From Where to Begin When We Already Started?: Revisionism and Organizational Strategy. You can check out the full pamphlet on Substack, YouTube, and sparkyl.org

Eclecticism in the “Tendencies”

Because we must develop Marxism further and unite under its most advanced theories, it is unacceptable for us to allow the field of Marxism to exist as it currently does, dominated by many diverse and often confusingly contradictory Marxist “tendencies.” The demand for a firm Marxist unity which adheres to the most developed theory means that we must also commit to a firm struggle within the eclectic field of the Marxist “tendencies” themselves, in order to unify them under an advanced program for the proletariat today.

The masses looking in on us from the outside already understand that the different “tendencies” are too often taken on as identities and dogmatic belief structures for history fanatics. Far from offering some light on the organizing of today, the adherence to personal tendencies by today’s comrades reflects a supremely un-Marxist trend of eclecticism which seeks to divide the international proletariat and its Communist movement through the ideological lines that pertained to certain points in our movement’s past. Revolutionary Marxism did not develop evenly, and it is solely due to the forces of counterrevolution and the bourgeoisie that it was not able to remain united in the course of its development. The existence of separate Marxist tendencies within the proletarian class represents a division in the international proletarian movement along national, cultural, historical, or even tactical lines, a division that is very undesirable for our movement and should be struggled against. This division is a problem for our movement before we even consider the most egregious feature of “multi-tendencyism:” while some of these tendencies are based in some degree of principle, some are entirely counterrevolutionary and anti-Marxist in reality (e.g. Trotskyism), making multi-tendencyism a dangerous trend that should not be tolerated in our organizing.

It is clear today that principled Marxist Communism took on the “tendency” of Marxism-Leninism, the Marxism expressed by Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and the respective Parties and revolutions they led. Replacing the dialectical materialist method they instruct us in with any group of tendencies repeats the exact same eclectic patterns many of our comrades recognize when dealing with the non-Marxist “socialist” formations, but overlook within Marxism itself. Instead of allowing the tendencies to become a shield each individual uses to ward off ideological and programmatic unity (not to mention one’s personal political development), we should always seek to work through all particular “tendencies,” substituting the different “camps” for one united “camp,” the “camp” of the international Communist movement. This does not mean dulling our theories, creating a wide unity of rearguardists. No, it means that we must, as a movement, demand that our members be Marxists, that they rise to the level of their namesake and to the destiny of the class they claim to fight for. Before any specific ideological adherence to any revolution of the past, we must have all comrades subordinated to the revolution of the now. Our movement must apply the most developed theories of Marxism-Leninism to the situation of the international working class as it exists today, creating a political line upon which all our work can be subordinated. True Marxists incorporate their knowledge of the past to build the future, and we fail to do that so long as we cling to our own personal identity and revolutionary “camp” instead of building a unity based around the most advanced theory and the situation today.

To combat the divisive effect of the tendencies, we should not paint ourselves as “Marxist-Leninists” advocating for the supremacy of the “Marxist-Leninist” tendency (though surely we are and we do advocate for this), but as revolutionary Marxists utilizing the most advanced revolutionary theory (Marxism-Leninism) with the intention of advancing it further in the course of our revolutionary activities, taking it out of history and into living and breathing revolutionary life. Leninism is the further development of Marxism, but we will develop it further. We make no apologies about this fact, and those who cannot come along are no Marxists at all. They wish Marxism had stayed a baby, but it has already grown strong through Marxism-Leninism, and today’s Communists will have it grow stronger still by rejecting all eclecticism and making use of this most advanced theory.

Check out our pamphlet on organizing, Where to Begin When We Already Started?, on Substack, YouTube, and sparkyl.org.

Check out the whole article and listen to the audiobook on Substack, YouTube, and sparkyl.org

You can also listen to the audiobook on YouTube or sparkyl.org

1.      An Energetic Split

The growing revolutionary wind of our times has already influenced the fallow field of current “Marxist” organizing in our country in a very discernible way. In October of 2024, the oldest and largest “Communist” party, the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), experienced the splintering of 32 of its chapters, with their subsequent reconstitution as a new “Communist” party, the American Communist Party (ACP).[1]

The ACP justify their break from the CPUSA for many reasons, with a primary one being that the CPUSA “have replaced serious Marxist–Leninist education with eclectic seminars given from the liberal perspective, designed primarily to instill allegiance to the Democratic Party.”[2]

This quote was taken from the ACP’s founding declaration, and is undoubtedly true regarding the CPUSA and many other so-called “Marxist” parties within the country, who have abandoned Marxism-Leninism, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the vanguard strategies that they call for in favor of electoralism and the supposed gains of bourgeois “democracy.”

To demonstrate, read this parenthetical aside put forward in an article which is part of the CPUSA’s “Mailbag” column, answering the asinine question, “What if the people don’t want socialism?”:

>By the way, to dispel a misconception: we do not see ourselves ruling a single-party state, as in the Soviet or Chinese models.  The multi-party system is part of the democratic traditions of this country, and socialism has to be built on those.[3]

This is a direct denial of the Marxist dictatorship of the proletariat, and a clear admittance of bourgeois opportunism on the part of the supposed “Communists” in the CPUSA. Lenin critiqued the bourgeois parliamentarianism of his own time, demanding that socialists commit themselves to revolution, rather than the winning of reforms. Read this portion of The State and Revolution, where he affirms the revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat over electoral gains in bourgeois politics, which were championed in Lenin’s time by the revisionist and “renegade,” Kautsky.

>We, however, shall break with these traitors to socialism, and we shall fight for the complete destruction of the old state machine, in order that the armed proletariat itself may become the government. These are two vastly different things.

>Kautsky will have to enjoy the pleasant company of…{those}…who are quite willing to work for the “shifting of the balance of forces within the state power”, for “winning a majority in parliament”, and “raising parliament to the ranks of master of the government”. A most worthy object, which is wholly acceptable to the opportunists and which keeps everything within the bounds of the bourgeois parliamentary republic.

>We, however, shall break with the opportunists; and the entire class-conscious proletariat will be with us in the fight—not to “shift the balance of forces”, but to overthrow the bourgeoisie, to destroy bourgeois parliamentarism, for a democratic republic after the type of the Commune, or a republic of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, for the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.[4]

Proletarian freedom is not won by LARPing “worker’s democracy” without worker organizations and under the “democracy” of the capitalists, as the CPUSA and many other parties do. The oppressed working class knows this, if only intuitively, and its political consciousness does not wait on votes, reforms, and representative bourgeois democracy, especially since its members, in many ways, are practically barred from participating in bourgeois democracy on the whole.

In posturing themselves as Marxist-Leninists opposite liberal democracy, the ACP reveals themselves as a more energetic, more working class, and, in this single lonely instance, a more principled organization. The split they were able to make from the sleepier CPUSA reveals that today, there is a section among the masses that are politically interested in Communism, and have become disenchanted by the failed attempts of the liberals, increasingly drawn to the Leninist vanguard strategy. This is fantastic news for us actual Marxist-Leninists, not to mention the revolution, even while the ACP itself is representative of imperialist capital, and doing their best to rob Marxism-Leninism of its progressive character, as we will show.

2.      American “Chauvinist” Party

>The question is whether it is permissible for a Marxist, directly or indirectly, to advance the slogan of national culture, or whether he should oppose it by advocating, in all languages, the slogan of workers’ internationalism while “adapting” himself to all local and national features...

Those who seek to serve the proletariat must unite the workers of all nations, and unswervingly fight bourgeois nationalism, domestic and foreign. The place of those who advocate the slogan of national culture is among the nationalist petty bourgeois, not among the Marxists.

>--V. I. Lenin, “Critical Remarks on the National Question,” 1913[5]

While the ACP has decidedly turned towards the masses and the workers by proclaiming (in word) Marxism-Leninism and vanguard strategies, they have risen above none of the populism and general reaction of their environment, leaving ample room for (and, in fact, inviting in) dizzying levels of opportunism and chauvinism... so much that they can hardly be considered a progressive organization, much less a Communist one.

For one, Mr. Haz Al-Din, their “Chairman”[6] and co-founder,[7] is quite fond of Nazis and Nazbols. In an article in which he directly appeals to the right, titled, “Marxism is Not Woke: Clearing Marxism's name,” Mr. Haz says, “Marxist theory in the West is meaningless without the aid of Dugin and Heidegger’s thinking.”[8]^(, [9]) For anyone not familiar, Aleksandr Dugin and Martin Heidegger are both rabid anti-communist academics -- of different time periods -- and obvious representatives of bourgeois interests. Dugin co-founded the National Bolshevik Party in Russia in 1993,[10]^(, [11]) and is the founder of the more recent Eurasia Party,[12] which has become a vehicle for his fascistic, anti-communist political ideas like The Fourth Political Theory, which attempts to unite reaction around hyper-nationalist ideas of “multi-polarity” and “anti-Americanism*.*” As for Heidegger, he was a prominent member of the Nazi Party, acting as its legal consultant and talking head, especially when it came to the party’s relationship with universities.[13]^(, [14]) He joined the Nazis in 1933[15] and remained a member through the end of WWII. He served as Rector of the University of Freiburg, and afterward entered the university lecture circuits, using his influence to mold German universities to the Nazi program.^(14,15) Between the years of 1934 and 1936, he sat on the Committee for the Philosophy of Law in the Academy for German Law, of which he acted as a consultant in constructing legislation; specifically, the Nuremberg racial laws, which cemented Jewish people as a race under the German government, paving the way for the Holocaust.^(13) Apparently, the ACP’s “chairman” forgot that Communists oppose fascism and Nazism.

It’s only fitting, since the ACP has fully taken up national chauvinism, that they recognize some of the chief architects of national chauvinism in the form of Dugin and Heidegger. Both them and the ACP spend their time courting ideas of the Übermensch, holding national sentiment above all else, and wishing to build a new national consciousness and a “new man” through strength of will alone*.* Look at this excerpt from their constitution, where they fascistically look backwards, baptizing the American myth with “revolutionary” aesthetics and using it as a springboard for their own nation-building:

>The Party upholds and strives to deepen the American revolutionary tradition beginning in 1776 and for the construction of a sovereign and united Republic of, by, and for the American people.[16]

Despite these being supposed “Communists,” the theology they preach and the republic the ACP advocates for is not one in service to the international proletarian class. They do not want the dictatorship of the proletariat, or even a republic for the international class of workers, but a “deepening” of bourgeois nationalism, a deepening of the rule of the so-known “American people,” a term that disguises a conglomeration of classes and particularly the domination of the ruling class of bourgeoisie, which is an international class that oppresses an international class of workers. Disguising this truth -- a truth that any actual Communist knows and propagates among the people -- is not the work of a socialist party, but the work of the bourgeoisie, and an opportunist party. What the ACP is deepening by bowing to nationalism is not socialism, but the rule of capital and reactionary idealism. This is because they fail to instruct on class and, instead, like a liberal, substitute the bourgeois nation as its replacement.

But their chauvinism doesn’t stop at valorizing the slave-owning American planters and their bourgeois revolt. In their constitution they include a section specifically enshrining the American national identity as a whole, along with the religious sentiments that often accompany it:

>Section 7C: All attempts to offend and provoke the national and religious sensibilities of the people are strictly prohibited.[17]

The ACP defending the “sensibilities” of especially a nation that sits at the height of imperial accumulation, whose bourgeoisie continue to perform the open and bare-faced global violence required to maintain that nation’s position, is inexcusable for a Communist organization. While it should not be directly antagonized by us who stand for the class of the proletariat, the national sentiments of Americans are ripe for antagonizing, and will be antagonized! The United States continues its vile imperial dominance and oppression on the world’s people, and it continues to face the consequences of that violence, consequences that are reflected upon the American “nation” in numerous ways. Who are we to deny this fact, or to defend as part of our Communist program, the national sensibilities of a decaying empire? Our adherence to the class viewpoint cuts through all national chauvinism (not to mention nations themselves), and it would be opportunist of us, not to mention reactionary, to dull our truths to make nationalists of any variety cozy, most of all those whose nation sits at the height of imperial accumulation.

Moreover, and relatedly, religious sensibilities should be “offended” as per the proper Communist method of dialectical materialism, which upholds atheism, and educates the people in a consistent materialist worldview beyond all idealist superstitions. Again, this does not mean that we should antagonize religious people, but it does mean that the “offense” they take at being told the truth about their oppressive fairy tales can be of little concern to us.

The ACP however – like many opportunists and revisionists in our country – is unconcerned with the truth, and prefers to crudely prop up what remains of the expired dreams of American planters. In doing so, they never even glimpse for a moment the light of dialectical materialism or class science. The ACP claims Marxism-Leninism and vanguardism, but mucks around in the backwards swamp of both American religious and national reaction, calling for “the construction of a unified American historical, national, and cultural identity to overcome all racial and social antagonisms,”[18] as if a new idealist belief in “the American experiment” was capable of sealing up the contradictions of society, and hasn’t been tried a million times before. By keeping company with the swamp folk and adhering to nationalist and religious sentiment, they deny materialism, science, and especially class and international worker solidarity, siding instead with opportunism and the bourgeoisie (which we will see them do in a most direct way later on in this article). It should go without saying that the ACP will not be able to construct a “perfect nationality,” and that the very desire to do so is steeped in reaction, reaction the party has fully accepted as part of their strategy to appeal to the “MAGA” crowd.[19]

Reaction begets reaction, and as you might imagine, the ACP’s adherence to nationalism and right populism brings with it other shameless examples of backwardness, particularly misogyny. A video posted from their official Youtube channel titled, “Carlos Garrido on the Education Program of the American Communist Party” begins with Carlos driveling on for four minutes, attempting to tell a misogynistic joke about whether Engels, Lenin, and Marx would rather have a wife or a mistress.[20] In a video discussing their party program, Mr. Al-Din proclaims that one of their tenets is the “wholesale abolition of the sex industry, including prostitution and pornography” (which received an unsettling standing ovation by what seemed like a majority of baseball hat-wearing men in attendance).[21] It should go without saying that the abolishment of sex work, as a part of any political program today, engages in adventurism, and reveals profound ignorance on the deep-set contradictions of patriarchy and the economic factors underlying the sex industry. The fixation on sex work that is seen in our movement is reactionary and degenerative, coming from a patriarchal mindset that is unsettled, and not yet developed out of its putridity. The ACP’s taking up this line is fully in-keeping with their general reactionary and chauvinistic character, which is a general trend within their organization.

3.      American “Capital” Party

The ACP’s reaction and opportunism makes even more sense when we understand that, despite all their “Communist” posturing, they are an openly bourgeois party organizationally, by virtue of their own founding documents. The supposed “Communists” in the American Communist Party actively and openly encourage all their members to become small business owners. This is not a joke. Listen to this section from their constitution, which puts capitalism as a mandate:

>Section 2: Chapters will establish small businesses or cooperatives owned by the Party Chapter (Chapter Enterprises) with the intent of both funding the Chapter and Party.[22]

In this pyramid scheme put forward by the ACP, would-be comrades are instructed to go forth and extract surplus labor from the working class. The inclusion of the word “cooperatives” as an option for a form of ownership does not detract from the parasitical and thoroughly petite-bourgeois directive to have party members establish businesses. Even if these businesses were run by party members as cooperatives, which is clearly only optional, this is still a mandate to engage in speculative capitalist production for the sole purpose of profit-creation, making the ACP much more like a bourgeois development fund than a Communist Party. Section 4 of their constitution proves this point.

Section 4: A Chapter may apply for investment funding or seed capital for Chapter enterprises. This Party fund will be under the direct supervision of the National Treasury section of the Executive Board, and awarded on a case-by-case basis, as decided by the Executive Board. The Executive Board reserves the right to require expertise in any field being investigated and to bring in a consultant with expertise in the field in order to provide sound investment advice.[23]

“Sound investment advice.” This is franchising; bourgeois capital-creation by a bourgeois business. Enough. It’s clear as crystal what the ACP is.

4.      The American “Clown” Party: A Joke We Could Learn From

We could go on with their failures but let’s give them some credit for a change. Through absolutely no effort on their part, in fact, in spite of their best efforts, the ACP fulfills a rather progressive and important role in our movement, all things considered. Much of “the left” does correctly (thank goodness) view them as reactionary, calling them “fascist,” “Nazbols,” and whatever else, and while they continue to rightfully draw the ire of our movement towards them, socialism will be repelled from implementing their tactics in a wide way, and in a way that has the potential to build lasting foundations for socialist organizing generally. While our movement is rejecting this reactionary contingent of supposed “Communists,” let’s make sure that we learn the lesson thoroughly so we can truly leave the ACP, and the wider trend they represent, behind, and instead, advance socialism in the correct direction.

The only reason we have talked as much as we have about the ACP is because they have taken the name “Communist” erroneously for themselves, doubtlessly duping and turning reactionary those members of the unconscious masses who are just now waking up to the political plight of working people and the oppressed classes. However, we would like to let all of these wakers know that the American “Communist” Party is no Communist Party at all. We propose that the “C” in ACP actually stands for “Clown;” the American Clown Party is a much more befitting name for the monstrous ideological sideshow of bourgeois opportunism and general reaction that is the ACP.

The fact of the matter however, and the more pressing thing to understand for a Communist, is that the ACP is not alone, and they didn’t spring up onto the political scene out of nowhere. In many ways, organizations like the ACP are inevitable. Any bourgeoisie with a decent amount of capital, or any ambitious opportunist within the sea of opportunists that make up the ranks of the CPUSA, was bound to become the ringleader of just such a circus as the ACP, and our country is bound to throw up many such organizations due to the current forces of capitalist-imperialism.

5.      The ACP and American Spontaneity

While we rid our movement of the ACP’s influence, we should not view their party and their bourgeois interests as an anomaly, an exception to our movement. To do that is to miss their being representative of a general trend, and shows a failure to understand the degree to which the bourgeoisie is currently in the driver’s seat of “socialism” generally. It is also a failure to diagnose the general reaction of American society; it is naïve to believe that the full-throated reaction displayed by many in the US will not also find its way into the socialist movement. Finally, it is also a failure from the viewpoint of Marxist theory, which teaches us that Marxism has already achieved numerous victories, so much so that the bourgeois were forced to propagate their views within “Marxism” itself, in the form of revisionism, meaning history has “gifted” us with numerous bourgeois enemies that erroneously take the names “Marxist,” “Communist,” and even “Marxist-Leninist” upon themselves, degrading them. Lenin talks about this in The Historical Destiny of the Doctrine of Karl Marx.[24]

The ACP fits into the wider trend of history, and their hypocrisy in calling themselves “Communist,” along with their egregious reactionary character is not due to any individual ignorance or personal “evil” within Mr. Haz or their ranks of chauvinists, but due to the egregious character of the American spontaneous movement in general, which is destined to birth many ACPs until the point it is raised out of the pit of American reaction and into the conscious revolutionary movement.

By the spontaneous movement, we are referring to a theory of Lenin’s, and a foundational tenet of Marxism-Leninism. He describes this theory well in the following passage from his pamphlet, What is to Be Done?:

>...the “spontaneous element”, in essence, represents nothing more nor less than consciousness in an embryonic form. Even the primitive revolts expressed the awakening of consciousness to a certain extent. The workers were losing their age-long faith in the permanence of the system which oppressed them and began... I shall not say to understand, but to sense the necessity for collective resistance, definitely abandoning their slavish submission to the authorities. But this was, nevertheless, more in the nature of outbursts of desperation and vengeance than of struggle.[25]

One of Lenin’s chief contributions to Marxism was his fleshing out of the idea of spontaneity. Through the delineation he makes between revolt-actions that are within the confines of bourgeois society and the conscious actions of capable, professional revolutionaries which act against those confines he reinvigorated Marxism with its revolutionary character, and allowed for the development of theory and socialism generally out of the spontaneity of its time.

It is one-sided to think of the “outbursts of desperation and vengeance” Lenin attributes to spontaneity in the above passage as simply protests or property damage. In truth, these “outbursts,” and the sentiments leading up to them, form whole philosophies and political contingencies within society, as Lenin illustrates throughout What is to Be Done? as a whole. Spontaneity is not comprised of isolated events, but trends that constitute themselves as an entire “revolutionary” movement that is hopelessly encased in the philosophy and tactics of outbursts.

And why are they encased? Why can’t they develop along their own path and become capable? They are encased and trapped in their spontaneity, requiring the efforts of conscious revolutionaries, because of the opportunism of the bourgeoisie, who take up and reproduce each spontaneous trend of the masses, turning it into a market to sell their wares. Often these days, and within the highly parasitical imperialist countries like the United States, the bourgeoisie sell actual commodities to the adherents of the spontaneous movement (think of the commercialism now surrounding the once supposedly “revolutionary” Black or queer liberation movements), but even when this is not happening, the bourgeoisie will bend these spontaneous elements into their own class interest and away from the interest of the workers and the masses, as Lenin explains in the below passage from What is to Be Done?:

>But why, the reader will ask, does the spontaneous movement, the movement along the line of least resistance, lead to the domination of bourgeois ideology? For the simple reason that bourgeois ideology is far older in origin than socialist ideology, that it is more fully developed, and that it has at its disposal immeasurably more means of dissemination.[26]

The spontaneous movement in the US today is only now finding its steps after a period of intense counterrevolution (counterrevolution that culminated in the fall of the USSR and the domination of American capital post-Cold War). Thus, it is severely tainted both by the reaction of the ruling-class (due to its adjacency to the highest level of capitalist-imperialists), and by a basic ignorance of socialism (which comes from the fall of the Communist countries, the subsequent reversal of socialist construction, and especially because the US is the primary proponent of capitalist philosophy worldwide).

In line with the spontaneous character of “socialism” today, the ACP has fully submitted to both the bourgeois class and its reaction, siding also with some of the biggest bourgeois political actors. Just like we can’t take their socialism seriously, we can’t take their anti-imperialism seriously either. They portray Russia,[27] China,[28] and a few others as socialist, or otherwise aligned with a socialist strategy, despite the fact that they oppress the world’s proletariat through their defense of private property and their ties to the world market; despite the fact that they are bourgeois countries. The ACP’s delusions in this regard are far too popular for us simply to dismiss as the workings of state intelligence agencies in Beijing and Moscow (even though this is where the delusional snake has its head) and are beyond the scope of this article.

The fact that they have gotten so cozy with sitting bourgeois governments is just another sign of their blatant opportunism, and their complete inability to make any firm distinctions between the current political climate and all its spontaneity on the one hand, and the tasks of socialism on the other. The ACP, like many organizations, accepts the full spontaneity of the masses -- and their reaction -- with open arms. The fact that they are catering to a particularly anti-DSA crowd is simply the place that their bourgeois handlers have wormed them into, allowing them to divert a progressive section of the masses away from a path of political development and, instead, put them to work for petty bourgeois and rivaling capitalist countries. The ACP and parties like them are part of the fabric of leftist organizing, revisionist and right-leaning fake “Communists” reflecting the contradictions of imperialism and competing bourgeois nations, and never rising above the current form of the spontaneous movement or the domination of the capitalists. In fact, they do their best to ensure the spontaneous movement doesn’t develop at all. The fact that it has developed and is developing further, away from the Democrat-led parliamentarianism that it has been under for some time, is about the only thing the opportunism of the ACP has latched onto that is progressive and good to emphasize, but that has little to do with the actions of the ACP or any of their bourgeois-backers, and a lot more to do with the truths of Marxism-Leninism, and the increasing violence of today’s capitalist-imperialism, both of which are having their effect on the masses.

For now though, and without the influence of a centralized Communist media group, the spontaneous movement in the United States will remain ineffective and reactionary. Our movement will learn, and outgrow its spontaneity, but not without the conscious actions of comrades today.

Until the people of this country are able to see with clearer vision than they do now, it will be the unfortunate task of this publication and all principled comrades to repeatedly report on the erroneous and, far too often, reactionary formations that will endlessly cascade upon the political stage due to the nascent revolt of the lower classes, and the amateurishness of the spontaneous movement in the US. As our current crisis in capitalist-imperial production continues to worsen, numerous political faces and groups will spring up with answers, most all of them representing bourgeois either domestically or abroad, and many calling themselves “Communist.” We will continue the task of thoroughly critiquing the inevitable failures in these organizations until the people rise up out of spontaneity and into a class conscious, anti-revisionist, and scientific (Marxist-Leninist) worldview, creating actually revolutionary organizations, a process which we understand can only occur through the actions of a centralized country-wide media group committed to the anti-revisionist struggle.

Sparkyl laid out the plan for this kind of organization in Where to Begin When We Already Started: Revisionism and Organizational Strategy, and invites all interested comrades to unite with us in this work.

Endnotes

[1] American Communist Party Plenary Committee. “Declaration of the American Communist Party.” https://acp.us/declaration.

[2] Ibid

[3] Hiley, Scott. “What if the people don’t want socialism?” October 21, 2020. https://cpusa.org/interact_cpusa/what-if-the-people-dont-want-socialism/

[4] Lenin, V. I. The State and Revolution. First published in 1918. Lenin Internet Archive. 1993,99.  https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/ch06.htm

[5] Lenin, V. I. “Critical Remarks on the National Question.” Prosveshcheniye. Nos. 10, 11, and 13. 1913. Lenin Collected Works. Vol. 20. Progress Publishers. 1972. Pg. 25.

[6] Executive Board American Communist Party (ACP). “ACP Chairman Detained and Interrogated by DHS.” February 25, 2025. https://acp.us/dispatches/2025/acp-chairman-detained-interrogated-dhs.

[7] American Communist Party Plenary Committee. “Declaration of the American Communist Party.” https://acp.us/declaration.

[8] Infrared. “Marxism is Not Woke: Clearing Marx’s Name.” 2023. https://showinfrared.substack.com/p/marxism-is-not-woke. June 24, 2023.

[9] Al-Din, Haz (@InfraHaz), “Why Marxism is not Woke: Proving beyond possible doubt that James Lindsay and other rightists are fundamentally wrong about Marxism, and that Marxist theory in the West is meaningless without the aid of Dugin and Heidegger’s thinking. [MASSIVE THREAD],” Twitter, June 23, 2023, https://x.com/InfraHaz/status/1672279455732215809?lang=en.

[10] Limonov, E., and A. Dugin. 1993. “Declaration on the Establishment of the NBP.” Web.Archive.org. National-Bolshevism. May 1, 1993. https://web.archive.org/web/20080921193029/http://www.nazbol.ru/rubr28/index0/249.html.

[11] Fenghi, Fabrizio*. It Will be Fun and Terrifying: Nationalism and Protest in Post-Soviet Russia*. University of Wisconsin Press. 2020

[12] Verini, James. “The Imperialist Philosopher Who Demanded the Ukraine War.” The New Yorker. March 1, 2025. https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-weekend-essay/the-imperialist-philosopher-who-demanded-the-ukraine-war.

[13] Faye, Emmanuel. Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy. New Haven: Yale University Press. 2010.  Pg. 205-207.

[14] Sherratt, Yvonne. Hitler’s Philosophers. Yale University Press. 2013. 122-125. https://z-lib.fm/book/5252038/d8e440/hitlers-philosophers.html

[15] Ibid, 116

[16] Constitution of the American Communist Party. October 12, 2024. https://acp.us/constitution.

[17] Ibid

[18] Program of the American Communist Party. October 12, 2024. https://acp.us/program.

[19] Infrared. “The Rise of MAGA Communism.” Substack. 18 Sep 2022. https://showinfrared.substack.com/p/the-rise-of-maga-communism.

[20] American Communist Party. “Carlos Garrido on the Education Program of the American Communist Party.” YouTube. March 18, 2025. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8OZT1JhDb20.

[21] American Communist Party. “The American Communist Party Program- Ft. Haz Al-Din.” YouTube. December 18, 2024. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkzOcyspH7Y. 22:23-22:48.

[22] Constitution of the American Communist Party. October 12, 2024. https://acp.us/constitution.

[23] Ibid

[24] Lenin, V.I. “The Historical Destiny of the Doctrine of Karl Marx.” 1913. Pravda. No. 50. 1 March 1913. Lenin Collected Works. Progress Publishers. 1975. Volume 18. Pages 582-585.

[25] Lenin, V. I..  1902. “What is to Be Done?”. Lenin’s Selected Works. Foreign Languages Publishing House.      1961. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/

[26] Ibid. Pg. 386.

[27] Infrared. “Russia is Still Fighting for Communism.” YouTube. May 16, 2023. https://youtu.be/sK6RLP7i5-w?si=gw81AnTjMpsEFKmG .

[28] u/FamousPlan101. “Recently, the Communist Party of China's Guangxi branch mentioned the American Communist Party in a presentation about the mission and duty of Communist Parties in the New Era.” Reddit. 28 Sep 2025. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskSocialists/s/uavNiUDOL7.

It's sad. Don't let your despair make you think otherwise, and don't let your sadness keep you from the work that needs to be done.

It's crucial that comrades be able to discern the conscious from the unconscious element, and learn to organize and empower the former. Instead of bowing to spontaneity, we must raise the spontaneity of the masses into professionalism and capability.

The term is thrown around a lot, but do you understand the labor aristocracy and its connection to imperialism? Check out the full article

Our plan for a country-wide media group builds off the Leninist strategy. We lay out this tactic in detail in our pamphlet, Where to Begin When We Already Started?. Here is a brief excerpt:

"As it stands, any proletarian who is in the least bit political now, not to mention revolutionary, is likely part of this spontaneous liberal ferment, part of the liberals’ never-ending stage production they call 'activism' and even 'revolution,' revolving around all the parading issues, sit-ins, protests, and the like that the opportunists direct them towards, trying (and failing) to bring some sense to it all and form a consistent worldview.

We build the labor outcomes we need when we can raise the prestige of Communism generally (which is at an all-time low) by sealing up these 'signs of ferment and active struggle' — these spontaneous and disunited manifestations of oppression — and reveal to the masses, again, that the contradictions plaguing the people are all symptoms of the primary antagonism of class oppression, and that Communism is the only consistently materialist (that is, scientific) philosophy which stands against that oppression, making its universal adoption by the masses inevitable. It is difficult to imagine a mass labor movement adopting Communism (which they must) without this kind of revelation happening among a good portion of the masses generally. It is ignorance to think that the low-level of esteem general society holds towards Communism now has not also translated into the class of the proletariat, which lives in this society and, moreover, has very little means of influencing it towards its own class opinion at all, since it is oppressed by the ruling class of the capitalists.

But the proletariat will change into a Marxist force for class revolution in due time, and our media group will be a primary agent of that change. Through our sound scientific socialist explanations of the antagonisms of society — antagonisms that so mystify the liberals and all interested members of the working class — we will reveal the necessity and the relevance of the Communist worldview again, which, because it unites workers under a revolutionary worldview in which they are the 'rulers,' can only help to hasten the organization of labor generally. Having orchestrated the ideological struggle along firm class lines, the media group will be well-equipped to orchestrate also the labor struggle, especially those labor elements that have 'grown-up' in the content we produce.

In addition to clearing Marxism of revisionist influence, our media group will supply the consistent worldview of Marxist dialectical materialism to the workers and to the masses generally via literary and multimedia content, exposing each isolated political 'issue' as a related consequence of our system of production, which any actual Marxist should be capable of doing to at least some degree. After engaging with our material across only a few of these 'issues,' the workers and the masses in general will have, in fact, begun the process of breaking their current narrow liberal understanding of separate 'issues,' and adopting a more correct holistic and class-conscious understanding. If they possess even a little of an understanding of their oppression by the capitalists, the workers who come in contact with our work will appreciate a class analysis, and, after coming in contact with our work across a wide range of 'social issues,' they will be pushed towards the scientific socialist view and full class-consciousness, becoming our staunchest supporters and willing comrades in service to the media group and to our movement."

Visit sparkyl.org for the full job descriptions, and send us an email if you think you'd make a good fit!

Title quote is from Lenin's "Socialism and Religion" from 1905. While a Communist Party should not demand atheism (since the religious question should not be "advanced to first place" as Lenin says), Marxism is a dialectical materialist worldview, and we must demand atheism from those "Marxists" who claim to instruct the masses.

Where there is inconsistent materialism and inconsistent atheism, there is certainly bourgeois idealism.

You can also listen to the audiobook on YouTube!

...

>Now we must speak of the world proletarian revolution; for the separate national fronts of capital have become links in a single chain called the world front of imperialism, which must be opposed by a common front of the revolutionary movement in all countries.

>–        J. V. Stalin, The Foundations of Leninism, 1924[1]

Introduction

No Communist should be listening too intently to the words of Caitlin Johnstone, the Australian “journalist” who has been an “anti-establishment” liberal “shock jock” on the internet for the last decade. However, we bring a pair of tweets she made on April 30^(th) to the attention of the comrades, because it is clear that a large portion of our movement is at risk of being just as ignorant as she is.

Context: her posts are in response to a violent stabbing of two Jewish men in the UK,[2] which has been portrayed by the media as a hate crime and an example of anti-Semitism.[3] Whether racially motivated or no, Miss Johnstone has fully taken the side of the stabber, and the theoretical alliance she makes with him is an especially good example of what is colloquially known as the “liberal-to-fascist pipeline,” which is a true phenomenon within the system of capitalist-imperialism that is only now beginning to be understood by the masses, and thus understood in very backwards ways. We must understand this phenomenon however, but not just so that we can dunk on the liberals. It is sad, but true that this “pipeline” is right at the socialist movement’s doorstep, sucking in and turning reactionary many would-be comrades; specifically those who bow to the national contradictions of our imperialist system, and are ignorant of, or confused on, the underlying economic contradictions that sit underneath and dictate the form of all national contradictions.

If you are confused reading this now, let’s shake some of the rust off your dialectical materialism as we explore the “pipeline” in more detail. First, we’ll let one enthusiastic “pipeline” traveler showcase it for us, and afterward explain the material motions of our current global situation that make the “pipeline” a growing concern for all progressive-minded people, and especially the Communists.

>"So two Jewish people got stabbed by a mentally ill guy in the UK, no one died, there’s no evidence that it was a hate crime or that it has any political relevance whatsoever, and yet it still dominated the news cycle way down here in Australia for a full day. What the fuck, man."

>"That guy’s going to get slammed with terrorism charges and spend the rest of his life in prison, all because he was unlucky enough to be off his meds in a Jewish neighborhood during an artificially manufactured moral panic about antisemitism."

^(4)Johnstone, Caitlin (@caitoz). “So two Jewish people...” & “That guy’s going to get...”. X. 30 Apr 2026.  https://x.com/caitoz/status/2050005730888126816.

Let’s not waste our time and effort dissecting every piece of this drivel. I’m sure Miss Johnstone will go on to write much worse things even (and probably already has), but we can leave a complete critique of her literary body to the rearguardists who like to milk every reactionary utterance for its perceived imports. As Marxists, we are concerned with the trends of the masses, and about the material forces that influence those trends. We reveal these trends to the people, and we guide them in appropriate actions towards each particular trend so that they are aware of the forces that influence their lives, and are given sound strategy to navigate them. We bring up Miss Johnstone’s posts, not to pick apart a backwards “thinker” for cheap applause from an intellectually impoverished crowd, but to raise the understanding of that crowd, to move through their “oohs” and “awes,” building a foundation of knowledge so they know and understand, clearly and in a practical way, that, yes, what so many people on the so-called “left” preach but hardly understand is, indeed, true, and happening at an alarming rate: the liberals are turning reactionary the world over, and the same way they inevitably always do, by bowing to national antagonisms and, according to their class interest (which is to keep capitalism intact, and thus to reject materialism and all class theory in the final view), sucking up the reaction of the bourgeoisie who promote them.

The “Two Sides” of the “Pipeline”

We won’t spend too much time either on the most obvious reaction directed against Palestinian, Iranian, and other national and cultural groups in the “Middle-East,”[f1] which is true, pernicious, and promoted by Western capital. The people of the Arabian peninsula and the colloquially known “Middle-East” more generally have never had peace ever since so-called “Great Powers” first developed their economies beyond the borders of their own nations. The region has been, and continues to be, a hotbed for the most rapid, brutal, and persistent imperial aggression, with the bourgeoisie of Israel, the United States, and the NATO alliance turning it into their personal playground for rapid accumulations, investments, and, especially, profit, all gained from the stolen land and labor of the indigenous population. The deplorably racist sentiments against the Arab ethnicity, Persian people, and other groups in the so-called “Middle-East,” which is pushed forward by Israel, the United States, and other mostly European powers – powers representative of one side of our “pipeline” in question – is in line with the violent aims of capitalist-imperialist accumulation in the region, and a phenomenon which is highly encompassing, dominant, and readily understood to everyone who cares to understand. Miss Johnstone understands the chauvinism of these powers, and even of the existence of at least this one side of the “pipeline” too. That is why she puts herself opposite it, agitating against anti-Arab bigotries and chauvinism and becoming a vocal opponent of both Israel and the United States. But, in doing so, and because she is a liberal without a class perspective, she rides the “pipeline’s” other side, the weaker and less prominent side that is born from the Palestinian perspective of the conflict, and births chauvinism towards the nationalities of the imperialist countries they oppose.

Opposite the interest of NATO and Western capital, the “pro-Palestine” side of the same “pipeline” in question reflects the interest and chauvinism of specifically the bourgeoisie in the “Axis of Resistance,” who are relatively weak on the global stage, but have found increasing support from the imperialists in the BRICS+ alliance, an alliance of supposedly “anti-imperialist” bourgeois nations who are increasingly being dominated by Chinese capital. The chauvinism they display towards nationals under NATO and Israel is, of course, completely understandable and even progressive in many ways. Palestine and Iran require widespread national sentiment to put up a defense against their oppressors in a complete and whole-society way, which, due to the violent antagonisms between their own “nations” and those of the aggressors’, breeds also chauvinism towards the nationalities of their aggressors. When it targets Americans, “the Resistance’s” chauvinism has more progressive character, since the United States is the most dominant imperial power in the world currently and, even while purely national chauvinism towards Americans (or any nationals) is not progressive for a socialist revolution (and thus, not for a Communist), chauvinism directed at Americans, for now at least, serves a progressive role in eroding the still dominant myth of American exceptionalism, and of serving as a crude foil by which American chauvinism, which is, in our current period, a far bigger and more deadly beast than that displayed by any other nationality, can be directly confronted in a general way within the masses.

However, things are different when we look at the national chauvinism targeting Israeli nationals. The “nation” of Israel has insidiously attempted (and succeeded in many ways) to tie the international Jewish cultural group to their deplorable national project. Thus, the chauvinism directed at Jewish people by the defenders of Palestine, though understandable and a direct response to the genocidal aggression of the Israeli state, lands on far more heads than just imperialist Zionists, and antagonizes an entire global population of Jewish workers who have (and often want) nothing to do with Israel, and whose national identifiers mark them for oppression the world over, even while that oppression is at a relative low today.

It is the “pro-Palestine” side, the more junior “side” of the “pipeline” that we focus on in this article because anti-Jewish sentiment plays a very dangerous, reactionary, and peculiar role in the capitalist-imperial system, and it is inexcusable for us as Communists or even progressives to engage in this kind of supposed “Palestinian solidarity” given the deadly consequences that will inevitably come by its normalization. More than this however, if we understand that the national chauvinism of both sides of a national contradiction builds reaction and, ultimately, fascists, we will be fully prepared to counteract the reaction caused by all national conflicts, and vastly more capable of revolutionary tasks. Communists know that the motions of capitalist-imperialism are always creating specifically national movements due to the high-degree of violence inflicted on certain nationalities over and against others in the course of production. We Communists must educate the people on this fact, and on the fact that every conflict between “nations” (in addition to generally being in the interest of the bourgeoisie and not the working class) births a “liberal-to-fascist pipeline,” along with national chauvinists who serve as its fascistic “right wing.” We reveal these facts about nationalism to the people so that they know why they need a class view, and why nationalism, the rivalry of the capitalists, and the countries they control are expired features of the productive forces – riddled with contradictions – on their way to the ashbin of history due to our global system of production and exchange.

Regarding our specific “pipeline” in question, it is growing along with the growing national conflict faced by the Palestinians. As this conflict continues to become more antagonistic, reaches a higher pitch, and grows wider, it ceases to be a purely regional conflict and takes on international character. This is because it takes on international capital, splitting the world’s bourgeoisie into increasingly hostile camps. This split is not random, and certainly not due to their moral or ideological position on Palestinian liberty, but on the position of their respective capital in question, and along the multiple poles of imperialist accumulation, with the biggest and most dominant two being the NATO and BRICS+ alliances today, which are dominated by the United States and China respectively. In suite with the broadening of the conflict, and pulled along by the greater influence of the bourgeois classes who agitate their every interest amongst the people, the liberals and the masses of society generally are widening their understandings of global politics beyond a critique of the Israeli state alone. This critique, even when including Israel’s open political allies on the geopolitical stage, is becoming increasingly insufficient at explaining the problem of escalating violence, bigotry, and reaction the world over,[f2] and so they must adopt a broader view. The liberals need an international position in order to resist an international enemy. In lieu of the correct class view however, “international Zionism” and idealist witch hunting for conspiracies that Israel is supposedly behind are becoming the shaky and bigoted “answer” the liberals have stitched together to meet the problem. Idiotic, non-material terms, or, we should say, terms whose only material quality is their falling decidedly square on the heads of the actual global Jewish population – terms like “cultural Zionism,” “spiritually Israeli,” and others that conflate Judaism with reaction generally – are becoming more popular, and, even while these ideas are a response to Palestinian genocide and represent “good intentions” in at least some cases, they are convenient scapegoats, detracting from materialism and the economic critique of capitalist-imperialism, lending themselves completely to racism and reaction.

Miss Johnstone acts within this bad trend, as well as the “liberal-to-fascist” pipeline, by politicizing, in a spontaneous and liberal way, individual violence against Jewish persons who, as far as Miss Johnstone or anyone in the public knows, has nothing to do with the Palestinian genocide; namely, civilians in the United Kingdom. Despite whatever angle Israeli media and the NATO alliance more broadly wants to take on the story, Miss Johnstone rises above none of her opposing chauvinism when she downplays the stabbing (saying “no one died”) and even valorizes the attacker, removing him from personal culpability and painting him as a force of nature due to his history of mental illness.[f3] While it is probably true that news of the stabbing would not be international without the influence of Israel, Miss Johnstone would not have viewed the stab victims so callously had the victims not been Jewish, and had she not defined herself, through the course of her “journalism,” as a vocal proponent for Palestinian national liberty. It is good that she is on that side of the conflict, the side of the oppressed, but she has twisted herself into a force of oppression for other nationals, particularly the already vulnerable international Jewish population, and this is a dialectical reality neither she nor many liberals are likely to understand.

Nationalism and Imperialism

Israel acts in the interest of capital and never alone – no country ever does. No single cultural group, especially the oppressed Jewish people, have the ability to conquer or dominate the rest of humanity or even very many humans, relatively speaking. So long as they stand on their own or in any combination of nationalities, a movement of such kind will inevitably disintegrate due to the contradictions caused by the differing national markets and differing interest of the bourgeoisie attached to them. Reactionaries do always lose, but why, and why is nationalism still alive today?

Within the global capitalist-imperialist system, nationality is the only social unifier within the masses remaining[f4]^(,[f5]) in bourgeois liberal society, and so it is utilized by capitalists to maintain their market and state, even though both (not to mention the relations of the people underneath them) become more and more integrated within the global market, making nationalism as a concept and motive force of human life more and more irrelevant as a result. That is why, despite all the posturing of the reactionaries, it is becoming increasingly difficult to unify around nationalism at all, even while the bourgeoisie will continuously prop it up for the people’s slaughter.

The founding of Israel itself is a good example of how imperialism and the capitalists stand above nationalism,[f6] and utilize it for their own purposes; how nationalism has become even more clearly their property. The fact of the matter, and the truest story about the matter, is that in 1948 certain Jewish bourgeois and their hangers-on in the Jewish lower-classes, deluded as they were with reactionary nationalist fervor, were “promoted” into hegemonic power in the Middle-East in order to maintain imperialism’s wider interests in the region. Despite many ignorant Americans, fascists, anti-Semites, and the policy of Iran state media, which loves to portray Americans and the world more generally as victims of Israel,[f7] Israel was created and is actively maintained by the international capitalist class, primarily by its members in the United States. Why? To protect their interest in the oil-rich regions of the “Middle-East,” which, in addition to being a huge source of one of the most primary resources used in production today, is also a historical region where energetic capitalist-imperial accumulation (investments, returns, the selling of weapons, and the rapid snatching of indigenous land, labor, and resources into the imperialist camp) has been happening for decades (for reasons far too numerous to go into here). Israel continues to support (and be supported by) American and “Western” imperialism today, even as it pursues its own imperialist agendas in the region on behalf of its own bourgeois class. It is because, especially these days, Israel is effectively in a war for its survival, requiring greater and greater quantities of weapons, supplies, and funds to carry out this war, that the American people and the American government see the shadow of Israel looming more and more over their own country. This is not Israel “puppeting” the United States, but Israel, a puppet of the United States and the capital behind it, becoming larger, more expensive, and unruly as it is forced to aggressively pursue its vile settler-colonial project or be crushed by the weight of the dialectical opposition to that project, which is developing alongside it, finding allies, and becoming more capable, as it always has been, despite the minor “valleys” of relatively “peaceful” co-existence in the overall trend. This opposition is stronger now than it ever has been, reflected clear as crystal in the missiles exploding on Israel’s national ground.

The reward Zionist reactionaries received when they “won” their “homeland” was a death sentence – for many Palestinians in the most direct way, which is obvious to everyone, but also for the majority of Israelis in the final (and not too distant) view, which is obvious to a Marxist, and is being proven true in real-time. There is no question that the contradictions plaguing an active 21^(st) century settler-colonial ethno-state in the populous “Middle-East” will end not only with the collapse of Israel, but of Zionist reaction itself to a significant degree. Every person (especially the lower classes) within Palestine and Israel is unsafe due to these conditions; conditions which are only beginning to be understood by sections of the masses, but will become more understood as they become more antagonistic.

Anti-Semitism and the Reactionaries’ Myth

While Israeli bourgeoisie and their supposedly “Jewish” state are carrying out the genocide of Arab people with reckless abandon, understandably muddying the public’s understanding of Jewish oppression and doing a tremendous disservice to the already beleaguered Jewish international population, anti-Semitism is a historical fact, not invented by Israel and not “artificially manufactured,” as Miss Johnstone suggests. This is true even while Israeli bourgeois are undoubtedly weaving conspiracy after conspiracy, and, yes, certainly promoting the news of the stabbing in the UK according to their own national interest.

The existence of global anti-Semitism and the oppressed status of Jewish people is only “debatable” by people who have already been degenerated by reaction to a significant degree; these, in fact, being most represented by politically aware fascists. The fascists promote a hyper-nationalist, mystical (don’t laugh; the power of idiots is real!), and idealist system in which the phenotypes of people, along with their nationalities, are hierarchically categorized, with the whole paradigm set up as opposing the “pure” nationality or race, the dominant one in the country that the fascist movement represents. In these disgusting theories, Jewish bogeymen play a central role even today, and not simply because fascists are racists in a one-sided way, but because anti-Semitism fulfills a practical purpose organizationally in their deplorable racial hierarchies.

There are many more besides the fascists who say (though, of course, not scientifically) that there is a disproportionate amount of Jewish people who are capitalists and media bourgeoisie in the Western European countries; that Jewish people own the commanding heights of the economy at a disproportionately greater rate when compared to their number in the general population. This is not a study that has ever been performed, or ever should be performed, but, nonetheless, when this “fact” is revealed to degenerated sections of the masses and promoted as part of a reactionary theory, it antagonizes national conflicts within the masses, and organizes them not only against “the Jews” and their supposed servants in the other minorities, allowing for accumulation against the lower-classes, but against also the high-levels of the liberal economy and state that acts against their movement, building an incredibly backwards and reactionary “critique” of “capitalists” by shoving their “evil rich Jew” caricature onto any bourgeois that oppose the fascist project. The fascists of the last century organized their societies and militarized them against the masses, maintaining the rule of capital and enriching themselves off of both the misery of the new slave-like lower classes they had created, and the decaying imperial market around them, carrying out the latter by making alliances with some members of the big capitalist-imperial financier class while liquidating those in opposition through combined political power and the use of racist ideas of Jewish conspiracies. In doing so, they created a complete racial theory of counterrevolution that is still alive and active. Any anti-Jewish sentiment today inevitably slides right down the “pipeline” and into this living tradition of active fascist organizing.

Still, suppose we must offer some postulation for why the shadow of “the Jewish bogeyman” is so clear a post for the backwards mysticism of the reactionaries to rally around, but we will make this deplorable task as brief and as comprehensible as possible, and hopefully never speak of it again. We can make the educated guess (and many others have as well) that the disproportionate amount of Jewish persons in media and finance industries in the “West,” if such a pattern does exist, would be due to Jewish persons being relegated to these industries through the course of history. Media and finance are dominating industries today, but they were once puny, insignificant, and relatively unprofitable at one period of time; media even more so since it is a relatively new industry entirely.

In the feudal relation, which preceded capitalism, wealth was wholly hereditary, and power passed from family head to family head as per the laws of feudalism. Markets themselves were extremely local, where they existed at all, and money was rare. The serfs produced for themselves and their lord, who represented the ruling class and had life and death rights over all his subjects by birth. In early feudalism, the lords received their goods as tribute, the physical goods produced by the peasant-serfs, which they would use for armies, bribery, feasts, socializing, etc. The Christian rulers, who dominated the feudal relation, enforced Christianity, so it was that the Jewish people in Europe, who could not often be a subject of a Christian king (at least one in good standing) and definitely had no hope of owning land or productive forces (which was nearly impossible even for “good” Christians) often gravitated to speculation, to trading, and, eventually, to “money-lending,” forced to get by in the relatively mobile, new, undeveloped, and not even very profitable early feudal markets that were taboo to Christians, and ostensibly “outside” the general economic structure, even while they would grow into dominating forces of global production over the centuries.

And that is how history developed – turning against feudalism to bury it entirely and enshrining speculation, market motions, and, to a much lesser degree, regarding the sphere of ideological production today, the American “Hollywood” entertainment industry as driving forces of societies the world over in the system of capitalist-imperialism. This was no even march of history, however, and the chasm certain Jewish speculators would create as they ascended their families into the moneyed class from their merchant beginnings enflamed the “proto-national”[8] antagonisms of “good” “Christian” Europe, and especially the ire of the decaying ruling class of feudalists. While the myth of “the international Jew” controlling society is certainly false, and even the supposition that Jewish people are overrepresented in the economy is threadbare at best, pogroms, the systematic murdering of Jewish people, along with the confiscation of their property, is a historical fact. When we look at the development of any European or “Western” nation, genocidal acts are routinely committed against the Jewish population, with capitalist-imperialism and the world market spreading this trend well beyond the confines of Europe. The dialectics of history are such that Jewish people specifically, as a religion that has grown up opposite dominant Christianity (a contradiction Marx talks about in “On The Jewish Question”^(6)) and as a “nation” without a nation (a contradiction Stalin talks about when defining “national autonomy” in Marxism and the National Question^(7)), have often been integrated into society not as a full member, but as dialectical opposition to the members, fulfilling particular roles in production not fillable by the majority of society due to their prejudices, and thus becoming a target of that prejudice itself. This is, in fact, the role that all minorities play within capitalist-imperialism to some extent, but, regarding the Jewish population specifically, this has been played out in a complete way, even while it will continue to play all the way up until the overthrow of the imperial system, since every petite-bourgeois reactionary movement has been granted sound and lasting theory from the fascist movements of the last century.

History now must contend with the fact that there is, within the superstructure, ready-made theory on how to draw ridiculous anti-Semitic patterns in the productive forces, form demented racial hierarchies of supposed “enemies,” and terrify the whole reactionary world with horrifying stories that entice them to kill and destroy in defense of their “nation,” demanding that all society subordinate themselves to the crudest and most inhuman form of capitalist dictatorship in the process. Moreover, it must contend with the fact that these theories will always be propagated by the unsettled and reactionary petty bourgeois the world over until their defeat under socialism. Until fascism is defeated at the root, it will strike against every nationality, but it strikes against Jewish people in a very central way, despite some Jewish bourgeoisie’s taste for fascism in the form of Zionism and the Israeli settler-colonial state.

It’s horrible to ignore the oppression Jewish people have faced and continue to face on account of their nationality, just as it is horrible to ignore the oppression Palestinians, Iranians, or any ethnicity or nationality faces when they are violently targeted by the imperialists in the capitalist system. It is especially shameful for a “Communist” to be ignorant of the fact that a conscious section of fascists are actively working to portray every evil of our capitalist system as the result of powerful Jewish conspiracies, and working also to remove the historical record of Jewish oppression entirely. Obviously we have no support for Israeli nationalism, or their settler-colonial state, but for a Communist to forget or sideline the anti-Semitic feature of fascist organizing, and to ride the “pipeline” of the liberals themselves for cheap nationalist “solidarity” and applause from a widely ignorant “anti-Israel” crowd is to bow entirely to spontaneity, to be an opportunist from the viewpoint of the class, and to risk becoming a reactionary oneself (don’t forget that we are what we do!).

The fascists are already finding their “Jewish bogeyman” an easy idea to propagate due to the evils being done in the “Middle-East” by mostly American and Israeli capital in the name of Judaism, and they don’t need any help from Caitlin Johnstone or anyone else; especially a “Communist.” Jewish people in the UK or anywhere, as a group or individuals, cannot be held responsible for the sins of the Israeli settler-colonial nation, just as no actually thinking person could say that the Arab ethnicity represents, or has concrete ties to, fundamentalist Islamic terror groups. It is reprehensible to dehumanize Jewish people or any minority in such a way, or to twist the news of violence against them with conspiracy, as admittedly, the Israeli government and her allies, the “Axis of Resistance,” Miss Johnstone, and the fascists have all done with this story in different ways.

Conclusion

Unlike all the reactionaries and Miss Johnstone liberals of the world, Communists know that nations of all varieties raise up financiers and capitalists of all nationalities and cultures. We resist the system that produces bourgeoisie and nationalism wholesale, agitating against all national chauvinism and defending always the rights of every minority and of the whole working class to live in peace. This is why we advocate for the real and lasting peace that eliminates all nations and classes, and that can only come from a socialist revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat, which will carry society through the contradictions of both capitalist-imperialism and socialism to usher in the communist mode of production.

It is her chauvinism – not solidarity – that makes Miss Johnstone annoyed at hearing news of Jewish stab victims. The “liberal-to-fascist” pipeline, or, as we should say, the national contradiction, has already degenerated her to the point that she cannot accept the stabbing of two Jewish bystanders in a correct way, seeing them properly as victims of violence that exists decidedly outside the purview of Israeli national power. Instead, and like all reactionaries, she must put forward her own version of “fake news,” declaring the situation not only the result of a perpetrator who was “unlucky” and “off his meds” (a disturbing orientation to take towards a stabber), but also portraying it as a “moral panic” concerning “manufactured” anti-Semitism.

We will see many more similarly blatant chauvinistic sentiments against both Jewish people and Arab people alike by the participants of this “pipeline.” Let’s not, as Marxists, ever be confused at where it ends. Many, and on both the Israeli and Palestine poles, will follow chauvinism and reaction all the way down to conscious fascism, and it is our job, as Marxists, to struggle against this chauvinism with a materialist and class view of the situation.

>The Jewish bourgeois are our enemies, not as Jews but as bourgeois.  The Jewish worker is our brother.

>Any kind of hatred against any nation is inadmissible and shameful.

–        V. I. Lenin, “Decree on the Council of People’s Commissars on the Uprooting of the Anti-Semitic Movement,” 1918 [8]

Footnotes

[f1] In actuality all national chauvinism is directed at a vast international grouping of nationals, since every nation today is itself a grouping of many different nationalities. Thus it must always take on international character, making chauvinism incapable of staying regulated against any one or group of nationalities in the course of global conflict, even while it must necessarily make delineations amongst the nationalities to regenerate itself.

[f2] “Racism,” “violence,” and “bigotry” are secondary contradictions that have the capitalist-imperial mode of production itself as their primary causation, and thus increase in step with the increase in the antagonism of that more primary contradiction.

[f3] We’ll note here that national chauvinism, as a primary chauvinism, will also lead to secondary chauvinisms in line, reflecting also on other groups. Miss Johnstone’s post also expresses chauvinism towards the mentally-ill, de-facto portraying them as violent if they are unmedicated. 

[f4] “National differences and antagonism between peoples are daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto.”^(4) It’s worth clarifying that, while this quote from The Manifesto is right in saying that antagonism between peoples is vanishing, the peoples are still forced to antagonize each other due to the antagonisms of the bourgeoisie, who the people are chained to in numerous economic, political, and sociological ways. Even while social intercourse and the productive forces removes national distinctions within the masses, the bourgeoisie will still hold up their remnants, or event new ones for the people to destroy each over in war. This will not stop until the socialist revolution makes it stop, and replaces nationalism with the kind of international class solidarity that is conducive to the productive forces.

[f5] The nation is itself is a bourgeois development of the territorial and ancestral claims of lords under the feudal relation. As the bourgeoisie centralized their state and market post-feudalism, they turned all the subjects of ruling monarchs into “free” wage-slaves, supposedly united under their common ancestry as a “nation.” They still, however, required “the King’s” bureaucracy, his army, his dominion over the lower-classes, and his territory. How else would they suppress the lower classes, divert their labor into bourgeois profit, and defend their market against rivals? These “kernels” of the feudal relation that preceded liberal democracy are still alive and well within the liberal nation, which, despite no longer being a kingdom with subjects, reproduces similar oppressive power dynamics between a national state and its national citizens.

[f6] Nationalism is a secondary contradiction in relation to the primary contradiction of capitalist-imperialism.

[f7] This is in line with Iran’s war strategy. Iran cannot bite off both the US and Israel, and so they attempt to decouple them, focusing on the weaker and more accessible of the two (Israel) and biding its time on the stronger by producing “Anti-Israel” propaganda campaigns which paints the US as a misguided and foolish sidekick, but not as a conscious aggressor, which has the dual effect of isolating the current pro-Israel US administration from the rest of the country, dramatically reducing the US’ ability to carry out war, and also of potentially isolating Israel so they can be defeated.

[f8] It’s more accurate to say that this is a religious antagonism, but this wording mystifies the fact that religion was the primary unifier of the masses in the feudal period, to be replaced by nationalism in the age of capitalism and bourgeois democracy.

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