”: the carving off of an actual insight, mixing it with toxic and ultimately pro-establishment lies, and presenting it so that no one can recognize the unvarnished truth. The algorithm wants to distract you, and these people have, with the resources of the Anglo-American, Zionist oligarchy behind them, mastered the algorithm. The truth? They can only give you the shit-coated version.

For anti-genocide work, the supposedly anti-war right is another distraction. The same way that Bernie Sanders and AOC turned out to be pro-Israel empty suits, the so-called antiwar right is of no use to any just cause.

https://orinocotribune.com/the-mirage-o ... war-right/

They like to talk anti-war and individual rights but if they came to power the communists would be the first against the wall.

blindpig · Post by **blindpig** » Mon Aug 25, 2025 1:57 pm

Glasgow protests demonstrate farce of ‘fascists’ v ‘antifascists’

Workers are being forced into culture wars paradigms to keep them busy fighting amongst themselves.
Proletarian writers

Saturday 23 August 2025

Police escort a motley crew assembled behind a Ukip banner demanding ‘Mass deportations now’. The hard truth is that both the leaders of the overtly racist right-wing organisations in Britain and the leaders of the supposedly ‘antiracist’ and ‘revolutionary’ Trotskyite left are state provocateurs, working in tandem to keep workers’ energies misdirected, their ranks divided and their struggles impotent.

On 26 July, to coincide with the visit of US president Donald Trump, competing protests were staged in Glasgow.

On one side of the city centre, the United Kingdom Independence Party (Ukip) held a gathering that took an explicit stance in favour of mass deportations of “migrants” and declared its support for the policies of President Trump. On the other side of the city centre was a static protest staged by ‘Stand Up To Racism’ (SUTR), which was there to demonstrate against both the Ukip crowd and Trump.

Between the two stood a mass mobilisation of various police forces from across Britain, who had been brought into Glasgow to provide security for the US president’s state visit.

The whole event demonstrated the farcical nature of what self-identifying ‘antifascism’ has become in the imperial core nations. While around 300 leftists gathered on one street, surrounded by the police, and a smaller number of reactionaries gathered across the city centre, prime minister Sir Keir Starmer and President Trump met untroubled by any protest.

During their meeting they felt quite comfortable to declare their ongoing support for the proxy war on Russia in Ukraine and the war against the Palestinian people.

Some issues brought up by these protests merit closer examination.

Forces of the right serve the ruling-class agenda
Ukip was a major political force across Britain leading up to the Brexit vote of 2016. After the referendum on European Union membership was won by the Brexit side and Nigel Farage quit as party leader, Ukip fell into a rapid decline, going through a series of splits and dwindling to a membership of around 3,000.

In recent years, its leadership has been taken over by a man called Nick Tenconi, who is the chief operating officer of a group called ‘Turning Point UK’. This is the British spin-off from Turning Point USA, which is funded by ultra-reactionary bourgeois circles including the notorious Koch Foundation. In its current incarnation, therefore, the so-called party of ‘United Kingdom independence’ can in fact best be described as the British wing of a US operation.

The Ukip crowd consisted of about 50 people kettled by the police on the town hall side of Glasgow’s George Square. The majority were the type of assorted eccentric reactionaries who can be observed on every right-wing demonstration – Trump fans, followers of David Icke, Infowars types and supporters of notorious state asset Stephen Yaxley Lennon (aka Tommy Robinson).

Beyond these there was a hardcore who looked as though they were there to start a fight. These were mostly Glasgow Rangers fans gathered around a banner celebrating ‘King Billy’ and singing Rule Britannia. There was also a single individual from a group of self-proclaimed “paedo hunters” calling themselves ‘The Trojans’, who have been popping up at meetings on women’s safety held in areas like Parkhead in Glasgow’s working-class East End.

Several heavy-looking men were reported to have come in from the occupied six counties (and were sporting more tattoos than any human can reasonably accumulate in one lifetime). And there was an ultra-reactionary group of christians holding crucifixes – which gave a rather retro feel to the whole affair.

Looking at the slogans being held up by the Ukip crowd, one could see the usual anti-migrant calls for mass deportation, but there were also attempts to link migrants with the grooming scandals that have recently been brought to prominence in towns like Rotherham.

The right-wing mobilisation in Glasgow was consciously trying to pick up on local working-class concerns about public safety and to racialise them. This is not just a tactic of the likes of Ukip, of course; it is standard practice amongst all British bourgeois politicians and parties. The more nakedly reactionary parties are just more open about their intentions.

Forces of the fake left do the same
On the other side of George Square were the left counter-protestors organised mainly by SUTR. There were at least 300 of them, so they far outnumbered the fascists. The focus of the SUTR slogans was ostensibly to oppose the racism of both Trump and Ukip.

The occasional chant of “Tax the rich” was heard, but what struck this reporter was the way in which the question of racism was totally separated from the question of imperialism. This should not be a surprise given that the organisers are very close to the Labour party and there was also a Green party presence.

Since both these parties are imperialist to the bone and rabid supporters of Nato, it should come as no surprise that their influence promoted an entirely false understanding of racism – ie, that it is the product of individuals, parties and policies and not of the system of capitalist production for profit and imperialist plunder of the globe.

The role of the Trotskyite SWP is also crucial, as its leadership and members have always been the primary organisational influence within SUTR. The SWP has a long track record of promoting the Trotskyite ‘interpretation’ of global economics and politics, which pretends to be Leninist, but in fact denies Lenin’s analysis of imperialism as the highest (and final) stage of capitalist development.

Ultimately, what is being promoted by SUTR is utterly divorced from the realities of the role played by British imperialism at home and abroad. It does nothing to promote the real working-class politics of workers v capitalists, and instead plays a culture wars game of two opposing working-class sides – ‘enlightened’ workers v ‘fascists’.

The SWP’s slogan during the cold war period was “Neither Washington nor Moscow”, and this twisted logic, which always refused to recognise or support any of the revolutions that were actually made by workers in the last century, always refused to recognise the mechanisms by which imperialism oppresses whole nations abroad (including their bourgeois), and always refused to recognise the mechanisms used to bribe the upper stratum of workers at home (making them loyal to the imperialist system) continues to serve imperialist interests today – even as it continues to present itself to potential recruits as the most ‘revolutionary’ force imaginable.

Trotskyist ideology offers no explanation of the connection between racism and imperialist war, and does nothing to promote the goal of class unity in the face of the non-stop racist propaganda of the ruling class. (For more see our party pamphlet: Harpal Brar, Trotskyism: Tool of Imperialism, 2024)

What does real antiracism look like?
Our task as communists is to conduct antiracist work in a different way to the fake, purely performative, culture wars version of ‘antiracism’ that has been promoted in bourgeois media. We must resolutely oppose the racism of reactionaries such as the leaders of Ukip and Reform, but we must at the same time show where their racism originates from and help workers taken in by their narrative to see how they are being lied to and duped against their own interests.

We must clearly explain to the working class that racism is driven by the British ruling class and always has been, and that its purpose is twofold:

1. To justify wars of aggression against other nations.

2. To keep the working class within Britain divided on the basis of race and religion.

The British capitalists have been playing this game since the days when Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels observed the divisions being created between local British and migrant Irish workers in the 1840s. It is the primary means by which they achieve the social peace needed for stable class rule and exploitation at home and incessant war, looting and rapine abroad.

Those who really have the interests of the working class at heart must put forward clear demands that undercut the false arguments propagated by reactionaries about the inherent scarcity of resources available to working people.

On the question of housing, for example, it can be shown that the housing crisis is the inevitable effect of successive governments’ (of all parties) attacks on social housing, which has once more turned housing from being something we are all entitled to by right into a commodity available only to those with money to pay for it. Proof of this can be seen in the huge volume of empty housing in Britain, which continues to grow alongside the number of homeless and inadequately housed.

A state of endemic and permanent housing crisis for the working class is, in fact, the natural state of affairs under capitalist relations of economy, as was brilliantly described by Friedrich Engels 150 years ago.

As the capitalist system sinks into an ever deeper global economic crisis, the housing situation is exacerbated by the financiers’ need to keep the housing price bubble fuelled – to the benefit of bankers and property developers and the detriment of those unable to pay the astronomical prices now being demanded for the most modest of dwellings.

The housing crisis is just one of many similar problems facing working people. Their roots are all the same, but huge efforts are put into convincing working people that the problems they face are owing to ‘scarcity’ and an artificial boom in demand that has been caused by allegedly ‘uncontrolled migration’.

Beware wolves in sheep’s clothing
Working-class anger is growing as the situation worsens, which is why the ruling class promotes racism and anti-immigrant sentiment ever more aggressively. The financial oligarchs in whose interests Britain is really run know that if the working class unifies against them their system will be brought down and their rule will end.

That is what we as communists must work towards, rather than tamely playing the game of ‘fascist v antifascist’ that has been set up for us by our class enemies. The only thing that can stop racist and anti-immigrant sentiments infecting our ranks and diverting our energies is working-class solidarity, which means unified action around a real programme of action that addresses the needs of our class.

Workers need to be brought face to face with the truth: neither the EDL/Ukip/Reform agents of imperialism nor the Trotskyite/social-democratic agents of imperialism have their interests at heart. Both claim to care about the problems of the working class. Both claim to know how these problems can be solved. But the real goal of each is the same: to keep workers’ anger directed at other workers instead of at the capitalist-imperialist system.

These apparently ‘opposite’ camps are in fact directed from the same centre, their leaders are all bought and paid for, and they work in partnership to keep the working class fighting amongst itself instead of unified and fighting its exploiters.

https://thecommunists.org/2025/08/23/ne ... ist-farce/

blindpig · Post by **blindpig** » Thu Aug 28, 2025 1:56 pm

About the difference between capitalism and socialism for children
August 27, 18:41

A reminder of the main difference between capitalism and socialism, written for social media by someone from Chile many years ago:

- Explain to your son what socialism is. Make him work, cleaning his room and the toilet. When he finishes, pay him with 10 candies. Then immediately take 7 candies from him and tell him that they need to be shared with his brothers, because you have too many.

- Explain to your son what a free market is... Make him clean his room and pay him with 12 candies. Then take 3 candies from him for the room, 1 for the toilet, 2 for food, 1 for clothes, 1 for studies, 1 for medicine and 1 for transportation. And tell him that he must give you the remaining 2 for safekeeping for his pension. Then tell him that if he doesn’t have enough, you can lend him another 5 and so on for a couple more months until he runs out of candies. When they run out, you throw him out and tell him that he is lazy and idle and wants everything for free. If he asks you for your savings, laugh in his face, and if he is indignant, punch him in the face.

https://t.me/olegyasynsky - zinc

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/10036616.html

Google Translator

blindpig · Post by **blindpig** » Fri Sep 12, 2025 2:08 pm

The Discipline of Liberation: Mass Power vs. the Mirage of Assassination

Posted by Internationalist 360° on September 11, 2025
Prince Kapone

Assassination is a spectacle that feeds repression, not revolution. Terrorism creates martyrs for the ruling class and pretexts for the state. History proves only the organized masses can topple empires. Communists reject illusions to build the discipline of real liberation.

The Mirage of the Gunshot

The image is seductive: a single bullet, a lone hand, a tyrant collapsing, and history itself pivoting in that instant. Popular culture feeds us this fantasy over and over—the idea that liberation is just one assassination away, that injustice can be toppled by a pistol hidden in a coat pocket. But revolutionaries, those who live and die with the oppressed, know this is a mirage. The state is not a man to be shot; it is a machine, a network of class power, an empire with a thousand heads. Cut one down and another grows in its place. Assassination is a story told to pacify the desperate, to trick us into believing that individual heroics can substitute for organized struggle.

The truth is harsher and clearer: the ruling class thrives on these acts. Each assassination is recycled into propaganda, a justification for new laws, new prisons, new armies of surveillance. Each bomb in the marketplace or bullet on the stage is used to tighten the net around the very people who had no part in it. The ruling class knows how to turn tragedy into leverage, grief into handcuffs. They do not tremble at terrorism; they feed on it. The spectacle of the lone gunman does not terrify them—it validates them, giving them the excuse to intensify repression in the name of safety and order.

Communists do not fall for this trick. We know that liberation is not born in the echo of a gunshot but in the roar of the masses. The power of the oppressed is not the despairing act of one individual but the collective discipline of millions. To believe otherwise is to chase shadows, to mistake a spark for the sunrise. Real revolution is not assassination; it is organization. It is the slow, patient, and dangerous work of building class consciousness, of uniting workers and colonized peoples into a force strong enough to topple not just a man but a system. That is the lesson written in blood across history: the mirage of the gunshot fades, but the power of the masses endures.

The Class Basis of Assassination and Terrorism

Political assassination and terrorism carry a certain romance for those who stand outside the struggle, or for those so crushed by despair that they cling to the fantasy of one dramatic act altering the course of history. But when we analyze it through the lens of class struggle, the reality becomes clear: these tactics are not born from the organized power of the oppressed. They emerge from impatience, from the isolation of the petty bourgeoisie, or from the desperation of individuals cut off from mass movements. They are acts that substitute the will of a few for the action of millions, and in doing so, they betray the very essence of revolutionary politics.

For communists, history moves not by assassins but by classes in conflict. Kings, generals, presidents—they are not the engine of oppression but the representatives of a class order. To believe that killing one figure topples the system is to misunderstand power itself. The ruling class does not rest on the shoulders of a single leader; it is embedded in institutions, armies, banks, and police. When anarchist conspirators in 19th century Europe declared that “the deed” would inspire the masses, what followed was not liberation but backlash. The bullets felled individuals, but the system adapted instantly, often stronger than before. Each act confirmed to the masses not the possibility of freedom but the futility of violence divorced from organization.

Terrorism, in this sense, is the politics of substitution. A handful act “for” the people, imagining themselves as the spark, while the people remain spectators. But the working class does not need saviors who bomb in its name; it needs organization, strategy, and power built in its own hands. That is why communists reject assassination and terrorism as class strategies. They are not the tools of the proletariat but of adventurists who mistake spectacle for revolution. The path to liberation cannot be paved by individual despair; it must be constructed by collective struggle, disciplined, conscious, and rooted in the material force of the oppressed.

Why It Doesn’t Work

The appeal of assassination and terrorism rests on a fatal illusion: that the state is fragile, that a single act of violence can unmask its weakness and bring the edifice crashing down. But the modern state is not a windowpane waiting for a stone—it is a fortress. Its walls are built of institutions, armies, prisons, banks, and a propaganda apparatus that can spin any event into its own advantage. When a revolutionary falls into the trap of terrorism, the only thing shattered is the credibility of the movement itself. The state does not falter; it grows stronger, feeding off the act like a parasite that thrives on blood.

Every assassination is immediately recoded by those in power. The fallen leader becomes a martyr, their image polished into innocence, their legacy weaponized to justify new laws and harsher repression. Reactionary figures in particular benefit most—death grants them sanctity that life never could. The lone gunman or the hidden bomb delivers not weakness to the ruling class but legitimacy. Governments invoke “national unity,” unleash new surveillance powers, and expand the machinery of police and intelligence. The supposed blow against the system becomes the excuse for the system to tighten its grip.

Even worse, terrorism alienates the very people in whose name it claims to act. Workers and oppressed communities do not see themselves in isolated acts of destruction; they see danger, fear, and chaos. Instead of inspiring solidarity, terrorism breeds suspicion and resignation. Instead of opening space for organization, it closes it. History is littered with examples: anarchist bombings in 19th century Europe that rallied support not for the revolution but for the police; assassinations that provoked crackdowns, demoralizing the movements they were meant to ignite. This is why communists insist that liberation cannot come from spectacle. The enemy is not surprised by these acts; it counts on them. Only mass struggle—organized, disciplined, collective—can withstand the fortress and bring it to the ground.

Historical Lessons Written in Blood

History offers no shortage of examples for those willing to study instead of fantasize. In the late 19th century, anarchist militants in Europe declared that “the deed” would awaken the people. They hurled bombs, they struck down kings and presidents, they spilled blood in the name of liberation. But what followed was not revolution. What followed was repression. Police powers expanded, workers’ organizations were raided, and the masses were left watching from the sidelines as their supposed champions were executed or jailed. The state did not crumble—it fortified itself. The lesson was clear even then: terrorism does not build class power; it isolates and destroys it.

Consider 1914, when the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand did not shatter empires but helped ignite a world war. Millions of workers and peasants across Europe were dragged into the slaughterhouse of trench warfare, not liberated from imperialism. The ruling classes seized the act, wrapped it in nationalist fervor, and marched humanity into catastrophe. The bullet of a lone assassin became the pretext for one of the deadliest chapters in human history. Far from weakening the system, it gave the system the war it wanted.

The same pattern recurs in the modern era. States themselves have long learned to weaponize the spectacle of terrorism. Intelligence agencies sponsor or provoke attacks to justify new crackdowns, painting dissenters with the same brush. From COINTELPRO’s infiltration of radical groups in the U.S. to the false-flag operations of dictatorships abroad, the line between authentic terrorism and state-manufactured provocation blurs. In every case, the outcome is the same: repression deepens, surveillance expands, and genuine revolutionary struggle is smeared. Contrast this with the great victories of the oppressed—the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, Vietnam, Cuba, the anti-colonial struggles of Africa. None were won by assassinations or isolated bombs. They were won by masses organized in disciplined struggle, armed with consciousness as much as with weapons, and rooted in the collective power of the people.

These lessons are written in blood: terrorism delivers martyrs to the ruling class, not victories to the oppressed. Assassination creates crises that the state knows how to exploit. Only when the masses move—through strikes, uprisings, wars of liberation—does history bend toward revolution. Communists do not worship the lone act; we study the record and choose the path that builds power where it matters: in the hands of the people themselves.

The Revolutionary Alternative: Mass Power, Not Spectacle

If assassinations and terrorism are dead ends, what then is the path forward? Communists answer without hesitation: the road to liberation is built through the mass power of the oppressed. It is the strike that halts production, the uprising that overwhelms police lines, the people’s army that defends liberated ground, the dual institutions that replace the authority of the old state with the beginnings of the new. Revolution is not the fantasy of a single gunshot; it is the disciplined movement of millions who have come to recognize their collective strength.

The distinction is crucial. Terrorism substitutes the will of a few for the struggle of the many. Revolution does the opposite: it transforms the anger of the many into a disciplined will. When the masses act together, the state cannot simply mourn a fallen leader or pass another law; it faces the paralysis of its own foundations. A general strike can do what no bullet can—halt the flow of profit and reveal who actually makes society run. A people’s uprising can do what no bomb can—replace fear with solidarity and crack open space for a new order. Assassination individualizes the struggle; revolution collectivizes it.

Violence, when it comes, is not abandoned by communists but placed in its proper context: defensive, collective, and inseparable from mass organization. No revolution has succeeded without confrontation, but no revolution has succeeded through terrorism alone. The Red Army, the Viet Minh, the Cuban guerrillas—each fought, but they fought as the organized expression of entire peoples, not as isolated cells chasing headlines. Their victories flowed from class power, not spectacle. This is why we insist: the revolutionary alternative is not in the mirage of the lone act but in the hard, patient, and disciplined work of organizing the oppressed into a force capable of seizing history.

The Discipline of Liberation

The appeal of assassination and terrorism comes from desperation, from the hunger to see the enemy fall in one dramatic stroke. But revolutionaries cannot afford illusions. We measure tactics not by how they feel in the moment, but by whether they build power for the oppressed. Assassination builds nothing. Terrorism isolates, provokes repression, and feeds the ruling class the martyrdom it craves. These are not the weapons of the proletariat. They are the traps laid by history, into which too many have already fallen.
https://libya360.wordpress.com/2025/09/ ... ssination/
Communists insist on another path—the long, disciplined road of mass struggle. We study history not to repeat its tragedies but to inherit its victories: the revolutions that succeeded because they rooted themselves in organization, in consciousness, in the collective power of workers and the colonized. Our fight is not against a single politician or general; it is against a system that breeds them endlessly. To topple that system requires patience, clarity, and discipline. It requires millions, not martyrs. It requires strategy, not spectacle.

This is why communists reject assassination and terrorism: not because we are pacifists, but because we are serious. We know that liberation demands more than a bullet. It demands the organized force of the oppressed, acting in unison, seizing history with their own hands. That is the discipline of liberation: to refuse the mirage, to name the traps, and to build the power that no assassination can ever deliver. Only then will the oppressed rise, not as spectators to a single act, but as authors of a new world.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2025/09/ ... ssination/

For the historically minded(we all should be) see "Politics of the Deed" and "Nihilists".

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