Part of This Series of Posts:
Communism is true populism, and real populism is Communism, ask any random Chinese person who was, is, and will be the Communist party fighting for and they will answer the people. For example populism is redundant in China because it is a given that all politics must be ‘populist’.
Real socialism is populist because populism is supposed to mean serving the masses but every ‘populist’ who is not a Communist (today not historically) is just a fake populist (demagogue) who is only in power to prevent the rise of class consciousness among the masses.
There is definitely an anti-establishment current emerging in the United States, but it is up to the Communist party to emerge as leader over it as opposed to other (fake) populist forces that form and show how Communism is true populism and win over the minds of the people. Due to the dwindling, downward labour aristocracy, an increasing amount of people have been looking for alternatives, albeit most have developed false consciousness. However the fact that people have developed false consciousness shows that if they were guided correctly they would become socialists. Anti-establishment movements such as those of (that stem from) Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump (MAGA) are prime examples of movements we should be reaching out to so that we can guide them on the right path. It is from these mostly blue-collar and rural people that we should be reaching out to as opposed to liberal, metropolitan (or suburban), university graduates, AKA the Professional Managerial Class (PMC).
Recently we saw American self-proclaimed ‘Communists’ oppose the trucker protests despite the vast majority of truckers being either working class or one truck operators (likely indebted to banks). This is all despite Engels stating that Communists must always bring the property question to the forefront of every protest. It does not matter what spurred on the protests to being with, what matters is the protests are anti-establishment. It is up to us Communists to be at the forefront of any movement against the current order and to always bring up the property question and guide it towards a revolutionary proletarian direction. Complete denounciation did not help the movement in anyway and is an indictment of just how low the Communist parties of North America (CPUSA and CPC) have fallen.
Communists want a socialist United States but there are people calling themselves socialist who want it to be called ‘Turtle Island’ because they think America is fundamentally stained and Americans are all settlers benefitting from imperialism (when this could not be further from the truth as only the imperialist bourgeoisie benefit from imperialism). Despite this being so divorced from the masses as all they know is the U.S. and the vast majority identity with the United States. Socialism is not just about having ‘correct beliefs’. If your position does not allow you to build a mass, POPULAR movement of your countrys MAJORITY, then you are not a socialist. It is socialism that delivers true patriotism and socialism that delivers true populism and only socialism which can as it is the scientific vehicle moving society forward.
Revolutionary defeatism is the stance American Communists need to take internationally and when it comes to the oppression of oppressed peoples inside the U.S., but that needs to be backed up by real patriotism not the phony patriotism of the ruling class. We are patriotic to the people themselves, not the current state. We want to win over the masses and establish a socialist state to serve the masses because only with Communism can the mythos of the American dream be made reality for the masses.
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Also to address those who hold some dogmatic idea that ‘populism’ means ‘mob rule’ whatever that is supposed to mean to entail as if it is a buzzword.
‘Mob rule’ is a slanderous term invented by the bourgeois historians to slander populist leaders and movements throughout history. However what is wrong with it? Real socialism is populist because populism is supposed to mean serving the masses and under a socialist system they themselves are in power. Only socialism has historically, and only socialism can provide this future to the working masses.
Mob rule is cool and good
What if I was to tell you that I was working class:
– I was Anti-government - Pro-strong state to serve the people, for and by the people
– Anti-deep-state, anti-DoTB - Pro-government of action for working families, pro-DoTP
– Anti-elite/ultra-rich/bourgeoisie - Pro-worker/small business/farmers, pro-nationalist/patriot
– Anti-establishment, anti-censorship, anti-MSM - Pro-populism, pro-free speech
– Anti-malthusian, anti-degrowth - Pro-wealth, pro-material abundance, not anti-billionaire
– Anti-corporation/oligopolies/monopolies - Pro-conservative, centrally planned economy
– Anti-war, anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism, anti-racist - Pro-self-determination
– Anti-immigration, seeing immigration for what it is, braindrain - Pro-immigrant, internationalist
– Anti-idpol - Pro-equal rights, live and let live, what happens in the bedroom stays there
– Anti-moralism, anti-vegan - Pro-facts and logic, pro-environmental and animal conservation
– Anti-reform, anti-taxation, taxation is theft - Pro-gun ownership, pro-revolution, expropriation
– Pragmatic, thinking of how things can be directly applied to my community and state
You would probably think that I was conservative, but no I am a Communist.
Liberals would be calling for my arrest.
Pro a government of action for working families
o7
When it comes to American leftists, they sure love to focus on issues which do not have anything to do with the majority of people.
The economic and political are by far the most important issues while the social irrelevant in comparison but Americans seem to hyperfocus on divisive identity culture wars which plays into the bosses hands because Americans are highly polarised within a narrow overton window giving the illusion of difference leading to team sport mentality. Even before the neoliberal era, ‘social issues’ used to refer to matters of housing and health and occasionally societal issues such as abortion and gay rights, but since then, it has only ever referred to identity politics of the individual.
Leftists become associated with this identity confrontation due to the liberals, while right liberals (conservatives) are the reaction to this, often even American ‘Marxists’ themselves will make out the social issues to be the most important focus and completely ignore the economic issues. Ironically since Occupy Wall Street, leftists have become more and more pro-establishment, pro-NATO, pro-intervention and it is the Trump faction of the Republican party which is dominant over the party which has taken on the anti-establishment aesthetic (of course Trump is a phony). While so called ‘ACAB’ supporters praise the police crackdown on rightwingers, and today seeing anyone who identifies as a ‘leftist’ oppose NATO is seen as a good start when before that was a given
It is because of this that us Marxists and us revolutionaries must break from the left-right wing paradigm if we want to win because Marxism-Leninism transcends the linear and binary political compass and it is up to us to ensure that we tread the golden centre of Stalin and not tread past the tightrope to revisionism on the right or ultra-leftism on the left.
Even when it comes to Communists in the West, there are a lot of people with this label who are really liberals with a red mask on and hold a typical liberal, Kantian (liberal universalism which stems from modernity) worldview where everything fits into their (postmodern) idealistic, metaphysical paradigm. Often these so called ‘Communists’ muddy the waters and take a line against religion or even a pro-prostitution and anti-family line. This shows just how depraved their worldview is as they do not care what the masses think. The vast majority of people in the world are religious, the vast majority oppose prostitution and have a loving family who they care for. However these people do not care about that and want to push their satanic depraved worldview on the masses. The masses have never and will never fall for them. This synthethic left must be pushed against hard as they will try to bring us and other genuine revolutionary movements down with them into the abyss. These people simply care about their own individual self and do not love the masses as we do. We must expose them for what they are and ensure that we do not get associated with them.
Empty sloganeering is very common in the Western Left, it causes nothing but confusion and does nothing but hold us back. For example, ACAB is a slogan which in general just puts us backwards. Most people know individual cops but of course we know that the true nature of the police force is to serve capital. (When it comes to the police I completely agree with this Parenti piece). Those who are already Communists know that ACAB refers to the police as an institution, but average people when they hear that the term think it means we are calling all individual officers bad people. This definitely does alienate a large percentage of people from our cause and plays into the hands of the bourgeoisie keeping us divided. ACAB is an anarchist/radlib slogan not one Communists should be using because it can be exploited against socialist states, which as we know still retain police forces and have to maintain law and order. When that order breaks down, all states, including socialist ones are susceptible to regime change, which gets exploited by the imperialists themselves. We must be careful as to our wording. I do however have no problem when it comes to people in the ghetto being against cops and pigs in phrasing because it is these (poor and minority) communities which suffer the most at the hands of the police and it is through rap and other artistic form that anti-establishment sentiment can be sown.
‘Eat the rich’ is almost as cringe as ‘ACAB’ because rich is subjective and even the slightly well off man down the road thinks that he is ‘rich’. We must ensure that our actions and phrasing is directly against the true enemy of the working class, the capitalist elite themselves, and that it is not against (or seen to be against) the worker who is slightly better off. One good thing that came out of OWS (Occupy Wall Street) was the slogan ‘99% vs the 1%’ because in comparison to ‘Eat the rich’, this slogan explicitely is raising the issue of class itself and while class relations are far more complex than this, it was a far better starting point to build a mass movement from and far less easy to exploit by the capitalist media. I think it is because of this (as well as the anti-establishment rap songs which were everywhere) and the rise of the internet which led to widespread anti-establishment sentiment. From this we saw such a reversal of this trend from the late 00s, as censorship became widespread, the internet became monopolised, as well as manipulation of algorithms to prevent the masses waking up.
When it comes to our sloganeering, phrases such as ACAB which require context to understand can come back to bite us because if you have to keep explaining a slogan then that slogan becomes useless. It is far too easy for our enemies to play up a strawman of our views and use that to keep us from winning the masses. ‘Eat the rich’ can also similarly be exploited.
There are also terms that come from liberal metropolitan university ivory towers pushed by academics on the masses to refer to groups of people. These terms are academic jargon terms and more often than not these terms are hated by the people they are actually supposed to describe. For example ‘POC/BIPOC’ and ‘Queer’. ‘POC’ is hated by a majority of people it describes and has evolved from a gesture of solidarity to one of skirting around racial issues. ‘Queer’ is hated by a vast majority of LGBT people. The same also applies to ‘latinx’. Of course it is obvious with these terms that they have their uses, it is clear that when the vast majority of people they are describing dislike or even hate the term, that they should be avoided when referring to those groups of people if at all possible. This is what I mean when I talk of academic jargon terms being pushed on people. We should avoid the jargon and get down to real issues and talk to the masses with normal terms they are familiar with not academic jargon they do not identify with.
Race is a social construct dependent on where you are, who is defining it and how it is defined. Race science originates from Anglo-Colonial pseudo-science to justify slavery and colonialism for the bosses and to divide the exploited classes on the basis of skin tone/pigment/melanin/haplogroup and ethnicity.
However while it is a social construct, it does have real meaning in simple terms since the colonial era. For example, to an African man living in Johannesburg, it is obvious that the fair skinned man (white) who came to enforce apartheid was serving the whites in trying to keep the majority who are darked skinned (black) people down. Whereas in the past before this dialectic came up through the onset of colonialism, different African groups fought each other, had vastly different cultures, languages and looked different, whereas against the white man, they were all black and in the struggle for African liberation after the colonisers left they were also black. The same holds true today globally as we live in a globalised society and one in which the vast majority of people outside of the imperial core (which is overwhelmingly white) are not white and are under the lock of imperialism.
While we must oppose race essentialism, it is undeniably that different racial groups will have different interests. For example, the promise of 40 acres and a mule to the black people of America which was promised to them after freedom from slavery was never fulfilled, instead they were ignored, segregated and later Jim Crow laws made them poor. All of this has a real impact still to this day and even today they suffer in much higher rates from police violence. From this there is the potential to build a mass movement of black people which will deliver 40 acres and a mule (tractor) to every black family and which will uplift the community. The affirmative action programs of today, which are based on race and not class are clearly made to divide as poor whites get left out while even rich blacks benefit, this should in the future be based on wealth. Giving land to black families would greatly uplift the community and would be an impetus for a cultural and social revolution as a rejuvenation is brought to the rural areas and black culture would thrive.
Similarly in America, when it comes to the native people, they are of course after a revolution going to have the right to self determination on a tribe by tribe basis and this will also serve as part of a massive land reform program which will see the poverty of reservations be no more and will uplift them and allow them to thrive and be respected and contribute to their communities in ways which were impossible through the reservation system which oppresses them. Both of these are massive impetuses for popular support in these communities which are both significant minorities. There is so much land owned by corporations and capitalists that other groups would of course also be included in an extensive land reform program.
I discuss this in detail here:
