Emerican Johnson and Luna Nguyen are a couple, and they host YouTube channels that exist to teach people about communism and socialism. Emerican hosts NonCompete, and Luna hosts Luna oi! And they very frequently appear on each other’s channels and share resources with each other. That’s the spirit of sharing, aligned with the true nature of communism!

Communism and anticaptialism in general is very relevant to the resistance to Gen AI. Because Gen AI is a product of capitalism fighting to keep on growing as it collapses, and communism is the antidote to capitalism. Gen AI tries to kill multiple birds with one stone for our evil billionaire overlords, such as Sam Altman, Satya Nadella, and Elon Musk. Hold on, I heard that through his SpaceX stock market financial scam, he’s now the world’s first trillionaire. Americans in general are now likely the poorest they’re been since the Great Depression, despite being the most “productive” ever. It’s common for Americans to turn down ambulances when they have a medical crisis, because they can’t afford the ambulance, nor the hospital care. So where the hell are everyone’s pitchforks?

Luna was born and raised in Vietnam. And the Vietnamese army defeated the American imperialist invaders in April 1975. So chances are that Luna has known a sovereign and communist Vietnam her entire life.

Ironically, Emerican’s name sounds like parents being creative with altering the spelling of American. And he’s most likely American by birth. (Gee, I should have asked them, to confirm my assumptions, eh?) One thing that I do remember from watching NonCompete is that, like me, Emerican briefly had a right libertarian phase. Hopefully many, many years ago. Decades ago! We’re very close in age, and I got over my libertarian phase by about 2002 at the latest. I got to experience poverty as a solo adult for the first time. So the worldview that the Foundation for Economic Education brainwashed me into through the early web of the late 1990s collapsed under the weight of the material conditions that I had to survive. (They convinced me to envision “Big Government” as a proxy for my extremely abusive biomom, whom I’ve long since gone no contact with.)

Emerican and I probably had to do way more unlearning than Luna, because we were indoctrinated from birth by American pro-capitalist propaganda. I was born and raised in Canada by a British immigrant father, so I got indoctrinated by both American and British propaganda. We were both born during the final years of the Cold War and acquired legal adulthood around 9/11, so you could only imagine how intense our indoctrination was. We were told that communism is violent totalitarianism. Turns out, that’s a colonialist projection.

Thankfully, Luna made a video a few years ago that debunks the lies of a Vietnamese American who has a self serving incentive to lie about Vietnamese communism. Although it’s mainly Vietnam specific, what Luna says about communism in Vietnam can be applied to communism in general.

Emerican’s recent video on capitalist indoctrination resonated with me:

Karl Marx defined communism:

Communism is the positive supersession of private property as human self-estrangement (alienation), and hence the true appropriation of the human essence through and for man. It is the complete restoration of man to himself as a social, i.e., human being, a restoration which has become conscious and which takes place within the entire wealth of previous periods of development. This communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism; it is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature, and between man and man, the true resolution of the conflict between existence and being, between objectification and self-affirmation, between freedom and necessity, between individual and species. It is the solution of the riddle of history and knows itself to be the solution.

Marx was from the 19th century, so I’ll try to translate that into 21st century (Canadian) English for you:

Communism liberates people from our dystopia, where the very few capitalist wealth hoarders steal the resources that we produce. That’s a process which alienates us from our labour. When the resources we produce are stolen from us by capitalists, those resources are called private property.

Through our communist liberation, we can collectively leverage our true nature as social beings who recognize that sharing resources and collaboration are what strengthens us. Not brutal “every man for himself” individualism, where a few pathologically greedy people born into lucky circumstances benefit by taking as much from the rest of us as possible. We can then collectively benefit from the entire wealth of previous periods of development.

Sharing resources for collective benefit is the natural tendency of humanity, therefore communism allows us to fully realize our human potential. No longer will humans oppose nature, we will be unified with nature. Also, we can materialize abstract concepts without conflicting with our self-affirmation. Freedom and necessity, and humans as individuals and as a species will also no longer be in conflict.

When communism is realized, we can properly understand humanity’s greatest problems throughout our history, and resolve them with solutions that are now inherently obvious.

In a nutshell, humans are naturally social animals. I can be a loner introvert who needs a lot of solitude, but I’m still just as interdependent as everyone else. I can still have as much solitude as I want under communism! But we can easily share material resources and human talents to assure that everyone is well housed, fed, and provided the best medical care that’s possible through our scientific understanding. That’ll free us to pursue self-actualization, our hobbies, and our passions. Because we won’t waste so much energy on basic survival. The vast majority of the value we produce is stolen from us, and hoarded at the top. The Gen AI clanker techbros clearly want to take from us the pleasurable work of being human; art, imagination, thinking, dreaming, to burden us with tedious , backbreaking labour, while taking away people’s ability to think for themselves. With the technological productivity gains from the period roughly from the dawn of industrialization to… let’s say 2010 or so, we can produce an abundance of food, housing, clothing, and other material needs with very little work by few people. And because it won’t be stolen from us, we can enjoy leisurely lives, driven by our passions.

Emerican and Luna live in Vietnam. Lucky them!

Here are essential links for you to check out Emerican and Luna’s body of work.

LunaOi.com, a barebones website with links to Luna’s YouTube and Twitch.

Non-Compete.com is just slightly less barebones because it includes the latest NonCompete and LunaOi! videos and a merch shop.

Luna Oi on Comradery, like a socialist Patreon. She’s on the OG Patreon too. And here’s Luna’s YouTube channel.

Non-Compete on Comradery and on Patreon. And here’s Emerican’s YouTube channel.

They also have Banyan House, their own publisher of books on communism. I own the intellectual property rights to my very soon upcoming book Technofascism Survival Guide (it’s the final days to get in your late pledges, as I publish the eBook before June 2026 is over), so maybe I will discuss a deal with them. They got to be less exploitative than O’Reilly and Wiley have been.

Kim Crawley: As people who do a lot of work and put a lot of creativity and thought into making YouTube videos about Marxism and Vietnam, has the torrent of Gen AI slop on YouTube impacted how many NonCompete and LunaOi! subscribers see your human made videos?

Emerican Johnson: Certainly. It seems like AI first started to impact short format content. I noticed it myself when watching shorts on YouTube, and we started getting comments from viewers saying things like, “finally, information that’s not from an AI voice.” The vast majority of our audience is pretty passionately opposed to generative AI, which is to be expected, and that’s broadly true across the internet. People generally aren’t enjoying AI. This is reflected in trends we’re seeing such as “self-referential language” becoming more prominent in YouTube videos (referenced 12 minutes into this video). A lot of analysts are saying that this sort of language – basically, just, YouTubers talking about themselves in first person – is leading to notably higher audience retention rates. And this indicates that people are looking for authentic humans amid the onslaught of AI slop.

But I want to point out that this isn’t really new. AI is certainly exacerbating the problem, but people have been going to YouTube and TikTok and Instagram and such for parasocial human connection for a long time, now. Well over a decade. And that, I believe, is because capitalism has eroded our human connections and our sense of community.

It’s no secret that Western capitalist nations are experiencing loneliness crises, and what I find really disturbing is that tech bro billionaires like Zuckerberg and Musk are pitching AI as the cure to loneliness. As if having a chatbot companion can and should replace real human connection. This, to me, seems like the logical conclusion of a campaign by the ruling class to sever us off from each other, a situation that’s been intentionally cultivated over the course of many generations. But I don’t think their plan can possibly work. It’s anti-scientific. Because human beings are social animals, and we seem to be instinctively repulsed by artificial connections. This is something I first learned when I was working in marketing.

Back in the 2000s when I was deep in that industry, there was a huge trend in advertising and marketing of “chasing cool,” and it revolved around seeking “authenticity.” So marketing researchers were realizing that people are instinctively repulsed by what seems like marketing, they want to identify with authentic human culture and social trends. People have been seeking out and longing for real human connection for a long time, and capitalism has been eroding our social bonds, and trying to replace them with corporatized garbage. First they pushed us all onto social media networks, so if you wanted to keep up with your real life friends, you’d have to join Facebook or whatever. Then over time they gradually and intentionally shifted it so you were seeing less and less of your friends and family and more and more corporate marketing slop. So now we have Zuckerberg saying explicitly that Facebook is NOT a platform for connecting with people you know in real life. So they are trying to sever us off from each other.

The ruling class loves AI because they believe it will give them perfect and total control over not just information but over how workers socialize. They think this will be a pathway to complete domination of workers. But I think they might be overplaying their hands, and that’s why people are leaving these platforms in droves. You have millions of people leaving Facebook and Twitter now, and withdrawing to smaller chat groups and such where we can talk to our fellow human beings. I think this trend reflects the fact that workers are finally getting fed up with artificial connection and alienation and I hope we, as socialists, can leverage this natural and organic trend and use it to help teach class consciousness to workers. Because this is first and foremost a class issue. This is about the ruling class owning the means of information production and, increasingly, the means of socialization.

Luna Nguyen: We need to be very careful when we choose videos or pictures for our videos, to make sure it’s not AI. We get a lot of feedback from people who say they appreciate that we avoid using AI slop. We have also had a couple of situations where we got a picture from what we thought was a reputable site, like one time EJ got a picture from Wired Magazine assuming it was a real picture, and it turned out to be AI generated. And some audience members pointed that out.

And we’ve also had situations where we were accused of using AI photos when we were actually using real historic photos. So this is a major problem, because it shows that AI has people questioning things that are true and also makes it harder to find and deliver the truth. I believe this is the goal of the ruling class: to make everyone confused, to make everyone fight over who is and isn’t using AI, to make the truth something that the wealthy can control so they have plausible deniability when they get caught doing something bad, or they can accuse their enemies of doing something bad using AI. In a low-certainty environment, the side with the most resources have much more over what is seen as true, and that’s exactly what the ruling class wants.

Crawley: What advice would you give to Marxists who want to create videos and podcasts, while surviving this Gen AI late stage capitalism dystopia?

Johnson: The first thing anyone who wants to get involved with mass education must do is learn the fundamentals, and to us, that means learning Dialectical and Historical Materialism. That’s why we are focused right now on completing the translation of Vietnam’s curriculum and trying to get as many people as we can to read the free eBooks of Luna’s translations. We strongly believe that this philosophy is the greatest weapon we have for defending and advancing the interests of the working class. Everything else, like learning how to use a microphone or edit a video, is much easier these days than it was when we first started our channels, there is a huge wealth of information on how to do the technical aspects of content production.

But what’s much harder to find is solid information on how to think critically, how to provide meaningful and accurate analysis, how to deliver content that will resonate with people and help people to solve the problems we face. But if you learn how to look at things from a comprehensive and historical perspective- which Dialectical and Historical Materialism enable us to do- then suddenly you have an edge over everyone else who is shouting into the void and bickering. Because you can provide clarity and substance. You also need to try to find comrades to work with who share your values and worldview. We need to try to de-individualize content creation, build more collectives and media cooperatives and network them together so that over time we become more and more institutionally organized and ideologically coherent. This is honestly the only way we can survive, by working together and building collective strength, because the algorithm is getting increasingly hostile to individual creators who are going against the grain of capitalism.

Nguyen: You have to equip yourself with knowledge to tell what is AI and what’s not AI, and be aware of what AI slop can do to people. You have to understand that heavy use of AI degrades critical thinking skills and this is something the ruling class wants. They don’t want us thinking critically. Speaking as a Vietnamese person, this isn’t really new. AI is a new tool for confusing and manipulating us, but the West has been using their media power for decades to spread misinformation about AI. Most Westerners have had a false perception of my country since long before LLMs and generative AI images were a thing.

So the fundamentals haven’t really changed. People need to learn a comprehensive framework for analysis, which is why we focus so much on teaching Dialectical Materialist analysis, which forces you to look carefully and deeply at a subject from as many angles as possible and to look at the historical development of a subject. This makes us much more resistant to all forms of manipulation including AI.

Crawley: Have you seen people claim to be Marxist and yet support Gen AI?

Johnson: It’s a minority opinion, but yes, I have seen it. There are those who say we should use every tool at our disposal. The problem with that line of thinking is that AI is not a tool that’s at our disposal. It’s dominated by the ruling class. (Kim Crawley: Also, every “prompt” wastes massive amounts of water and furthers environmental destruction on our already dying planet.) So any technological strategy needs to take that into consideration. I myself am a tech nerd, and I’ve always tried to stay informed about the latest technologies. So I have dabbled with LLMs just to keep myself up to date on what they’re capable of, what they can do. And I have yet to see an LLM that can come anywhere close to providing anything that’s even remotely close to good Marxist analysis, for instance.

LLMs are incapable of rational thought. What they are good at is spitting out text that “seems Marxist” aesthetically. It uses a lot of the right buzzwords. But it strings them together in ways that just do not reflect Marxist thought or analysis at all. It’s like they say, “AI seems intelligent until you ask it about something you have some expertise in.” That’s how it is with political analysis. If we were to start relying on AI for our political messaging and analysis we’d be making a huge mistake. I think that’s something the fascists are doing, and it’s weakening their position. I think a lot of reactionary tech bro billionaires and political leaders have started to develop AI psychosis, they’re starting to believe the garbage that AI feeds them. And I hope that trend continues. “Never interrupt your enemies when they’re making a mistake,” as they say. We should definitely stay informed about AI, we should know what it’s capable of, and if there really are use cases where it can come in handy I’m not dogmatically opposed to it.

But for me, personally, I haven’t seen LLMs or generative image AI put out anything that I would want to use in my political work. Especially now that the costs of AI are becoming more clear. I think humans have a huge edge over AI when it comes to creative and political work, like, it’s not even close.

Nguyen: One very concerning trend in Vietnam is that a lot of older Vietnamese people (especially boomers) are fascinated with AI and they think it’s amazing technology, and we are even having the government push AI in concerning places such as ideological work, in schools, and in journalism. Younger communists like me in Vietnam are concerned with these trends and we’re speaking out but it will take a lot of work to try to educate the older generation about the problems of this technology because they don’t have as deep of a connection with technology, they didn’t grow up with technology like many of us have. So this, to me, is a generational divide that younger Marxists in Vietnam are going to have to take a leading role in solving.

Crawley: How might have Marx, Engels, Rosenberg, Gramsci, Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Mao, or Lenin reacted to Gen AI?

Johnson: I think it’s pretty clear that they would have loathed this technology, precisely because all the people you mentioned were truth-seekers. Dialectical and Historical Materialism is, above all, a systematic way of pursuing truth. LLMs don’t seek truth. They generate the illusion of truth, which is really just an automated form of sophistry. It’s exactly the sort of thing Marx and Lenin and Engels attacked viciously in polemics like The German Ideology and Anti-Duhring and Empirio-Criticism. Marxism is absolutely and inherently opposed to false consciousness, and with LLMs you are much more likely to get false consciousness than truth, especially when you start asking important and complex questions.

Nguyen: Ho Chi Minh was a poet and an artist and he valued human minds, human power, social connection, and community. I believe Ho Chi Minh as well as Marx and Engels and Lenin and all other communists of past generations would have been very aware and very weary of the dangers of AI. Especially since the ones pushing AI the hardest are the ruling class. And not just the ruling class, but the most reactionary and fascistic elements of the ruling class.

Crawley: How can all the energy building in the US to resist datacenters be leveraged into organizing revolution to stop capitalism?

Johnson: Oh, this is a fantastic way to build up socialism. But we need to build up institutions, first, like working class parties and organizations that can leverage these kinds of “pain points” (to use some corporate jargon) to build class consciousness and to harness the will and energy of the masses. Of course that will involve producing agitation propaganda as well as going into communities and organizing resistance against these datacenters, but we are way behind on our institutional infrastructure. We need to do a lot more organizing and we need to develop our ideological lines so that when we go in and work among the people we have clear answers and clear solutions for the problems our communities are facing.

Nguyen: This is a good opportunity to build community on a local level. The first step is to talk to your neighbors about why they oppose these data centers. Learn from the people, and from your experiences talking to and discussing with your community, you build a plan and a set of demands and you organize people based on what the people want. If we give people a chance to have their voice heard, that is how we can build our movement and become popular among the masses. By calling attention and teaching people their own power, that their own voices matter, that’s how you build socialism, on a person-to-person basis.

Crawley: How can we inform people that Democrat Party backed supposed “resistance” to Trump in the form of “No Kings,” “50501,” etc. could be better directed toward organization that doesn’t feature a pro-genocide party (Dems) and one that will actually be disruptive to capital, rather than a fun parade with city permits and police support?

Johnson: This is always tough because, especially in the USA, people cling to liberal parties out of fear. The only way to solve this problem is to build parties of our own that actually serve our communities. This is something Vietnamese communists demonstrated in the 1930s and 40s. They didn’t get popular because they had the best arguments and the prettiest words in their pamphlets. Actually, most Vietnamese peasants and workers were illiterate at the time. Communism became popular in Vietnam because the communists were feeding people, helping them to resist Japanese fascism, educating people, offering material aid to the people.

Same with the Black Panthers. Fred Hampton talked all the time about how people in their neighborhoods didn’t love communism, at first, because they loved the ideas. They loved communism because communists were giving kids free breakfast and protecting communities from police violence. We can’t just attack the DNC’s ideas on a superficial level. We need to build alternatives and go into our communities and demonstrate our ideas through practice.

Nguyen: We need to educate people about the fact that both parties are bourgeois parties. Both parties are controlled by the ruling class. They have different aesthetics but both serve the same economic function. One thing I have noticed as an outsider looking in on USA politics is that the so-called “progressive” candidates do not speak the voice of the people. What is very strange to me is that candidates, both Democrats and Republicans, are just individuals who come forward with their own personal opinions and they aren’t expected to follow any sort of democratically developed platform.

By making politics all about individual personalities, nothing will ever get accomplished for workers. I encourage people in the USA to build working class controlled parties which will hold candidates and leaders to a standard, so that if a candidate fails to deliver on a platform and policies which the party has democratically developed, they can be recalled. If you build institutions like this, rooted in what we call in Vietnam “democratic centralism,” then you can uncouple politics from individual personalities and celebrity culture and actually begin building a cohesive movement that’s grounded in the voices and concerns of the masses.

Crawley: How can Stop Gen AI organize so people know about our mutual aid money for people who have lost incomes, and know about our existence?

Johnson and Nguyen: We talked about this question together and we think the solution is to leverage the human desire for connection right now. People are looking for real art with a human soul. And people want to hear from their fellow humans. I think you need to build inroads in the arts community. Artists are extremely and urgently concerned about AI right now and you will not only get their support, but you can also help them to build, organize, and clarify a movement of human artists. We believe the conditions are ripe for a new class conscious artists movement that’s rooted in humanism and socialist values. But first we need to help clarify the situation for artists. The ruling class has done a lot of work to push a petty bourgeois perspective and agenda when it comes to resisting AI impact on art. This is basically a controlled opposition strategy which frames the problem around the issue of “intellectual property,” when in fact, AI is a labor problem​.

We made a video laying out this case a while back. The problem isn’t that AI “steals property,” the problem is that it exploits labor and steals labor without any compensation whatsoever. Artists need to realize that it is our labor that breathes life into at. So we should build an artists’ movement that celebrates and breathes life into human labor, artistic labor. And defends our labor from exploitation and capture by the ruling class through AI and through more traditional means of primitive accumulation, coercion, and domination.

Crawley: Please share anything else you’d like to say.

Johnson and Nguyen: We are not anti-technology, and we believe there are uses cases for machine learning, but to determine what is useful and what is harmful, we need to politically educate and organize the masses. (Crawley: Machine learning prior to the horrors of Gen AI uses limited and specific training data, and is thoroughly human supervised. Gen AI is to machine learning what a forest fire devouring every forest on all continents outside of Antarctica is to a campfire.)

It will be very difficult to solve the problems presented by AI and to figure out which technologies and applications are acceptable and beneficial to society and which are harmful and under capitalism. We are conditioned to bicker about these problems as individuals when we should be focusing on building institutions that can collectively develop coherent lines and ideological frameworks for solving the problems of our era. And, of course, the only real way to truly and permanently solve these problems is through class revolution. As long as capitalists control the state and the means of production, our concerns as workers will be ignored. The first priority for everyone opposed to the negative impacts of these technologies should be building class consciousness. That means framing AI in terms of class struggle, and teaching workers the economic basis for these superstructural and technological problems we are facing as an oppressed economic class.

I thoroughly enjoyed the latest NonCompete video, which makes sense of the fascism we’re now afflicted by and explains why Democrats are eager to look like fascists:

And here’s the video on Gen AI that Emerican referred to in our interview:

And here’s Luna’s latest video:

Here are essential links for you to check out Emerican and Luna’s body of work.

LunaOi.com, a barebones website with links to Luna’s YouTube and Twitch.

Non-Compete.com is just slightly less barebones because it includes the latest NonCompete and LunaOi! videos and a merch shop.

Luna Oi on Comradery, like a socialist Patreon. She’s on the OG Patreon too. And here’s Luna’s YouTube channel.

Non-Compete on Comradery and on Patreon. And here’s Emerican’s YouTube channel.

They also have Banyan House, their own publisher of books on communism.\

Originally written by Kim Crawley for StopGenAI. Support the Technofascism Survival Guide here.

Neofeud 2: Now Available on Steam.

The long-awaited sequel to the cult cyberpunk adventure game Neofeud expands on the original’s exploration of capitalism, colonialism, and resistance by bringing players into a larger sci-fi universe shaped by the experiences and political perspectives of its creator, Native Hawaiian game developer Silver Spook.

We are proud to say that NonCompete members EJ and Luna are featured in the game’s voice cast, along with many of our comrades, including Mexie of Positive Leftist News. For Silver Spook, Neofeud has always been more than a game. As a Native Hawaiian activist, educator, and indie game developer, Silver Spook has woven a radical political perspective deeply into the fabric of this retro-style adventure game.

A Cyberpunk World Rooted in Real-Life Experiences of Oppression

Much of Neofeud’s world was inspired by Silver Spook’s experiences with social and economic inequality in Hawaii:

“A lot of the art and stories and the world are influenced by my experiences growing up as a Native Hawaiian on the, quote unquote, ‘not so nice side of the coconut trees’ in Honolulu, Hawaii,” said Silver Spook in an interview we conducted for an upcoming video on NonCompete cooperative member channel Luna Oi.

Growing up in a high-poverty community while attending an elite private school exposed Silver Spook to stark class divisions that would later become central themes in Neofeud and its newly launched sequel.

“And so that’s influenced the way that I make the games, which are dealing with a lot of social, political, economic inequality. A lot of social commentary is embedded in the games,” said Silver Spook.

It was in college that Silver Spook began to grapple with perspectives on Hawaiian history that challenged colonialist narratives. In particular, Silver Spook was an inspired by a Native professor who asked, one day:

“Do you know that you were colonized?”

That question became a turning point in Silver Spook’s political development and led to the anti-colonial, anti-capitalist, socialist worldview that’s reflected in Silver Spook Studio’s games.

Bringing Punk Back to Cyberpunk

While many modern cyberpunk stories focus on neon aesthetics, futuristic technology, and slick-looking cityscapes, Silver Spook believes the genre’s political roots are often forgotten.

“I like the punk part of cyberpunk,” said Silver Spook. “When it’s at its best, it’s questioning systems of oppression.”

That philosophy runs throughout Neofeud 2, which tackles corporate domination, colonial expansion, propaganda, and resistance movements through a science-fiction lens. As Silver Spook puts it:

“With Neofeud 2, I try my best to, to really make a cyber punk game in anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, anti-corporate and, you know, just against-all-systems-of-oppression sort of game.”

Origins of the Neofeud Series

The original Neofeud was born out of frustration with the corporate games industry.

After years working for larger studios, Silver Spook wanted to create something that spoke directly to the social and political realities of our modern society.

“I decided, I’m going to try to create a game that’s exactly what I want to say. I want to say what I actually want to say story-wise, art-wise,” said Silver Spook.

Publishers repeatedly rejected the project because of its politics.

“Multiple publishers basically said, we cannot release our game because you’re critiquing too many, you know, systems.”

Rather than compromise on the political messaging, Silver Spook chose to self-publish.

The gamble paid off. Neofeud found a dedicated audience among cyberpunk fans, leftists, and players looking for games willing to engage with serious political themes. Over the years, players have told Silver Spook that the game changed the way they thought about technology, labor, colonialism, and their own relationship to existing systems of power. That support helped make a sequel possible.

Asking Bigger Questions, Exploring a Bigger Universe

While the original Neofeud focused primarily on inequality within a cyberpunk metropolis, Neofeud 2 dramatically expands the scope. The sequel moves beyond Earth into a wider galactic setting where players encounter different civilizations, political systems, and visions of the future. At the center of the story is a sentient machine whose very thoughts are monitored and controlled by a megacorporation.

The game explores themes of colonial warfare, ideological control, healthcare, ownership, and propaganda, blending dark humor and sharp satire with moments of sincere emotion and drama. But unlike many dystopian stories, Neofeud 2 also asks what alternatives might look like. As the player encounters societies built on fundamentally different principles, the game challenges assumptions about what is possible beyond the boundaries of capitalism and empire.

A Cooperative Effort

Neofeud 2 is also a reflection of how Silver Spook approaches game development itself. Rather than embracing the corporate structures often critiqued in cyberpunk fiction, Silver Spook Games operates as a cooperative project.

“I think to me, that’s, that’s that’s the most punk thing that you can do,” Silver Spook said, referring to building things using cooperative, anti-capitalist structures.

Available Now

Neofeud 2 is available now on Steam and we strongly encourage you to check it out. If you end up enjoying it, consider leaving a Steam review, creating content about it, or sharing it with friends. Every bit of support helps this Native Hawaiian-led cooperative continue creating independent games, videos, and media that challenge systems of power and imagine alternatives beyond them. You can also find Silver Spook on YouTube and Blue Sky.

“Put three Cubans in a room together, you’ll have five different opinions,” a Cuban friend of mine likes to joke. He was referring to debates in the town-hall meetings during Cuba’s constitutional convention process of 2018. But I immediately thought, of course, of any Nochebuena celebration at my dad’s house, just a few hundred miles north. Siblings, cousins, babies, abuelas, family, and friends of all ages and political opinions gathered around a brilliant feast. Between the devouring of lechón, yuca, plátanos, and flan, a flurry of back and forth between English and Spanish. Everyone hugging, praying, laughing, and occasionally yelling. Well, maybe more than occasionally.

The existence of contradictory political opinions across generations will come as no surprise to diaspora families from all over, and my Cuban family is no exception. My abuelo participated in the Cuban Revolution against Batista before being turned off by what he saw as the horrors of communism. My family moved to Miami, and after being jailed for counterrevolutionary terrorism, my grandfather then defected and fought for the U.S. in the Bay of Pigs. (A Brigada 2506 flag hung on the wall of my childhood home.)

Like many Cuban-Americans growing up in Florida, I was taught countless criticisms and failures of the government of Cuba by family members. But my proudly capitalist father also raised his children to lobby against the U.S. embargo on Cuba. And as an adult, I learned about the positive aspects of Cuba’s policies, such as the nation’s historic biomedical achievements, or the remarkable advances of LGBTQ rights under the recent Families Code referendum. Today, my older brother and I are openly Marxists and organize as such for labor, social, and environmental justice. As you may guess, sometimes things get a little complicated!

Following the festivities this past December, one of mis primos worried to me about her brother who lives on the island. With increasing blackouts and energy strains, a stressed economy, and hawkish U.S. policies towards her first homeland, things were only getting harder. “The only people who pay attention to what’s happening in Cuba are Cubans,” we lamented. “Hopefully that will change.”

Then 2026 came. With it, the Trump administration’s war games: Kidnapping presidents, murdering leaders in other countries, seizing foreign oil, and threatening sovereignty. People were paying attention.

People are starting to learn about the 66 years of failed U.S. policy against Cuba. People are learning about the trade restrictions that prevent medicine, food, and fuel from getting to the island. People are learning about the starvation, pain, disease, and death that come from these policies. And people are also beginning to notice that Cubans across the political spectrum want something different than what the U.S. provides!

There has long been a particular image, a particular idea, of what it means to be Cuban-American. You know it well: “The Miami Cuban.” The man who opposed the communist policies in Cuba so much that he’s willing to go to war with the island, that he’s willing to bomb, and destroy. And this hyper-machismo image, along with intergenerational trauma in Cuban families, has been used for decades to push US policies against Cuba that do nothing but harm the people of the island. That harms our family, our friends, and a country that we deeply love.

I’m tired of the extremist “Miami Cuban” propaganda machine. I’m tired of the Marco Rubios and Ted Cruzes of this country claiming to speak for Cuban-Americans.

I know, however varied our politics, what my family wants is this:

We want the embargo to end. We want the cruel, inhumane oil blockade by the Trump regime to end. We want the current administration’s posturing towards war games and invasion to end. We want engagement, not escalation. We want friendship. We want trade. We want to gather with our families, watch béisbol, and drink cafecitos by the Malecón.

Despite what the Marco Rubios, Maria Salazars, and Carlos Giménezes of the world try to tell people, this is what most Cubans in America want.

Ready to speak up, a group of us has come together to build the Cuban Americans for Cuba movement. We have launched an open letter against the current U.S. policies towards Cuba (CubanAmericansForCuba.Org/Letter), so other Cubans can sign on and show the world the true values of Cuban-Americans. Our organization is growing, with members all over the United States, and we span a variety of opinions. What we share is the belief that the future of Cuba should be left to Cubans on the island to decide without U.S. interference and meddling. We work together across our differences to end the Embargo, knowing that this is the best way to allow for freedom for all to flourish.

And that is why a delegation of Cuban-Americans is going on the Nuestra América convoy later this month with other Cuba solidarity activists, a delegation which I am proud to join. We are going to deliver thousands of pounds of medical aid to the people and communities that we love. We are going to show that Cuba is not alone, and that the working people of the USA stand with them. We are going to build bridges of friendship and solidarity and a better world where we all have liberation. A world where we all have peace.

Some, including Republicans in the US Congress, have accused the convoy of being an anti-American venture and the participants of being communist agents. But just like Cubans and Cuban-Americans, the Nuestra América convoy and our supporters are made up of people across the political spectrum. The out-of-touch politicians who seek violence may not understand this, but here’s the truth: the only thing you need to be to oppose the US Embargo on Cuba and the Trump administration’s war games is a human being.

About the Author:

Justine Medina is a Cuban-American raised in Tampa, Florida, with over 15 years of experience as an electoral, labor, and community organizer.

A recent Gallup poll shows that American faith in capitalism has dropped from 60% in 2020 to just 54% in 2025. Given the hell which capitalism has put American workers through so far this decade, this slip in confidence is hardly surprising.

What might be more difficult to understand is that American perceptions of socialism have remained virtually flat, never rising above a 39% favorability rating at any point in the past fifteen years.

These numbers reflect deep ideological contradictions which have been ingrained into the social consciousness of Western workers through centuries of class subterfuge waged by the ruling class. Living in an ultra-capitalist nation like the USA is increasingly miserable for workers, but for countless decades capitalists have expended tremendous resources to convince us that there are no better alternatives. Surely you’ve heard the thought-terminating cliche: “capitalism isn’t perfect, but it’s the best system we have.”

The Background Noise of Anticommunism

Our entire media landscape is saturated with anticommunist propaganda. From early childhood we are bombarded with textbooks, Hollywood films and TV shows, History Channel documentaries, and college courses which demonize any and all historical efforts to build communism while sweeping the countless crimes of capitalism under the rug. Whenever a Western news outlet covers a socialist nation (such as Vietnam, where I happen to live) a certain propaganda line is always followed: anything good that happens is attributed to capitalism, and anything bad that happens is blamed on communism. The capitalist-controlled algorithms of major social media platforms like YouTube and Facebook amplify these ideological positions by boosting anticommunist views and suppressing the voices of communists.

This all-encompassing apparatus of anticommunist programming pervades our media, education, and cultural institutions, creating an ever-present background noise of anticommunist sentiment that permeates the public consciousness. This wall-to-wall environment of anticommunist propaganda contributes to a general perception that anticommunism is the “default position.” And this, in turn, allows capitalist propagandists to leverage the psychological phenomenon of “social proof.” The more popular ideas become, the more we are conditioned to see them as valid. If the videos and memes and posts which say communism is bad get millions of views while the videos and memes which defend communism get downvoted and algorithmically suffocated then the anticommunist ideas are far easier to present as “common sense” and therefore indisputable.

Michael Parenti describes this model of propaganda in Inventing Reality:

The media set the limits on public discourse and public understanding. They may not always mold opinion but they do not always have to. It is enough that they create opinion visibility, giving legitimacy to certain views and illegitimacy to others. The media do the same to substantive issues that they do to candidates, raising some from oblivion and conferring legitimacy upon them, while consigning others to limbo. This power to determine the issue agenda, the information flow, and the parameters of political debate so that it extends from ultra-right to no further than moderate center, is if not total, still totally awesome.

According to Parenti, the media’s ability to set the boundaries of discourse and ideation creates a distorted view of reality which forces citizens to adopt the worldview of the ruling class:

The basic distortions in the media are not innocent errors, for they are not random; rather they move in the same overall direction again and again, favoring management over labor, corporatism over anticorporatism, the affluent over the poor, private enterprise over socialism, Whites over Blacks, males over females, officialdom over protesters, conventional politics over dissidence, anticommunism and arms-race militarism over disarmament, national chauvinism over internationalism, U.S. dominance of the Third World over revolutionary change. The press does many things and serves many functions, but its major role, its irreducible responsibility is to continually recreate a view of reality supportive of existing social and economic class power.

Karl Marx had a word for this kind of distorted perception of reality:

False consciousness.

This term can be used to describe any thinking which does not accurately reflect reality. False consciousness can, of course, be arrived at honestly. It’s easy to be mistaken about what’s really going on in the world. Unfortunately, human beings have spent thousands of years perfecting strategies for intentionally ingraining false consciousness into one other for all manner of nefarious purposes. In particular, the ruling class of every epoch of human society has sought to develop false consciousness among the exploited classes to deceive the oppressed into accepting and even advocating for their own oppression. Under capitalism, the ruling class has developed the dissemination of false consciousness into a highly sophisticated science of propaganda and social programming.

Karl Marx explained described a historical pattern whereby a ruling class comes to consolidate its power over society through the development of class consciousness. This simply refers to the ideas which an economic class holds about itself and its relationship with the rest of human society.

According to Marx, as a new ruling class takes power over society, its class consciousness becomes the predominant social consciousness of all of society. Indeed, one of the defining characteristics of class society is that the ideas of the ruling class become the ideas which rule society. Predominant currents of religion, art, and philosophy of a given epoch of class society, according to Marx, reflect the worldview of that epoch’s ruling class.

Unfortunately, there is a tendency for historians and philosophers to detach these ideas from their basis in class society, and this further contributes to false consciousness among the working class. As Marx writes in The German Ideology:

If now in considering the course of history we detach the ideas of the ruling class from the ruling class itself and attribute to them an independent existence, if we confine ourselves to saying that these or those ideas were dominant at a given time, without bothering ourselves about the conditions of production and the producers of these ideas, if we thus ignore the individuals and world conditions which are the source of the ideas, we can say, for instance, that during the time that the aristocracy was dominant, the concepts honor, loyalty, etc. were dominant, during the dominance of the bourgeoisie the concepts freedom, equality, etc. The ruling class itself on the whole imagines this to be so. This conception of history, which is common to all historians, particularly since the eighteenth century, will necessarily come up against the phenomenon that increasingly abstract ideas hold sway, i.e. ideas which increasingly take on the form of universality. For each new class which puts itself in the place of one ruling before it, is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to represent its interest as the common interest of all the members of society, that is, expressed in ideal form: it has to give its ideas the form of universality, and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones. The class making a revolution appears from the very start, if only because it is opposed to a class, not as a class but as the representative of the whole of society; it appears as the whole mass of society confronting the one ruling class.

Understanding what Marx means here is absolutely vital for understanding why workers in the West today are so distrustful of socialism, even as faith in capitalism continues to deteriorate. The working class has been conditioned through generations of propaganda and indoctrination to subscribe to bourgeois class consciousness which is antithetical to our own liberation.

As we have already discussed, the ways in which the capitalist class disseminates false consciousness among the masses have become complex and the capitalist worldview is nearly all-pervasive in modern society. But to understand how we got here, we must look back in time to a period when the capitalists were themselves the revolutionary class.

Burghers vs. Kings

This was the end of the feudal era: a time when kings and nobles and the clergy ruled over peasants and craft guilds all across Europe. By the 18th century, the centuries-old political economy of feudalism was beginning to deteriorate, and a new class was emerging which could challenge the ruling classes of feudal society.

According to Marx, the bourgeoisie initially offered a better deal to the oppressed classes than absolute monarchs and inherited nobility. The deal which early capitalists offered workers was attractive and “more connected with the common interest of all other non-ruling classes.”

As Marx continues in The German Ideology, the victory of bourgeois revolution against feudalism “benefits also many individuals of the other classes which are not winning a dominant position, but only insofar as it now puts these individuals in a position to raise themselves into the ruling class.”

Such gains for workers were far from universal, but they did at least offer opportunities which were wholly lacking under feudalism. As Marx writes:

When the French bourgeoisie overthrew the power of the aristocracy, it thereby made it possible for many proletarians to raise themselves above the proletariat, but only insofar as they become bourgeois.

And here is the core idea of capitalism which the ruling class uses to convince workers to voluntarily work against our own interests: the idea of economic mobility.

In the feudal era, one’s class was determined at birth. A peasant’s children would be peasants. A noble’s descendants would remain noble. This was seen as a static aspect of society: the class consciousness of the feudal ruling classes. What the revolutionary bourgeois class offered to peasants and craftsmen and merchants was a chance (however slim) at becoming something more than a peasant or a craftsman or a merchant.

The bourgeoisie devised an entire philosophical worldview which centered around ideas of “meritocracy.” They refashioned Christianity from a static feudal religion which reinforced lifelong obedience and loyalty to the Lord into a more dynamic faith which promised divine financial rewards for hard and honest labor. By and by, the bourgeoisie managed to convince the working poor that their miserable circumstances were temporary in nature and that capitalist society would offer every individual an opportunity to achieve wealth and power far exceeding that of any feudal monarch.

This worldview evolved from the economic conditions which shaped the early bourgeoisie at the tail-end of the feudal era. Marx explains that the bourgeoisie began as “burghers.” These were well-to-do men of common birth who inhabited medieval towns and were, to further their own ends, forced to unite against the power of their feudal lords. This shared struggle eventually transformed their private interests into a broader class identity, as Marx writes in The German Ideology:

The separate individuals form a class only insofar as they have to carry on a common battle against another class; otherwise they are on hostile terms with each other as competitors. On the other hand, the class in its turn achieves an independent existence over against the individuals, so that the latter find their conditions of existence predestined, and hence have their position in life and their personal development assigned to them by their class... This subsuming of individuals under the class brings with it their subjection to all kinds of ideas.

One of the earliest and most important of these ideas of bourgeois class consciousness, according to Marx, was the concept of “personal freedom.” Capitalists tantalized workers with promises of freedom and economic mobility which had been entirely forbidden under feudalism. No longer would class be fixed by birth (as it was for a peasant or a nobleman). It’s easy to see how this promise of economic mobility was alluring to peasants and craftsmen.

According to Marx, the biggest mistake made by the working class during this time of rapid social change was to stop short of class struggle. Rather than building a shared class identity from the get-go, the workers of this transition period between feudalism and capitalism sought only to liberate themselves as individuals. Rather than trying to change the world for one and all, they were focused on freeing themselves individually, seeking only better terms for the same kind of work they already knew. The owning class developed class consciousness far more rapidly and effectively than the emerging proletariat. Under these conditions, the bourgeoisie became the revolutionary class of the new era and came to firmly establish capitalism as the dominant political economy (and political consciousness) of our modern era.

This process of bourgeois indoctrination of workers began to blaze across Europe in the 18th century and quickly spilled over into many European colonies. Most notably, the so-called “founding fathers” of the United States developed an intricate and powerful system of bourgeois ideology which has since become the dominant hegemonic worldview of most of our contemporary capitalist world. In Europe, bourgeois ideology became cemented as the ruling worldview during the Revolutions of 1848.

The Springtime of Bourgeois Nations

The Revolutions of 1848 are remembered today (on the rare occasion that they are remembered) as the “Springtime of Nations,” a glorious year of social and political upheaval which ushered in the downfall of absolute monarchy in Europe and the rise of democracy. Of course, this is a bourgeois framing which reflects a bourgeois worldview.

For Marxists, 1848 was the year that gave us the Communist Manifesto and the world’s first real taste of proletarian power. But beneath the romantic imagery of barricades and red flags lies a more sinister legacy. While 1848 birthed the modern movement for liberation, it also gave rise to a political pathology that plagues the global working class to this day: an unstoppable trend towards state power for the capitalist class that would spread around the world and the first full realization of ideological anticommunism which would come to grip the masses of most nations on earth.

While there were communist struggles and victories throughout the Revolutions of 1848, the final victors were the bourgeoisie. In the streets of Paris and Berlin, thousands of workers fought and died to seize power, only for it to be handed over to a capitalist class that wasted no time in turning its bayonets back toward the very people who had installed them. Marx and Engels were active leaders and participants in these revolutions, and they saw this betrayal play out in real-time. In the end, Marx and Engels were forced to flee to London to regroup and revise their revolutionary program to account for the harsh realities they had witnessed.

Marx and Engels derived from these experiences several theoretical breakthroughs which would define Scientific Socialism. As the smoke cleared, the founders of communism began to perceive a strange phenomenon taking root all across Europe. Despite the harsh betrayal which the capitalist class had inflicted upon the workers, and despite the widening chasm of inequality between these maturing classes of capitalism, a segment of the working class began to view the world through the eyes of the shopkeeper and the industrialist.

This was the birth of the Bourgeois Proletariat. Engels coined this term to describe workers who remain ideologically tethered to the very system which exploits them. It is a mindset that bargains away the long-term liberation of the working class for the short-term and dubious security of a job, a national identity, or a perceived seat at the table of the wealthy and powerful. To understand why a modern laborer in the American Rust Belt or an office worker in London might side with a billionaire over their own working class interests, we have to look back at the lessons Marx and Engels learned from the failures of 1848 and, in particular, from the various strains of opportunism which they watched develop among their fellow working class revolutionists in the years that followed.

Enter Ernest Jones: a leader of the Chartist movement whom Marx and Engels initially admired. Jones was jailed in England during the Revolutions of 1848 for making seditious speeches and when he was released in 1850 he started a revolutionary newspaper called Notes to the People. In 1852, he started another newspaper: People’s Paper. Marx submitted over 25 articles to People’s Paper and described Jones around this time as “the most talented, consistent and energetic representative of Chartism.”

Unfortunately in just a few short years, Jones would go on to betray the working class in the eyes of Marx and Engels. You see, Ernest Jones became a class collaborationist, and began advocating for an alliance between the workers of England and England’s bourgeoisie. Note that this was precisely the sort of “alliance” which ended in betrayal and the brutal suppression of workers which had forced Marx and Engels to flee Europe in 1848. As Marx wrote to Engels in September of 1858:

Our friend Jones has decidedly sold himself (but at the lowest possible price) to the bright coterie. The idiot has ruined himself politically without rescuing himself commercially. I’ll cut out the articles relating to him in Reynolds’ and send them to you. But how little his apostasy - the laddie is preaching UNION OF THE MIDDLE AND WORKING CLASSES - has availed him.

Marx then goes on to relate the paltry financial compensation which Jones received in exchange for his betrayal of the workers. Engels replied to Marx in October, writing:

The Jones business is most distasteful. He held a meeting here and the speech he made was entirely in the spirit of the new alliance.

Engels went on to suggest that Owens’ turn towards class collaborationism was merely symptomatic of a broader trend of the English proletariat “becoming more and more bourgeois.” According to Engels, “the ultimate aim of this most bourgeois of all nations would appear to be the possession, alongside the bourgeoisie, of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat.”

Engels realized that because England was the “workshop of the world” and held vast colonial territories, it could afford to bribe its own workers with improved conditions (relative to the privation of the empire’s colonial subjects). By siphoning super-profits from the colonies, the British ruling class could offer just enough concessions to the domestic working class to win their loyalty. This is precisely what happened, and precisely how Ernest Jones was transformed from a revolutionary representative of the workers into a class-traitor and a mouthpiece for bourgeois interests in the span of just five years.

A note to avoid confusion: the “bourgeois proletariat” which Engels describes here should not be confused with the “petty bourgeoisie,” which is an intermediate class between the capitalist and working classes. The petty bourgeoisie includes small business owners and artisans who own their own means of production.

The Bourgeois Proletariat are members of the proletariat and by definition they do not own the means of production. What marks a worker as a member of the “bourgeois proletariat” is the possession of false consciousness which has them siding with the capitalist class against their fellow workers. The bourgeois proletariat believe they benefit from capitalism, or have otherwise been convinced that capitalism is the only viable system. As the saying goes, they see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as “temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”

Marx later expanded on how this mindset is maintained and advanced by the ruling class through the development of artificial divisions and fractures between segments of the proletariat. In 1870, Marx observed growing tensions between English and Irish workers. The English worker, Marx noted, viewed himself as a member of the “ruling nation,” looking down on the Irish worker as a competitor. This created a fatal rift which saw the English worker siding with the English capitalist out of national pride and the Irish worker coming to view English workers not as comrades, but as accomplices to oppression.

Marx explicitly compared this to the racial dynamics in the American South between poor whites and enslaved Black people. By fostering religious, social, and national prejudices through the “press, the pulpit, and the comic papers,” the ruling class ensured that the working class remained impotent despite its organization.

I should point out, here, that these xenophobic strains of false consciousness which capitalists ingrained among the workers of the 19th century constituted the seeds of fascism. The notion of a “national proletariat” uniting with a “national bourgeoisie” against an “outside” threat is one of the core elements of the fascist worldview which we unfortunately see flaring up in capitalist nations around the world today. I would go so far as to argue that fascism is the logical conclusion of bourgeois proletarianism, as fascism demands the utter destruction of proletarian class consciousness and complete subjugation of the social consciousness of the working class to a worldview which champions the ruling class as supreme over all aspects of society.

The Rise of Anticommunism

Class consciousness is the most important prerequisite to social revolution. The bourgeoisie were not able to wage class struggle against the feudal lords until they came to perceive themselves as a class and disseminate ideological lines of struggle against their former masters. And the bourgeoisie continues to dominate the working class throughout most of the world precisely because they have managed to indoctrinate workers with a bourgeois proletarian mindset.

Of course, this failure to achieve class consciousness has not been universal everywhere on earth and throughout history. In various places and at different times there have been remarkable advancements in working class consciousness. Indeed, through most of the 20th century Marxism was the prevailing ideology throughout most of Europe and Asia and currents of communist revolution were swirling over much of Africa, South America, and the Middle East.

In less than a quarter of a century, the communist institutions of the Soviet Union brought Russia from a backwards agrarian feudal society to a spacefaring superpower. In Vietnam, impoverished communists managed to repel three of the most powerful militaries in human history. Communist nations like China and Cuba resisted Western hegemony and showed what can happen when class consciousness grips the masses.

Such communist victories understandably made the ruling class of the capitalist West quite nervous, resulting in a cold war which raged for half a century until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Today, the rise of China as a remarkable global superpower both in terms of manufacturing ability and military might has led to a new cold war. Economic achievements in Vietnam have allowed the former colony to advance from being the poorest nation on Earth in the 1980s to a modern and thriving nation today. Cuba still suffers tremendously from comprehensive embargo, but the fact that this tiny island nation has managed to hold out as a sovereign socialist nation for so long right in the front yard of the American empire is an achievement in and of itself.

The capitalist ruling class sees the very existence of nations like these as an existential threat, and for that reason, the twentieth century saw the development of an immense system of anticommunist institutions and propaganda programs which persist to this day. Clandestine operations such as Project Mockingbird and COINTELPRO relentlessly attacked and degraded currents of communist thought and organization in the capitalist West, and the CIA and other Western intelligence agencies never hesitated to back even the most despotic and murderous fascistic regimes whenever communism reared its head anywhere in the world.

It’s no wonder, then, that communism’s approval rating has all but flatlined. Capitalist hegemony is ideologically resilient and can tolerate a wide range of dissenting and contradicting opinions among workers. But for all the talk of “personal freedom,” popular support for communism and class consciousness are invariably subdued by the institutional apparatus of the ruling class. The death tolls of countless genocidal anticommunist campaigns of the American empire speak to this truth:

• Korean War (1950–1953): ~3,000,000 civilian deaths. The conflict featured intensive aerial bombardment of North Korean urban centers and infrastructure by UN/U.S. forces.

• Vietnam War (1955–1975): ~2,000,000 civilian deaths. Casualties resulted from indiscriminate bombing, chemical defoliants (Agent Orange), and ground-level massacres.

• Indonesian Mass Killings (1965–1966): ~1,000,000 deaths. A campaign of mass extermination targeting members of the PKI (Indonesian Communist Party), supported by the CIA and Western intelligence.

• Guatemalan Civil War (1960–1996): ~200,000 deaths. A UN-backed commission found that 93% of atrocities (including acts of genocide against the Maya people) were committed by U.S.-backed state forces.

• Occupation of East Timor (1975–1999): ~200,000 deaths. The Indonesian invasion and subsequent occupation were facilitated by U.S. and Australian diplomatic and military support.

• Operation Condor (1975–1983): ~80,000 deaths. A U.S.-backed coordinated campaign of state terror and political repression by South American military dictatorships.

• Salvadoran Civil War (1979–1992): ~75,000 deaths. Approximately 85% of civilian killings were attributed to U.S.-funded and trained state security forces and death squads.

• La Matanza, El Salvador (1932): ~30,000 deaths. A brutal military suppression of a communist-led indigenous peasant uprising.

• Greek Civil War (1946–1949): ~50,000 deaths. A conflict where British and American intervention sustained the monarchist government against communist forces.

• Chilean Military Dictatorship (1973–1990): ~4,000 deaths or “disappearances” and over 38,000 cases of torture. Following the U.S.-backed coup that overthrew democratically elected socialist President Salvador Allende, the military junta engaged in a systematic campaign to eliminate communist political influence.

This is hardly a comprehensive list of anticommunist atrocities committed by the capitalist west in the 20th century, but it offers some idea of the lengths to which the ruling class will go to stamp out and crush class conscious political movements. Whenever workers begin to question capitalism or struggle for economic liberation capitalists will rapidly deploy fascist thugs and violently oppressive police and military forces to eliminate the threat to their class position.

This violent opposition to the development of proletarian class consciousness reflects the importance which class consciousness plays in the advancement of human society. As the current ruling class, the bourgeoisie is inherently reactionary and conservative. The capitalist class seeks to maintain the status quo of society as it currently stands, and this leads them to instinctively and ruthlessly move to eradicate any currents of working class consciousness as soon as they are detected. Our rulers understand – even if we as workers have not yet realized – that proletarian class consciousness is the key to social revolution. Working class consciousness will be the undoing of the capitalist class, and thus it can’t be tolerated. The importance of building class consciousness as a prerequisite for communist revolution simply can’t be understated.

Marxist materialism is not mechanical materialism. The Marxist theory of Historical Materialism rightly holds that it is the economic base of society which plays a commanding role in determining and developing human civilization, but it also holds that superstructural elements (such as political ideology, the state, and class consciousness) play pivotal roles in how history plays out.

Gripping the Masses With Class Consciousness

We as workers are not helpless bystanders, swept along by the forces of history. As a revolutionary class, we have a historic mission to form revolutionary working class parties, to overthrow the ruling class, and to end class society altogether through the construction of communism. In order to accomplish this mission it is vital that we first develop and popularize class consciousness and negate the social poison of the bourgeois proletarian mindset which has so thoroughly befuddled our fellow workers.

For these reasons, the development of class consciousness is the most important task before the working class in the capitalist West today. Before we can hope to have a revolution, we must grip the masses with class consciousness. As Marx wrote in Critique of Political Economy:

The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism by weapons, material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses. Theory is capable of gripping the masses as soon as it demonstrates ad hominem, and it demonstrates ad hominem as soon as it becomes radical. To be radical is to grasp the root of the matter.

When Marx says that theory must “grip the masses ad hominem,” he means that the theory must manifest in the actual life conditions and conscious activities of the masses. It is not enough for the masses to simply be aware of their own class position and their historical mission to enact social revolution; workers must bring these ideas to life by building institutions capable of revolutionary struggle.

History has shown that the development of class consciousness will never occur spontaneously. Without dedicated communists working tirelessly to build and organize revolutionary parties and worker-controlled organizations, capitalists will continue to run roughshod over the working class with its vast machinery of propaganda, state violence, and coercive institutions. Only a disciplined, organized, and ideologically cohesive and coherent revolutionary movement can have any hope of resisting and overcoming the institutional might of the bourgeois state. The task of the class-conscious worker, therefore, is to build and organize and educate at an institutional level. The ruling class has had centuries to develop a bourgeois proletarian mindset far and wide among the workers. Capitalists control mighty institutions to disseminate false consciousness: public school systems, universities, film studios, social media platforms, and countless other superstructural institutions push bourgeois ideology into every corner of our lives. Fighting back against this torrent of information warfare requires workers to build institutions of our own. In order to break through all this broadcasted false consciousness and to rebuild the class solidarity that capital has spent centuries trying to dismantle, we must develop our own revolutionary ideology and construct corresponding revolutionary institutions which we as workers control.

The 2020s have shown that capitalism is coming into a period of unprecedented crisis. The contradictions are sharpening and instability is mounting. As material conditions of capitalist society deteriorate, workers are gradually coming to understand the inherent inequality and injustice of the capitalist system. This is reflected in growing distaste for capitalism even among workers in the imperial core. What the masses have yet to grasp, however, is the role which communism must play in liberating the global proletariat from this unjust political economy. And, unfortunately, the masses will never come to understand the need for communist revolution unless we, as communists, show them the way. This is our historical mission as communists: to teach our fellow workers the nature of our own oppression; to dissolve false consciousness which has been embedded so deeply into our culture by the ruling class; and to build revolutionary parties which can rise to the historic mission of the working class.

The good news is that once class consciousness begins to rise again among the workers of the world, our victory is assured. As Marx wrote in the Manifesto: “the proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority.” The material conditions already exist for the victorious revolution of the working class, and have existed since Marx penned those words nearly two centuries ago. Emancipation is ours for the taking. We need only realize the power we possess and it shall be ours. That is the power of class consciousness.

If you would like to learn more about these ideas, we encourage you to check out our free translation of Vietnam’s curriculum on Dialectical and Historical Materialism. You can find the ebooks for free at Banyan House Publishing.

The assassination of Charlie Kirk was an act of individualist political terrorism perpetrated by a young student-aged assassin. At the time of writing, the shooter’s political motivations are still unknown, but that isn’t stopping MAGA propagandists and mainstream media outlets from attempting to place all blame for the rise of politically motivated violence squarely on “the left” despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of such acts are perpetrated by disaffected fascists who have been radicalized online by hate speech and far-right conspiracy theories. According to the largest and most recent data-driven study that we could find, “attacks by left-wing extremists are 45% less likely to result in fatalities when compared to attacks by right-wing extremists” in the USA. This data holds up over the long term: from 1948-2018, the probability of a violent act of extremism in the United States being committed by a left-wing extremist was found to be 0.33, compared to 0.61 by a right-wing extremist. Rightwing pundits, politicians, and organizations like to claim that leftwing violence is “on the rise,” but we have found no statistical evidence to back up these claims.

All of that said, it would be disingenuous to pretend that there has never been such a thing as leftwing terrorism. It would also be disingenuous to pretend that there are not voices right now attempting to foment acts of individualist terrorism in the name of “the left” (a vague and nebulous term which seems, at this point, to encompass all ideologies and movements other than overt fascism and MAGA Republicanism in public discourse). There have been examples of tendencies towards terroristic violence on “the left” going back to the French revolution. Within the broader socialist movement, the phenomenon of individualist acts of terrorism has been a subject of discourse and dispute since the 19th century. With rare exceptions of rightist deviations, however, it must be stated at the outset that Marxist thought has held a clear position against individualist acts of terror from its foundation.

Contemporary mainstream political voices (including most liberal and “leftist” personalities) have succumbed almost entirely to the scourge of “respectability politics” which hold that the arena of politics is a binary with exactly two “sides,” and that one’s own “side” is beyond reproach. This is especially pronounced in the rhetoric of prominent members of the GOP and the DNC, which comes as no surprise, as both of these bourgeois parties exist to divide and conquer the working class sharply along party lines. In service of this goal, conservatives and liberals participate in an endless discourse cycle of publicly demonizing each other even as they both work arm-in-arm behind the scenes to uphold the abysmally violent system of capitalism.

After an hour or so of doomscrolling Twitter and Bluesky in the aftermath of the Kirk assassination, turning to Lenin on the subject of individualist political terror feels like a refreshing blast of honesty and clarity. As a principled Marxist, Vladimir Lenin was under no such illusion that each and every problem comes from “the other side.” He was aggressively critical of what he saw as failures of theory and practice on the left. Even as he was faced with the dire violence of the Czar’s ruthlessly oppressive state, Lenin did not hesitate to point out what he saw as gross misjudgments and tactical failures of leftist movements and programs which he believed to be counterproductive in the pursuit of building revolution. After all, there is no need to deny that progressives and socialists can be prone to poor judgment and erroneous acts whenever we stray from sound theory and solid practice.

It must be recognized as simple fact that there is such a thing as leftwing political violence; that there are leftist factions and figures calling for individualistic acts of terroristic violence now. We, as communists, cannot overcome such tendencies of individualism and adventurism by simply ignoring them. This is especially true in the age of stochastic terrorism and intense social currents of anger which are byproducts of alienation and dissatisfaction brought about by capitalism. We must offer our fellow workers clear positions rooted in a solid theoretical foundation if we are to forestall acts of spontaneous violence which undermine the construction of a class conscious mass movement towards revolution.

This article is an attempt to explain and defend the Marxist position against individualism and adventurism, which was held by Marx himself along with Engels and Lenin and Ho Chi Minh and countless other great Marxist thinkers and leaders. First, we shall present an overview of the Marxist critique of individualist terrorism grounded in Dialectical Materialist philosophy and Historical Materialist analysis of human society and social revolution. We will then endeavor to understand why acts of individual terrorism and spontaneous actions arise in class society and explain why Marxist organizations and workers’ parties must properly draw lines against individualist political terrorism and the theoretical errors embodied in the concept of “Propaganda of the Deed.” We will begin with a case study of individual terrorism which no doubt had a foundational political impact on none other than Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

Lenin’s Older Brother: a Propagandist of the Deed

Lenin was not the first revolutionary figure in his family. His older brother, Aleksandr Ilyich Ulyanov, was twenty years old when he joined the “terrorist faction” of the People’s Will socialist party in 1886. A promising student of zoology from a comfortable middle class background, Ulyanov nevertheless developed a passionate abhorrence of the harsh autocracy of the Russian czar at an early age and he came to believe that bold acts of spontaneous violence were the best way to spur the masses towards revolution. In 1887, Ulyanov was arrested for plotting to assassinate Czar Alexander III. He was publicly executed by hanging along with his fellow conspirators at the age of twenty one.

Ulyanov’s failed attempt to assassinate the czar was a manifestation of the philosophy of “propaganda of the deed” which was quite prevalent at the time. Acts of assassination and political terrorism extend back to ancient times, but as a formalized ideological doctrine, Propaganda of the Deed was first put forth in the 1850s by an Italian anarchist named Carlo Pisacane. Pisacane was a duke, born to a poor noble family in Naples, and participated in the complicated political and military struggle to unite Italy. Shortly before dying in an act of political violence himself, he wrote a tract which would become one of the most influential political texts of the 19th century. This “Political Testament” would go on to influence a wide gamut of political activists for generations to come: anarchists, socialists, suffragettes, and fascists have all drawn inspiration from the Political Testament. Mussolini, in particular, was a great fan of Pisacane’s philosophy.

The testament reads, in part:

“Ideas result from deeds, not the latter from the former, and the people will not be free when they are educated, but educated when they are free. . . The only thing for a citizen to do to be of service to his country is to patiently wait for the day when he can cooperate in a material revolution; as I see it, conspiracies, plots and attempted uprisings are the succession of deeds whereby Italy proceeds towards her goal of unity.

Pisacane explicitly rejected political theory as a concept. He believed that any and all attempts to develop coherent political ideology led to decay of the revolutionary spirit, and that politics must consist only and entirely of action, writing:

“The flash of Milano’s bayonet was a more effective propaganda than a thousand volumes penned by doctrinarians who are the real blight upon our country and the entire world.”

Pisacane framed the individual as the key maker of history and the core unit of the revolution, writing:

“There are some who say: the revolution must be made by the country. This there is no denying. But the country is made up of individuals and if we were quietly to wait for the day of revolution to come instead of plotting to bring it about, revolution would never break out. On the other hand, if everybody were to say: the revolution must be made by the country and I, being an infinitesimal part of the country, have my infinitesimal portion of duty to do and were to do it, the revolution would be carried out immediately and would be invincible because of its scale.”

There does not seem to be any evidence that Aleksandr Ulyanov drew direct inspiration from Pisacane’s Political Testament, but his own testimony at trial is a clear expression of faith in the political theory of Propaganda of the Deed:

"Terror.... is the only form of defence by which a minority strong only in its spiritual strength and the consciousness of its righteousness can combat the physical power of the majority... Among the Russian people there will always be found many people who are so devoted to their ideas and who feel so bitterly the unhappiness of their country that it will not be a sacrifice for them to offer their lives."

Ulyanov, like Pisacane before him, believed that revolutionary action rests in the hands of the individual, stating:

"My purpose was to aid in the liberation of the unhappy Russian people. Under a system which permits no freedom of expression and crushes every attempt to work for their welfare and enlightenment by legal means, the only instrument that remains is terror. We cannot fight this regime in open battle, because it is too firmly entrenched and commands enormous powers of repression. Therefore, any individual sensitive to injustice must resort to terror. Terror is our answer to the violence of the state. It is the only way to force a despotic regime to grant political freedom to the people.”

Vladimir Lenin did not write or speak frequently about the loss of his brother, though he did profess in at least one public speech that Aleksandr’s assassination attempt had not, and could never achieve its goal of “awakening a popular revolution.” Lenin was just sixteen years old when Aleksandr was executed, and as he matured into a revolutionary leader in his own right, he came to vehemently oppose the doctrine of Propaganda of the Deed. In his own revolutionary career, Lenin would prescribe a very different set of political solutions which centered on the construction of a proletarian party (rather than the individual) as the essential component of class struggle and revolution.

In 1902, another Russian student set out to assassinate an agent of Czarist autocracy. Stepan Balmashov, like Lenin’s brother Aleksander, was twenty one years old when he joined the terrorist wing of a socialist party. Balmashov’s outfit was the Combat Organization of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, and his target was Dmitry Sipyagin, Minister of the Interior of the Russian Empire. Sipyagin had been tasked with "the power of imposing military service as a punishment for acts of civil disobedience towards the University authorities” during a Russian student strike in 1899.

Unlike Aleksander Ulyamov, Balmashov was successful in carrying out his assassination. Like Ulyamov, he was sentenced to death by hanging shortly after being arrested. The Socialist Revolutionary Party defended the terrorist activities of Balmashov and the Combat Organization. A leaflet issued by the party stated that the assassination of Sipyagin “coincides in full. . . with the Party views,” and fully endorsed “the propaganda of terrorism among the masses” as the “big cause” of revolutionary struggle.

The Socialist Revolutionary Party’s platform echoed Carlo Pisacane’s disdain for foundational political theory. Just as Pisacane absolutized political action and eschewed theory, so too would the Socialist Revolutionary Party “give up trying to settle disputed questions of social theory, which always lead to disunity.” This disdain for political theory echoes Pisacane’s proclamation that “doctrinarians” were “the real blight upon. . . the entire world.”

Thus, the theoretical model of Propaganda of the Deed which was formulated by Pisacane and formalized into a platform by the Socialist Revolutionary Party can be understood as a one-way process of development whereby actions produce ideas (and not the other way around).

“By terrorism,” declared the SRP, “we are not relegating work among the masses into the background. . . We advocate terrorism, not in place of work among the masses, but precisely for and simultaneously with that work.” According to the SRP, every act of terrorism transfers power from the czar to the masses: “every terrorist blow, as it were, takes away part of the strength of the autocracy and transfers all this strength to the side of the fighters for freedom.”

In other words, the SRP claimed that acts of political assassination and terrorism are a method of directly channeling the will of the masses into pure political action, untarnished by theory, and that these acts also channel power directly from the czar to the masses. It might be graphed something like this:

Note that neither Pisacane nor the Socialist Revolutionary Party offer any explanation for the mechanisms by which the will of the masses is supposed to be transferred into individual acts of terrorism, nor is there any explanation for how power is transferred from the ruling class to the masses through such individual acts. Presumably, these mechanisms of transference are not only unknown but also unknowable, as any effort to provide a theoretical explanation of these mechanisms would deviate too far into “settling disputed questions of social theory.” (Perhaps it is hoped by Propagandists of the Deed that individual actions will one day lead to ideas which can explain these mechanisms?)

Lenin was fiercely critical of the SRP’s party line on terrorism. To fully understand the nature of his critique, it is necessary to review the basics of Marxist philosophy which Lenin advocated and advanced in his political theorization.

Relevant Aspects of Marxist Philosophy

The philosophical framework of Marxist philosophy is Dialectical Materialism. This is a universal philosophical system and worldview which holds that the material world determines human consciousness while consciousness can impact back upon the material world. This constitutes a dialectic in which matter and consciousness mutually change and develop one another, with the material serving as the first basis for all of this development. Hence: Dialectical Materialism.

At first glance, there’s some superficial resemblance between Pisacane’s formulation of the basic principle of Propaganda of the Deed and Dialectical Materialism. After all: Pisacane placed all emphasis on material practice. Actions performed in the material world are claimed by Propagandists of the Deed to lead to the development of human consciousness. Deeds → Ideas.

On closer examination, the differences between the theoretical basis of Propaganda of the Deed ideology and Dialectical Materialism become glaring. Propaganda of the Deed denies a dialectic. Practice and action are seen to absolutely determine consciousness. This theoretical framework explicitly denies the ability for human consciousness to impact back upon the world in meaningful ways. According to the Propagandists of the Deed, only acts of liberation can lead to education and the development of human consciousness. Thought processes, according to Pisacane and the SRP, are only valuable if derived (somehow) from individual action. This makes Propaganda of the Deed a sort of mechanical materialism which holds that consciousness always follows material action and which sees human consciousness and political theory as useless and devoid of political value.

According to Propaganda of the Deed theory, the deed of the individual is the nucleus of political activity and the sole driving force of revolution. Indeed, revolution is defined as a “succession” of individual acts, no more and no less. Individual human beings are framed as discrete agents, atomized and metaphysically distinct from one another. “The country is made up of individuals,” according to Pisacane. Each individual, as an “infinitesimal part of the country,” has an “infinitesimal portion” of responsibility to carry out individual acts of revolution.

This is the basis of the SRP’s claim that individual acts of terrorism are representative of the masses. According to Propaganda of the Deed theory, “the masses” is just a term used to describe the assemblage of individuals who (to paraphrase Pisacane) “make up the country.” If “the masses” is just a collection of individuals, then the only actions which can be performed by the masses are individual acts. If “the masses” is just a collection of individuals, then the action of any individual is, by definition, an act of “the masses.”

Marxist philosophy has a very different conception of revolution and of the relationship between the individual and the revolutionary movement. Just as matter and consciousness have a dialectical relationship in which each defines the other, the individual human and human society are also said to have a dialectical relationship in which each defines the other. In class society, the working class is, indeed, understood to be composed of individual workers; but in the Marxist conception of human society, all of these individual workers are not seen as metaphysically severed off from one another. Rather, the Marxist theory of Historical Materialism holds that individuals are defined by the collective just as the collective is defined by individuals. Each individual human has a dialectical relationship with every other individual human and with their economic class and with human society at large.

Whereas Propaganda of the Deed theory conceives of a one-way relationship in which individuals wholly define the masses (and the masses can only reflect the actions of infinitesimal individuals who make up the masses), Marxism contends that human society reflects the individual while society is also reflected within each and every individual.

According to the Marxist conception of human society, no individual can embody the will of the masses. No single worker can personally embody the will of the working class. Social change is determined by material conditions and cannot be determined by the subjective will of any individual; history is pushed forward not by the deeds of individuals but through class struggle and the advancement of class consciousness as a form of social consciousness.

As Marx and Engels explained in The Communist Manifesto: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” Revolution, then, is not seen by Marxists as an assemblage of individual actions, but rather as a process which is rooted in the activities of an economic class, which is more than just an assemblage of disparate individuals.

To better understand the drastic difference in worldview between Propaganda of the Deed theory and Marxism, we must first come to grips with these terms: social consciousness, class consciousness, and class struggle.

In A Great Beginning, Lenin defined classes as “large groups of people differing from each other by the place they occupy in a historically determined system of social production, by their relation (in most cases fixed and formulated in law) to the means of production, by their role in the social organization of labor, and, consequently, by the dimensions of the share of social wealth of which they dispose and the mode of acquiring it.”

Class, according to Lenin, reflects differences in status and oppositions which inevitably lead to one class being able to “appropriate the labor of another.” Thus, Lenin asserted:

“Classes are groups of people, one of which can appropriate the labor of another, owing to the different places they occupy in a definite system of social economy.”

Next, we must understand social consciousness, which represents the common aspects of private individual consciousness within a society. Social consciousness encompasses all of the ideas, thoughts, attitudes, beliefs, prejudices, and other manifestations of consciousness which are broadly held in common within society.

Individual consciousness and social consciousness have a dialectical relationship with one another, meaning that the consciousness of individuals can impact social consciousness and vice-versa.

An important form of social consciousness is class consciousness, which emerges whenever an economic class becomes aware of itself and begins to struggle for its own economic class interests.

Class consciousness is incredibly important because it is a prerequisite to social revolution. Whereas Propaganda of the Deed theory holds that revolution is nothing more than a collection of mindless actions of individuals, the Social Formation Theory of Marxist Historical Materialism holds that revolution can only be accomplished by an economic class which has developed class consciousness to a sufficient degree that revolution can be carried out by an entire class.

Engels explicitly denied the ability of the individual human being to act as a personal agent of history in a letter written to J. Bloch in 1890:

“History is made in such a way that the final result always arises from conflicts between many individual wills, of which each in turn has been made what it is by a host of particular conditions of life. Thus there are innumerable intersecting forces, an infinite series of parallelograms of forces which give rise to one resultant — the historical event.”

Far from being moved by an succession of individual actions, Engels explains that the forces of history are unconscious and emergent motions of collective social activity:

“This may again itself be viewed as the product of a power which works as a whole unconsciously and without volition. For what each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one willed.”

Thus it cannot be possible, as the SRP proclaims, for individual acts to embody the will of the masses. On the contrary, according to Engels, individual wills and actions emerge from collective social consciousness and social activity:

“The wills of individuals. . . do not attain what they want, but are merged into an aggregate mean, a common resultant, it must not be concluded that they are equal to zero. On the contrary, each contributes to the resultant and is to this extent included in it.”

Propaganda of the Deed, therefore, makes the critical error of voluntarism, which is an over-emphasis on the subjective will of individual human beings. Voluntarists deny both social consciousness and class struggle as motive forces of human history.

Lenin’s Critique of Propaganda of the Deed

And now, finally, we are ready to examine Lenin’s critique of political terrorism and propaganda of the deed.

In the article “Revolutionary Adventurism.” Lenin addresses the assassination of Dmitry Sipyagin by Stepan Balmashov and related political positions expressed by the Socialist Revolutionary Party. He begins by stating flatly that terrorism, in “the experience of the Russian revolutionary movement,” had “so clearly proved to be ineffective.” Lenin attacks the claim of the SRP that individual acts of terrorism such as Sipyagin’s assassination can be carried out “in conjunction with work among the masses.” Lenin argues that these are opportunistic claims and that these advocates of terrorism are, in reality, “in no way connected with the masses and, moreover, could not have been by reason of the very way in which it was carried out.”

Lenin cites the “theory of excitative terrorism” as an ideological underpinning of the SRP. This theory is defined by the Socialist Revolutionaries themselves: “Each time a hero engages in single combat, this arouses in us all a spirit of struggle and courage.”

Lenin dismisses the theory of excitative terrorism, writing:

“We know from the past and see in the present that only new forms of the mass movement or the awakening of new sections of the masses to independent struggle really rouses a spirit of struggle and courage in all. Single combat however, inasmuch as it remains single combat waged by the Balmashovs, has the immediate effect of simply creating a short-lived sensation, while indirectly it even leads to apathy and passive waiting for the next bout.”

Here we see an important distinction being drawn by Lenin between individual acts of terror and mass movement. Action and practice in the material world are of vital importance to the Marxist conception of the dialectic between theory and practice, but such actions are only relevant to class struggle if they are developed as mass movement. This is what distinguishes Marxist strategies for “awakening the masses” from the individualist framework of Propaganda of the Deed.

The SRP, following in the ideological footsteps of Pisacane, believes that each individual act of terrorism will catalyze further individual acts of terrorism, and that these individual acts of terrorism constitute “the revolution,” just as individuals taken together as a disparate assortment are considered to be “the masses.”

This ultimately comes down to an error of metaphysics. Our translation of Vietnam’s Curriculum of the Basic Principles of Marxism-Leninism gives this definition of metaphysics:

Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy that attempts to explain the fundamental nature of reality by classifying things, phenomena, and ideas into various categories. Metaphysical philosophy has taken many forms through the centuries, but one common shortcoming of metaphysical thought is a tendency to view things and ideas in a static, abstract manner. Metaphysical positions view nature as a collection of objects and phenomena which are isolated from one another and fundamentally unchanging.

Engels explained the problems of metaphysics in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific:

“The analysis of Nature into its individual parts, the grouping of the different natural processes and objects in definite classes, the study of the internal anatomy of organized bodies in their manifold forms - hese were the fundamental conditions of the gigantic strides in our knowledge of Nature that have been made during the last 400 years.”

Metaphysics sees the universe as an assortment of discrete things, phenomena, and ideas. The metaphysical worldview denies the dialectical relationships which define human individuals and precludes the idea that human society and the human individual have a dialectical relationship which mutually defines and develops both.

Both Pisacane and the Socialist Revolutionary Party expressed a starkly metaphysical worldview in proclaiming that revolution must be a process of individuals activating other individuals to bold acts of individual terrorism. Marxist conceptions of revolution, on the other hand, are founded upon the dialectical relationship between the individual and the economic class to which the individual belongs. Mass movement, according to the Marxist philosophy, can only come about through class consciousness which enables a class to think and act collectively as one cohesive movement.

According to Lenin, “the persons who committed this terrorist act neither counted on nor hoped for any definite action or support on the part of the masses. In their naïveté, the Socialist-Revolutionaries do not realize that their predilection for terrorism is causally most intimately linked with the fact that, from the very outset, they have always kept, and still keep, aloof from the working-class movement, without even attempting to become a party of the revolutionary class which is waging its class struggle.”

Marxism does not deny the importance of action, of course. Indeed, Marx himself pointed out that class consciousness can only be a motive force on history once it becomes embodied through mass action, writing in Critique of the Political Economy:

“The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism by weapons, material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses. Theory is capable of gripping the masses as soon as it demonstrates ad hominem, and it demonstrates ad hominem as soon as it becomes radical. To be radical is to grasp the root of the matter.”

When Marx says that theory must "grip the masses ad hominem," he means that the theory must manifest in the actual life conditions and conscious activities of the masses. It is not enough for the masses to simply be aware of their own class position and their historical mission to enact social revolution; they must bring these ideas to life by building institutions capable of revolutionary struggle.

Lenin points out that acts of individual assassination are ultimately futile, as they culminate in the loss of a revolutionary life, while the assassin’s target will be readily replaced by the ruling class. All that Balmashov has accomplished, according to Lenin, is “to sacrifice the Life of a revolutionary for the sake of wreaking vengeance on the scoundrel Sipyagin, who is then replaced by the scoundrel Plehve.”

Here, Lenin refers to Vyacheslav von Plehve, who became Minister of the Interior of the Russian empire after Sipyagin’s death. Plehve was even more harsh than Sipyagin in suppressing peasant revolts and executing revolutionary dissidents. It is, perhaps, devoid of irony that the Socialist Revolutionary Party Combat Organization went on to assassinate Plehve, as well, in 1904. Plehve was replaced, in turn, by Pyotr Sviatopolk-Mirsky, a “liberal reformer” who nevertheless oversaw the massacre of peaceful protesters in Saint Petersburg along with various other violent suppressions of dissent.

Lenin’s observation that assassination only leads to replacement of the target and continuity of the ruling class regime, therefore, proved salient. History has shown, time and again, that assassination is not a solution to the objective problems of class society. To believe that the elimination of a single individual could change the course of history is to succumb to the historiographical error of “Great Man Theory.”

This theory, first formalized by Scottish reactionary philosopher Thomas Carlyle, holds that "Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here." Great Man Theory insists that the motive force of history is the individual, which is exactly in line with the key pretext of Propaganda of the Deed. The insistence that revolution is nothing more than a series of acts of individuals is an invocation of Great Man Theory. Revolution is perceived by Propagandists of the Deed as nothing more than a procession of Great Acts by Great Individuals. This perfectly encapsulates Carlyle’s dictum that “all things that we see standing accomplished in the world are properly the outer material result, the practical realization and embodiment, of Thoughts that dwelt in the Great Men sent into the world.”

Propaganda of the Deed is a political theatric which is rooted in Great Man Theory: an ideological staging of Great Heroes against Great Villains. Assassins are Great Revolutionaries and their targets are Great Oppressors, and the revolution is reduced to little more than single combat between such Great Figures of History.

This entire worldview is diametrically opposed to the bedrock principles of Marxist philosophy and historiography. Marxist thought denies that history is pushed forward by the subjective will of individuals. Friedrich Engels insisted that “men make their history themselves, but not as yet with a collective will or according to a collective plan.”

Engels explicitly dismissed Great Man Theory, utilizing a similar line of argument as Lenin; that any historically “great” figure is eminently replaceable in the unfolding of history:

“That such and such a man and precisely that man arises at that particular time in that given country is of course pure accident. But cut him out and there will be a demand for a substitute, and this substitute will be found, good or bad, but in the long run he will be found. That Napoleon, just that particular Corsican, should have been the military dictator whom the French Republic, exhausted by its own war, had rendered necessary, was an accident; but that, if a Napoleon had been lacking, another would have filled the place, is proved by the fact that the man has always been found as soon as he became necessary: Caesar, Augustus, Cromwell, etc.”

Engels even admitted that if Karl Marx had never been born, someone else would have come up with all the ideas that Marx had written down:

“While Marx discovered the materialist conception of history, Thierry, Mignet, Guizot, and all the English historians up to 1850 are the proof that it was being striven for, and the discovery of the same conception by Morgan proves that the time was ripe for it and that indeed it had to be discovered.”

The Marxist conception of Historical Materialism rejects the notion that the subjective will of individual human beings can drive history and human society forward. Instead, Historical Materialist Social Formation Theory holds that the driving force of development of human society is the objective economic base of society. Individuals can impact the world through subjective actions, but class struggle is seen as the essential motive force of development of class society.

As Engels put it, Historical Materialism "seeks the ultimate cause and the great moving power of all important historic events in the economic development of society, in the changes in the modes of production and exchange."

Thus, from a Marxist perspective, the theory of Propaganda of the Deed fails at both ends. It erroneously absolutizes the importance of the subjective will of both the assassin as the nucleus of revolutionary action while simultaneously absolutizing the importance of the assassin’s target as a subjective force of oppression. It was not the Czar that oppressed Russia, nor was it Sipyagin, nor Plehve. It was the ruling class which oppressed Russian peasants and workers, and only class revolution as a cohesive mass movement grounded in class consciousness could hope to liberate Russia from class oppression.

Against Adventurism and Stochastic Terrorism

The Socialist Revolutionary Party’s claim that “strength” could be “transferred” from the ruling class to the oppressed masses through acts of individual terror was, from a Marxist perspective, nonsensical. As Lenin wrote:

“These people do not understand that this very promise to ‘transfer’ strength constitutes political adventurism, and that their adventurism stems from their lack of principle.”

In 1914, Lenin very clearly defined this word “adventurism” as activity which has “politics without the masses.” Adventurist politics have “no serious and stable principles.” This perfectly describes the politics of Propaganda of the Deed, which absolutizes the role of the individual while denying the coherence and cohesion of a class conscious proletariat and rejects the very notion of “serious and stable principles” of political consciousness altogether.

Strength cannot be “transferred” from the ruling class to the oppressed masses through individualist acts of terrorism. Strength and power comes from organization and development of the oppressed masses as an organized economic class. There is a kernel of truth in the theory of Propaganda of the Deed: the masses do have tremendous revolutionary potential just waiting to be unleashed. But this potential will never be unleashed through adventurist acts of individualist terrorism. On the contrary, the masses need education and leadership which will build up class consciousness and organize the masses into a united and cohesive revolutionary class.

As Lenin explained:

“Anyone who really carries on his revolutionary work in conjunction with the class struggle of the proletariat very well knows, sees and feels what vast numbers of immediate and direct demands of the proletariat (and of the sections of the people capable of supporting the latter) remain unsatisfied. He knows that in very many places, throughout vast areas, the working people are literally straining to go into action, and that their ardor runs to waste because of the scarcity of literature and leadership, the lack of forces and means in the revolutionary organizations.”

Thus we see that the theory of Propaganda of the Deed explicitly denies the most important aspects of revolution-building. Rather than seeking to unite and organize the workers, Propagandists of the Deed demands that we see “the masses” as little more than a seething jumble of disconnected individuals. Rather than seeking to educate the masses and build class consciousness, ideology is seen as a “blight” which can only ever “lead to disunity.”

Propaganda of the Deed as Stochastic Terrorism

Propaganda of the Deed and individualist terrorism can only beget further acts of individualist terrorism, and these disparate and random acts can never constitute a revolutionary whole. In our present era, Propaganda of the Deed most commonly manifests as stochastic terrorism, and it is primarily a weapon of the far right.

Stochastic terrorism differs from the tactics and methods of organizations like the Combat Organization of the Socialist Revolutionary Party. Whereas the SRP openly and directly called for individualist acts of terror, stochastic terrorism relies on indirect and coded calls for violence which provide a veneer of plausible deniability to those who call for violence. The aim of the stochastic terrorist is to create conditions which make it statistically more likely for “lone wolf” terrorists to come forward and commit acts of political terrorism. This is done through the dissemination of ideology which makes heavily indoctrinated individuals more likely to take up arms in acts of individualist adventurism.

Stochastic terrorism is the source of nearly all acts of political terrorism which take place in the West, and it is almost exclusively a phenomenon of fascism. That said, there are nominally leftist and progressive voices which broadcast calls for stochastic terrorism. If you look closely enough you will find strains of ideology promoting the ravings of such false-prophets of the pseudo-left as Ted Kaczynski and Pol Pot, attempting to spur disaffected young leftists towards acts of stochastic terror.

It is dubious as to whether these are organic progressive movements; it is plausible, even probable, that many of these ideological deviations are rightwing psyops, and so far, none have broken out into the mainstream. If left unchecked, however, it is entirely possible for the ideological poison of such adventurist currents of “leftism” to take root and spread. After all, adventurist and individualist acts of “leftist” terrorism have had currents of popularity in the past: the assassinations of the SRP in the early 1900s, the illegalist bombers of the 1920s, leftwing terror groups of the 1960s like such as the Weather Underground; there have been many such waves of leftwing terror throughout modern history. The only way to ensure such a current of fruitless leftwing violence does not resurface is through the construction of a coherent and organized proletarian movement which will divert workers away from such acts of desperation and political vanity.

Spontaneity vs. Organized Revolution

In What is to be Done, Lenin described the individualist theory of Propaganda of the Deed as “subservient to spontaneity.” As Lenin explains, the sentiments which lead to individualist acts of terror are rooted in dissatisfaction with an ineffective workers’ movement: “the terrorists bow to the spontaneity of the passionate indignation of the intellectuals, who are either incapable of linking up the revolutionary struggle with the labour movement, or lack the opportunity to do so. It is very difficult indeed for those who have lost their belief, or who have never believed that this is possible, to find some other outlet for their indignation and revolutionary energy than terror.”

In other words, individualist terrorists are failed revolutionaries who have either become frustrated by the lack of revolutionary progress in society or who have never believed in the power of the working class to develop into a solid mass movement. Individualist terrorism and Propaganda of the Deed emerge from pure passion and emotion and abandon all faith in the very concept of revolutionary leadership and strategy. Individualist terrorists come to believe that conscious planning and organizing are political dead ends, and that only desperate measures of lone wolves can spur change.

Unfortunately, the only results which individualist acts of terror can hope to inspire are more acts of individualist terror, and it is not possible for individual acts of violence to “accumulate” into revolutionary movement. This has been proven by history, which has seen thousands of acts of individualist terrorism and assassination, none of which have ever gotten us any closer to liberation of the working class.

Of course, spontaneous political activity comprises more than just individualist acts of terror. Riots and uprisings and strikes are also spontaneous actions. When Martin Luther King Jr. described riots as ‘the language of the unheard,” this is precisely what he meant. In Marxist terms, Dr. King is referring to social psychology, which Vietnam’s curriculum on Historical Materialism defines as “the whole emotional life, mood, aspirations, will, etc.” of a group of human beings.

Whereas social psychology encompasses the emotional aspect of the masses, social ideology refers to the rational political development of the masses. The highest form of social ideology in class society is class consciousness, because this level of social ideology allows workers to become aware of our own position in the political economy, our own ability to engage in class struggle, and our own historical mission to enact revolution and to seize the means of production from the ruling class.

Spontaneous political activity does not constitute revolutionary activity; rather, spontaneous actions amidst the proletariat are signifiers that the social psychology of the working class has superseded the ideological and political development of the working class. Riots and uprisings show that workers are angry and passionate and frustrated and dissatisfied, but have not yet gained class consciousness which would lead to organized and coherent revolutionary activity.

As communists, we are tasked with understanding the social psychology of the masses; of interpreting these signifiers; of channeling the emotions of the working class into productive revolutionary activity through leadership and organization which is grounded in sound principles. As Lenin advised:

“We must bear in mind that any popular movement assumes an infinite variety of forms, is constantly developing new forms and discarding the old, and effecting modifications or new combinations of old and new forms. It is our duty to participate actively in this process of working out means and methods of struggle.”

Spontaneous actions of the working class are a sign that the masses are desperate for change, but that they do not have a coherent path forward. Riots and uprisings and acts of individualist political terror show us that we, as communists, are falling behind the masses and failing to provide coherent vision and leadership which matches the objective needs of the day. Lenin faced similar circumstances in 1902, writing:

“Because of the extremely rapid growth of the movement, the leaders lagged behind the masses, the revolutionary organizations did not come up to the level of the revolutionary activity of the proletariat, were incapable of marching on in front and leading the masses. That a discrepancy of this sort exists cannot be doubted by any conscientious person who has even the slightest acquaintance with the movement.”

The “movement,” such as it exists today in the Western left, is young and raw. Dissatisfaction and anger have grown very rapidly since 2020. Covid and the George Floyd uprising were explosions of sentiment and spontaneous action that signified a readiness and a need for change among the oppressed masses, but as of now, a half a decade later, these needs have not yet been met. The leadership of working class movements, such as they exist, have failed to provide a framework for organization and mobilization that can harness the fiery energy of proletarian social psychology, and so we are met with a cavalcade of spontaneous actions and individualist acts. These deeds can only signify social psychology; spontaneity will never generate revolution. These are undeniable lessons of history, proved time and time again in one stifled and rudderless uprising after another. The only movements in history which have led to any advances against the ruling class have been organized mass movements which embody class consciousness.

Distinguishing Resistance War from Individualist Terrorism

To reject the individualism and adventurism of Propaganda of the Deed is not to reject the need for action. Marxists recognize the need for revolutionary action and we recognize that this must, of necessity, include acts of self-defense. The difference between revolutionary mass defensiveness and individualistic terrorism is that communist defensive violence must be waged as Resistance War.

In People’s War, People’s Army, the great general of Vietnam Vo Nguyen Giap dictated that “resistance War must be the work of the entire people. Therein lies the key to victory.” For this reason, Resistance War must also be People’s War.

Resistance War cannot be enacted through the declaration of a small and marginalized group of would-be revolutionaries, nor can it be waged by adventurist individuals. Resistance War is the mobilization of the working class writ large and emerges from the working class. Not all Resistance War is class conscious Resistance War. Other circumstances can mobilize the masses to wage Resistance War. An example of Resistance War that is being waged at this moment is the uprising of the people of Palestine, Yemen, and Lebanon against the genocidal regime of Israel. By and large, the uprising against Israel is not a class conscious movement, but it is Resistance War all the same, because it is rooted in the masses and constitutes a mobilization of the masses in defense of the masses.

The first modern Resistance War in Vietnam began under similar conditions to the Resistance War against Israel. It began during World War II in resistance against occupation by fascist Japan. Although this Resistance War against Japan was organized and led by communists, it was not a war of communist class revolution. It was a war for survival against genocide, slavery, and imposed famine. Only after the Japanese fascists left Vietnam did the Resistance War evolve into class warfare against French colonists and American imperialists with an explicit goal of communist revolution.

In his 1946 appeal to “Wage Resistance War,” Ho Chi Minh outlined the defensive philosophy of Resistance War:

“Out of love for peace we have made concessions. But the more concessions we made, the further the French colonialists went because they are resolved to invade our country once again. No! We would rather sacrifice everything than lose our country, than return to slavery.”

Resistance War, then, is not war of aggression, nor is it a celebration of violence. It is an existential struggle for survival and liberty against oppressors who will not peacefully yield autonomy and self-determination to the working masses.

It should also be understood that acts of destruction and what might be called “terrorism” are not beyond the purview of Resistance War. Even the most milquetoast liberals would be loathe to admonish the French Resistance, under German occupation, for bombing trains and assassinating Nazi officers. Similarly, the resistance war waged by Vietnamese revolutionaries included such acts. Ho Chi Minh explicitly called for destructive war in 1947, writing:

“I earnestly call on you to exert all your efforts to carry out destruction work. We must destroy roads widely and deeply so that the French cannot use them. A pick stroke into the roads has the value of a bullet shot by our soldiers at the enemy. I solemnly promise to you that after victory, I will endeavour to repair everything with you. We will build more beautiful roads, bridges and sluices and better houses worthy of a free and independent nation.”

Through decades of resistance warfare against Japan, France, the USA, and the puppet government’s ARVN forces, Vietnamese resistance fighters performed targeted assassinations and carried out clandestine acts of destruction and violence against invaders. But these acts of Resistance War resulted from the mobilization of the masses of Vietnam. They were not individualist acts of Propaganda of the Deed. They were carried out as an organized people’s war and Vietnamese communists worked for over twenty years, from about 1920 until the early 1940s, to organize the masses before the conditions were ripe for such mass mobilized Resistance War. At no time during this organizing period did Ho Chi MInh or Vo Nguyen Giap call for individualist acts of terrorism in hopes of “transferring strength” from the ruling class to the workers. Rather, Vietnamese communists built power by educating, organizing, and mobilizing Vietnamese workers and peasants into a coherent and class conscious mass movement which was capable of waging legitimate Resistance War and class revolution.

Avoiding Commandism and Tailism

In the work of leading and organizing the masses towards revolution, communists must avoid errors of commandism and tailism. These are mistakes which are made in revolutionary leadership which result whenever revolutionaries do not understand the process and nature of social revolution. According to our translation of Vietnam’s curriculum on Historical Materialism:

Commandism occurs when revolutionaries do not listen to the people, and instead attempt to unilaterally command the people through force of will. This is a form of voluntarism because it reflects a mistaken belief that the subjective will of the revolutionary individual or party can impose its will unilaterally on the masses. It fails to account for the dialectical relationship which exists between more advanced elements of the revolutionary class and the masses at large.

Tailism occurs when revolutionaries follow reactionary opinions, attitudes, and false consciousness of the masses blindly. It is, in essence, a failure to utilize proper Dialectical Materialist and Historical Materialist analysis and methodology in theory and practice. As Lenin wrote:

“Surely, it is not [the] function [of the revolutionary party] to drag at the tail of the movement. At best, this would be of no service to the movement; at worst, it would be exceedingly harmful.”

When it comes to understanding, interpreting, and engaging with spontaneous actions of the masses, it is easy to fall into mistakes of commandism and tailism. For example, during the George Floyd uprising, it was common for “leftist” thought leaders to fall into both commandist and tailist positions.

Commandists tried to steer and direct the spontaneous actions of the masses through force of individual will, either by spurring demonstrators on to increased violence or by attempting to restrain and hold back the masses from demonstrating and voicing their frustration with the status quo altogether.

Tailists sought to elevate the most reactionary voices and attitudes that could be found in the mass demonstrations such as the anarchocapitalistic “Boogaloo Boys.”

In the end, the George Floyd uprisings were misdirected and nullified by bourgeois agents who systematically steered and quelled the spontaneous passions of participants, as might have been expected. These uprisings were profound in their demonstration of proletarian frustration, but there was no revolutionary leadership present which was capable of channeling the energies of the uprisings into a lasting mass movement. As Lenin wrote in 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. And the younger the socialist movement in any given country, the more vigorously it must struggle against all attempts to entrench non-socialist ideology, and the more resolutely the workers must be warned against the bad counsellors. . . Yes, our movement is indeed in its infancy, and in order that it may grow up faster, it must become imbued with intolerance against those who retard its growth by their subservience to spontaneity. Nothing is so ridiculous and harmful as pretending that we are ‘old hands’ who have long ago experienced all the decisive stages of the struggle.”

Here, Lenin is cautioning against tendencies of tailism to spontaneous actions. Communist revolutionaries must not tail along masses “in subservience to spontaneity.”

This does not mean that we should make the mistake of commandism by clumsily trying to overtake or coopt organic spontaneous movements as some organizations tried to do during the George Floyd uprisings and as some try to do now in the movement to Free Palestine.

As Ho Chi Minh wrote in Modifying the Working Style:

“We must always converse with the masses and make sure that we are understood by the masses. This means we must show the masses that we are accountable. If we have bureaucratic manners, if we only command the masses, that means we are not accountable to the masses. In making this mistake, we turn our ‘commands’ into a wall that separates the Party. . . from the masses, and the policies of the Party. . . become detached from the needs of the people... Therefore, we must ask for the masses' opinions in everything. We must always converse with the masses and make sure that we are understood by the masses... But we should also not just blindly do whatever the masses say. (We must) compare different opinions carefully and analyze the class conditions that lead to those opinions. Find the contradictions in those differing opinions to see what is right and what is wrong. Select the right opinions, present them to the people for discussion, and then repeat this process, to gradually raise the people's awareness... We absolutely should not follow the tail of masses. But we must gather the opinions of the masses and utilize them in our leadership. We must take the people's way of comparing, considering, and solving problems, and turn it into a way of leading the people.”

In following Ho Chi Minh’s formula, we can gradually, steadily, and systematically educate the workers and divert the masses away from spontaneous action and towards unity, organization, and mass revolution.

Blindly following elements of the working class into spontaneous bouts of unfocused political violence and upheaval constitutes tailism: communists must not submit to spontaneity and thoughtless passions of social psychology.

Arrogantly succumbing to the vainglorious adventurism of Propaganda of the Deed is overt commandism: it is the facile belief that a single bold act of violence could spontaneously drive the masses towards revolution.

Only a measured, steadfast, and principled approach to organizing and educating our fellow workers will lead to mass revolution and the conditions to wage resistance war against our oppressors.

Conclusion

The most violent political force in the world right now is the international capitalist class. The bourgeois state of the USA and its puppet governments have murdered millions of innocent civilians around the world through imperialist wars of aggression. Bourgeois corporations unleash rampant destruction upon our planet’s environment in heedless pursuit of profits. The bourgeois police forces of the Western world have become increasingly militarized and are now beginning to purchase and deploy weapons of modern warfare such as drones and mass surveillance to violently and tyrannically suppress dissent. This is to say nothing of the crimes of “social murder” which Engels described as taking place “when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death.” The ruling class has committed social murder against countless millions of workers “as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains.”

In the face of all this brutality and violence enacted against the working class, it would be naive to call for “bloodless revolution.” The blood already flows. The ruling class is up to their necks in the blood of workers. We, as communists, never asked for violence. But as victims of violence we must have a sober and rational understanding of violence and an abhorrence, in particular, of senseless violence. Propaganda of the Deed and individualist acts of terrorism are just that: senseless and useless acts of frenzy and passion which bring us no closer to our liberation.

Charlie Kirk was an enemy of the workers of the world. As an agent of the ruling class, he sought to divide the proletariat along divisive lines of bigotry and prejudice and hatred. He actively struggled against the liberation of the masses. But he was not a Great Man of History, and he will easily be replaced. His death at the hands of an individualist adventurist will not serve the cause of liberation of the working class. His organization, Turning Point USA, is already moving forward to continue the work of bourgeois propaganda without him, just days after his assassination, and now Kirk can be lionized as a martyr in service to the ruling class. It doesn’t matter if the shooter was a rightwinger or a “leftist:” the end result is the same, insomuch as there is no end result, at least from the perspective of class struggle. The workers stand to gain nothing from this deed. Capitalism carries on without Charlie Kirk. The workers remain divided and conquered and unorganized. The individual identity of the shooter doesn’t matter any more than the individual act itself has mattered. This was a senseless act which was completely severed off from the masses. Nothing has been gained politically by the workers — and the ruling class has lost nothing.

As we strive to organize and educate our fellow workers, we must draw clear lines against adventurism and individualism. Our organizations must take a firm stance against individualist violence and reject the spurious theory of Propaganda of the Deed in all its forms, just as surely as we must support the waging of resistance war by besieged peoples in nations like Palestine. Our enemies will do everything they can to blur these lines, to draw false comparisons, and to confuse our fellow workers, which makes it all the more urgent and vital that we clarify our positions and sharpen the distinctions between ourselves and our opponents as we “participate actively in this process of working out means and methods of struggle.” We must not lag behind the social psychology of the workers, too timid to act resolutely; we must not tail behind the most reactionary elements of the workers, succumbing to bourgeois chauvinism; we must not try to drag the workers behind us as commandists; we must walk alongside our fellow workers and build class consciousness just as we learn from our fellow workers and build a legitimate mass movement grounded in sound theory and a solid understanding of the objective laws of history. And we must take comfort in the words of Lenin:

“But things can still be put to rights, comrades! Loss of faith in a real cause is the rare exception rather than the rule. The urge to commit terrorist acts is a passing mood. . . we shall fuse the militant organisation of revolutionaries and the mass heroism of the proletariat into a single whole!”

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By: Emerican Johnson

Elon Musk wants to form a new party and he is quickly garnering support from the same liberals who were correctly calling him out for fascism just a few long weeks ago.

Musk, whose political affair with President Donald Trump had the intensity and brevity of a steamy r/fanfic post, has declared his intention to challenge Republicans in upcoming midterm elections by forming a new third party. Musk has christened his new project the “America Party,” proving once again that he sucks at naming stuff. The Party’s stated raison d’etre: “independence from the two-party system,” according to Musk. At face value, the notion of a billionaire rescuing Americans from a billionaire-controlled system with a billionaire-controlled third party is farcical. What’s even more farcical is that he is getting early backing from none other than Andrew Yang, another tech bro with political ambitions who had a failed attempt at a third party run for president back in 2020. Yang helms a vanity party of his own — the only-slightly-better-named “Forward Party,” and it remains to be seen whether his party will merge with or form some sort of coalition with the America Party. All the same, Yang has made it clear that he supports Musk and his party-building intentions in various press interviews.

“Elon has built world-class companies from nothing more than an idea multiple times, and in this instance, you have the vast majority of Americans who are hungry for a new approach,” Yang told Politico. “I’m happy to spell it out for Elon, or anyone else who wants to head down this road. A third party can succeed very quickly.”

Yang has also claimed to be in contact with Musk’s team. According to Politico, Yang is “excited for anyone who wants to move on from the duopoly” and is “happy to help give someone a sense of what the path looks like.”

Alliances between egomaniacal capitalists are notoriously fickle, so this may be a flash in the pan or it may lead to the formation of something bigger, but the fact that Yang is willing to make such overtures may seem, on first glance, surprising. On the platform page of his failed campaign to become Mayor of New York City, Yang described himself as a “progressive reformer,” and many liberals have (incorrectly) lauded his advocacy for Universal Basic Income as economically liberating for workers (we’ll elaborate on our critiques of UBI in a future article).

In terms of social issues, Yang went from a more conservative stance in his 2019 presidential election campaign to espousing more liberal identity politics in his 2021 Mayoral campaign, which many have described as cynical pandering to New Yorkers. Yang has been quite critical of Donald Trump’s MAGA movement, going so far as to say last year that he was committed to ensuring that “we don’t wind up with a Trump return to the White House.” He has also expressed opposition to the fascist Peter Thiel (a known conspirator of Elon Musk and the power behind the Vice-Throne of J. D. Vance).

As a centrist who opposes MAGA fascism, Yang comes down decidedly on the liberal side of the right-shifted spectrum of American politics. Despite this, he seems to have absolutely no hesitance when it comes to supporting Elon Musk, who was instrumental in backing Trump’s election campaign and who worked diligently for months to help enact Trump’s fascist agenda - the same agenda which Yang described as ushering in a “dark period in American life.”

Ultimately, though, it may be easy to understand how Yang and Musk might fall into camp with one another. They’re both wealthy tech bros, they both have a history of opportunism and flexible morality, and they both have fragile enough egos that they directly pay out bribes so that people will like them.

What might be harder to understand is why an overt DNC apparatchik like Bakari Sellers is currently glazing Elon Musk and trying to build him up among his liberal peers as an ally against Trumpism. According to Sellers, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

“Elon Musk is a necessity in particular battles,” Sellers said recently in a CNN panel. As such, Sellers professed that he is willing to “take (Musk) back” into the fold to oppose Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill.” In this manner, Sellers and other Democrats (such as Congressman Ro Khanna) who are also taking this stance are beginning the work of rehabilitating Musk among the center-left. According to these Blue Dog “pragmatists,” the Hashtag-Resistance needs Elon Musk and his billions in order to oppose MAGA fascism.

Sellers is just a few months younger than me, and we both grew up in South Carolina, so I feel pretty confident in saying “there but for the grace of God go I.” Liberal politicians in South Carolina are (perhaps by necessity) some of the worst opportunists and compradors that have ever walked the face of the Earth. James Clyburn, who is perhaps South Carolina’s most prominent DNC figure, was instrumental in securing the DNC primary for Joe Biden back in 2019. Sellers was a protege to Clyburn, and they both share what we used to call “Blue Dog” politics which emphasize radical centrism, ruthless pragmatism, and a laser-sharp focus on “fiscal responsibility.” Joe Biden was the posterboy for Blue Dog politics, and indeed he was originally selected as Barack Obama’s running mate because Obama was seen as “too progressive.” It was believed that Biden would temper the fears of the right wing of the DNC. Bakari Sellers, like Joe Biden, is committed to such reactionary causes as neoliberal economic policies, imperialist aggression against Iran, and political Zionism.

Both Biden and Sellers have played roles in building up Musk as a political figure. Biden helped significantly to cement Musk’s power during his presidency, and now Sellers is helping to bring him back home to the center-left after his fling with MAGA. Everywhere you look there are signs of centrist libs warming up to Musk. Sellers frames the potential of such a coalition with a fascist figure as “pragmatism,” but there’s a darker truth at play. Materialist analysis reveals a consistently repeated underlying historical phenomenon underlying the collusion between center-left figures like Sellers and far-right fascists like Musk: it’s called the “liberal-fascist bargain.”

I first learned about this “bargain” over twenty years ago, in 2004, as a sophomore at the University of South Carolina. The class was History 375: Nazism and Fascism in Europe. It was an intimidating lecture series, somewhat legendary at the time among USC History students for the depth and rigor of the course. I was lucky to get a seat, as the course was prone to being filled lightning-fast by seniors. The professor, Dr. Robert Herzstein, was an accomplished Historian who blended his research work with public activism. He famously linked the former Austrian president and Secretary General of the United Nations to Nazi atrocities. He also ensured that documents and recordings held by the Nixon library (which documented, among other misdeeds, war crimes and atrocities in Vietnam) would be accessible to the public.

Although Jewish himself, Dr. Herzstein had deep and intimate knowledge of the Third Reich and Mussolini’s Italy. He was able to talk about Goebels, Himmler, Hitler, and their ilk with such familiarity that it seemed as if he had spent a few months in the Fuhrer Bunker himself. He was wonderfully gifted at explaining the functions and programs of European fascists of the 20th century. One of the most profound lessons I learned from Dr. Herzstein had to do with the way capitalist interests, including liberals  -  as well as socialist democrats, centrists, and bourgeois welfare state advocates  -  had willingly played a significant role in paving the way for Hitler to seize power.

The way Dr. Herzstein explained it, these middle class liberals were comfortable, even in the desperate conditions of postwar Germany and Italy. They felt threatened by communism, which was spreading rapidly across Europe. They wanted to keep their iron grip on the factories and farmlands. They wanted law and order. Even though many of these early 20th century liberals genuinely despised Nazis and fascists, communism was the greater threat and thus the shared enemy of liberals and fascists alike. Communism, after all, was a threat to the bourgeoisie’s position (which ultimately held the keys to the kingdom) as the ruling class.

There were glaring contradictions between the words and the deeds of Weimar liberals. In the public spotlight, they would proclaim an abhorrence of violence. They expressed disgust when the Sturmabteilung brownshirts showed up at Communist gatherings and broke a few skulls, even though liberal capitalists were the ones who’d paid the brownshirts to do the skull-smashing. They wrote long newspaper articles admonishing both sides  -  both the fascists and the communists who’d been assaulted - needed to use reason and discourse to solve their problems.

When push came to shove and the communists started to gain ground in Reichstag elections, the bourgeois liberal-centrist parties voluntarily handed the reins of government to Hitler. This history is well documented not just in the writings of Dr. Herzstein, such as in his excellent book The War That Hitler Won, but also in works by Dr. Michael Parenti, such as his clear, concise, and well-documented Blackshirts and Reds. The alliance between fascist and liberal, which almost invariably seems to come about whenever capitalism is threatened, is what Dr. Herzstein referred to as the “liberal-fascist bargain.”

Such a bargain reflects an opportunistic convergence between seemingly disparate factions of the ruling class. These factions are ostensibly opposed; indeed, more often than not, fascists and liberals legitimately hate each other and see each other as bitter political rivals. Yet they find themselves united, again and again throughout history, by a shared imperative: the preservation of capitalist power. This isn’t a conspiracy theory, but a historical and structural tendency that becomes particularly pronounced whenever capitalists perceive threats to their class-position from genuine working-class movements. To understand this bargain, we must recognize that both liberalism and fascism, despite their stark aesthetic differences, function as instruments of the ruling class. Both liberal parties and fascist parties are social institutions which exist to serve the capitalist agenda. Both fascists and liberals are capable of resorting to violent repression in order to maintain, expand, and defend capitalist institutions. Just as Trump violently cracked down on the BLM protests, Biden violently cracked down on student protesters who opposed the genocide of Palestinians. Democrats and Republicans alike uphold imperialist war and interventionism against nations which refuse to fall in line with the neoliberal world order, such as Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan, as we explained in a recent video. And both liberals and fascists have a common enemy in working class movements  -  be they socialist, communist, or anarchist  -  that fundamentally challenge existing property relations and the capitalist system.

To grasp the contemporary “liberal-fascist bargain” which seems to be forming between DNC centrism and Musk fascism, we must examine the history of the development of both liberalism and fascism in the USA from a Historical Materialist perspective. Historical Materialism is a method of analyzing human history and human society on an objective basis. Historical Materialism was pioneered by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and it demands that we seek to understand the economic base of society as the primary engine of history. According to this perspective, “superstructural” aspects of society, such as political ideologies, governmental structures, and social institutions are all reflections of underlying economic relations and political struggle stems from inherent class struggle which inevitably occurs between the capitalists — the private owners of the means of production — and the working class.

Our last article challenged the veneration of the United States’ “Founding Fathers” as champions of liberty and democratization of society. In reality, this image was carefully cultivated by the Founders themselves to secure their legacy and ensure the enduring preservation of the institutions they forged. In this process, politics and aesthetics were merged to create a “political cult” which would protect bourgeois class interests. In this manner, the narrative-building work of the Founding Fathers foreshadowed the ways in which fascists, according to Walter Benjamin, would aestheticize politics in order to deceive the working masses and divert them from class struggle. From a historical materialist viewpoint, the American Revolution was not a universal triumph of liberty but rather a power struggle between factions of the nascent capitalist class, consolidating power for the propertied elite and protecting their burgeoning interests against the “turbulent” working majority.

The foundational ideology and practices of the early American republic contained what could be described as the “germ” of fascism  -  a lower, proto-fascist form that would later inspire 20th-century fascist regimes. This makes the emergence of contemporary “MAGA fascism” a logical, rather than aberrant, development within the historical trajectory of American capitalism.

This “germ” manifested in several key ways:

• Suppression of Working-Class Movements: The Founding Fathers had an objective need to keep workers divided and powerless. This led to violent suppressions of dissent, from the New York Conspiracy of 1741 to Shays’ Rebellion of 1786 to the Whiskey rebellion of 1791, not to mention the brutal suppression of countless workers’ riots, Native American uprisings, and slave revolts. These actions set a precedent for the American bourgeois state’s willingness to use violence to maintain capitalism. Over the course of the following century, America’s capitalist ruling class and the bourgeois state proved more than willing to use of the military, police, and private mercenaries (i.e., the Pinkertons) to violently break up strikes and suppress workers’ movements. This directly prefigured and inspired methods employed by 20th century fascist regimes, such as capitalist factory owners paying Nazi brownshirts to break strikes and then violently dismantling workers’ unions all together to replace them with a state-controlled “Labor Front” which was completely subservient to the whims of Hitler and the Nazi Party.

• Manifest Destiny and Genocidal Expansion: Although the term “Manifest Destiny” was coins later in the 19th century, the ideology itself was rooted in colonialist ideals which had been deeply ingrained in American society since long before the Revolution. Manifest Destiny served as an ideological justification for the material expansion of the American capitalist system. This system of settler-colonialism was rooted in a belief in the inherent superiority of white Americans. As an expansionist vision marked by the violent extermination and forced assimilation of indigenous peoples, American colonial programs were directly and explicitly referenced as inspiration for 20th century fascist ideologies like Hitler’s dream of “Lebensraum,” or “living space” for the German people which was to be violently seized in Eastern Europe.

• Elitist Governance and Distrust of the Masses: The Founding Fathers profoundly distrusted the working masses and explicitly sought to insulate the state from democratic working class control. Figures like Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Adams openly expressed class prejudice against workers’ interests, revealing a clear and explicit intent to protect property and maintain capitalist control over the state and society. The fascists developed this anti-worker sentiment even further, going so far as to outlaw workers’ parties and to execute and imprison communists en masse in concentration camps.

Fascism, in this historical view, functions as a capitalist “antibody” against working-class movements. It is a “false revolution,” according to Parenti, designed to fool workers into fighting against their own class interests. In the USA, this has developed into two distinct ideological strains which both exist today: the political programs of the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. Outlining this historical development goes beyond the scope of this article, but suffice it to say that these two programs, while superstructurally and superficially quite distinct, serve the same objective class interests of the ruling class at the level of the economic base. That is to say, both DNC liberalism and GOP fascism exist to defend and preserve capitalism. It may be difficult to see this fundamental truth in domestic politics, since Republicans and Democrats appear to be so bitterly opposed when it comes to polarized partisan political theater, but an arena where it’s much easier to see the shared class interests of America’s bourgeois “duoparty” configuration is in America’s foreign policy.

The United States has a long and thoroughly documented history of supporting fascist regimes, atrocities, suppression of human rights, and even outright genocide around teh world. This blatant imperialism has been absolutely continuous stretching back throughout the history of the nation, and imperialist intervention and regime change operations have been backed by Republicans and Democrats alike at every turn.

During the 19th and early 20th century, American “gun boat diplomacy” protected the interests of American capitalists and propped up “banana republics” which often violently suppressed any attempts at organized working class movements in Central and South America. During the Cold War, the U.S. frequently allied with right-wing dictators and anti-democratic forces to counter perceived communist threats. The Truman Doctrine, named after Democratic president Harry S. Truman, pledged support to “free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” While this sounds nice on paper, it frequently translated into backing authoritarian anti-communist regimes. A stark example is the 1973 Chilean coup d’état, which overthrew the democratically elected socialist President Salvador Allende and installed the brutal military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. While often associated with the Nixon administration, this operation had roots in earlier U.S. covert actions and reflected a bipartisan consensus among both parties to prevent communism from taking root in South America.

In the the 1960s, the liberal administrations of both Kennedy and Johnson were instrumental in installing and propping up a brutally fascist puppet government in South Vietnam. This regime was deeply authoritarian and unpopular, and the war which ensued  -  supported by both Democrats and Republicans  -  resulted in the deaths of over two million civilians, the use of illegal chemical weapons and firebombs, mass rape of Vietnamese women, and countless other atrocities. The Vietnam War serves as a stark example of how liberal administrations prioritized containing communism over promoting democracy or human rights, and how DNC liberals are more than willing to prop up and support fascists abroad so long as it serves the capitalist-imperialist agenda.

Even now, decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the cold war, the international violence of the American bourgeois duoparty rages on. We have shown in a recent video how Democrats have attacked Republicans from the right to serve an imperialist war agenda against Iran, and of course it must be noted that Joe Biden and a wide majority of DNC party leadership practice political Zionism and provide enthusiastic support to Benjamin Netanyahu’s campaign of genocide and ethnic cleansing against Palestine.

Through all of this violent history, we see a consistent theme: when faced with what is perceived as a greater threat to capitalism and its imperialist agenda, liberal administrations have often found common cause with, or actively enabled, fascist regimes and fascistic programs of violence. Nowhere is the liberal-fascist bargain more visible than in the American empire’s geopolitical machinations of capitalist-imperialism.

Domestically, the liberal-fascist bargain has often been more subtle, often manifesting in policies or rhetoric designed to co-opt or neutralize radical movements. During the Cold War, many liberals were staunchly anticommunist. Although widely perceived of as supporting the Civil Rights movement, DNC leaders violently opposed black communists like the Black Panthers who directly challenged capitalism. It was a Demcoratic mayor -  Richard J. Daley  -  who oversaw the police assassination of Panther leader Fred Hampton in 1969. A year later, in 1970 the Democratic mayor of Kent, Ohio asked the Republican governor to send in the Ohio National Guard to violently crack down on students in what came to be known as the Kent State massacre.

An encyclopedia could be filled with all the examples of liberals and fascists in America working together to violently suppress workers. The liberal-fascist bargain is a phenomenon which has emerged again and again, decade after decade, in crisis after crisis, whenever capitalists have felt anxious about the security of their own class position. So it comes as no surprise that figures as divergent as Elon Musk, Andrew Yang, and Bakari Sellers would be converging opportunistically in times as chaotic and destabilized as our present moment.

What makes things interesting with Musk’s pivot away from MAGA fascism is that Musk is trying to synthesize the liberal-fascist bargain into something more stable than a temporary ad hoc bargain. He wants to form a radically centrist party which would synthesize the positions of Republican fascism and Democratic liberalism. Musk is hardly the first to attempt to build such a centrist Third Party. After all, Andrew Yang’s Forward Party beat him to the punch by half a decade. And before that, stretching back through the decades, there have been countless attempts to build a coherent political-center movement in America.

The “Third Way” ideology, popularized by Bill Clinton in the United States and Tony Blair in the United Kingdom during the 1990s, was a previous political program that attempted to complete a synthesis of liberal-fascism. Presented as a pragmatic middle ground between traditional left-wing social democracy and fascistic Thatcher-Reaganite neoliberalism, the “Third Way” fundamentally embraced market-oriented policies while attempting to soften their impact with market-based social programs.

Clinton and Blair pushed domestic programs of “rights with responsibilities” which were reflected in foreign policies of “austerity” in the Global South. Developing nations were asked to dismantle welfare programs and social safety nets in exchange for foreign investment. At home, American welfare programs were offered with “conditional benefits” and means testing which gatekept things like healthcare, food, housing, and jobs from people who were most in need. The “Third Way” was an attempt to use market forces for social good, or at least that’s how it was sold to the American people by Bill Clinton and his emerging cohort of Blue Dog Democrats.

In truth, Clinton’s “Third Way” was just a repackaging of Reagan’s neoliberalism with a human face scribbled on. Clinton was happy to capitulate to conservative economic principles and to mask austerity programs behind progressive rhetoric. In doing so, Clinton and Blair sought to “end class struggle” by emphasizing “community” and individual responsibility over collective action and systemic change.

As Clinton put it in a speech at the Third Way Conference in 1999:

“What we’re striving for is to replace a divided way of looking at politics and talking about our common live with a unifying theory.”

This ideological shift served to “sheepdog” disaffected voters back into the mainstream Democratic Party, preventing the rise of more radical class-conscious alternatives. It neutralized challenges from the left by adopting some of their concerns (e.g., social justice rhetoric) while abandoning their core economic demands. All this in service to preserving capitalist structures. The “Third Way” ultimately created a political consensus that accepted the fundamental tenets of neoliberal capitalism, making any challenge to the system appear extreme or irrelevant. It paved the way for policies that further entrenched corporate power and widened economic inequality, all under the guise of “progress” and “modernization.” The aim was to fool workers into believing that they could have common cause with their class oppressors, the capitalists. This is the same conceit which the Founding Fathers used to build the Founding Myth and the National Identity of the American: a false egalitarianism that seeks to fool workers into believing that there is no such thing as class society; that workers and capitalists are all “just Americans.”

Compare this with Parenti’s description of Fascist attempts to “unite society” across class lines:

“Fascist doctrine stresses monistic values: Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer (one people, one rule, one leader). The people are no longer to be concerned with class divisions but must see themselves as part of a harmonious whole, rich and poor as one, a view that supports the economic status quo by cloaking the ongoing system of class exploitation. This is in contrast to a left agenda that advocates the articulation of popular demands and a sharpened awareness of social injustice and class struggle. This monism is buttressed by atavistic appeals to the mythical roots of the people.”

The only difference, then, between liberal monism and fascist monism is the scope of monistic identity. Whereas Hitler aimed to create “Ein Volk” in the form of an Aryan master-race, Clinton tried to build an ideological construct of a “Global Volk,” a pseudo-egalitarian conceit that everyone in the world has the same interest in preserving and expanding global capitalism. As Clinton put it in his address to the Third Way Conference:

“The answer is not to get rid of cultural diversity but to extol it, to protect it, to preserve it, to celebrate it as a particular manifestation of our common humanity. I still think  - and I will end with this  - that’s our most important responsibility.”

It sounds like a lovely sentiment, until you realize that this rhetoric is explicitly in service to the destructive and murderous system of capitalist-imperialism. Earlier in the same speech, Clinton remarked:

”We’ll say yes to the market economy.”

That’s the objective economic root of the Third Way position; and that’s what really matters. As Marx said, “we do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process.” With Historical Materialist analysis, we do not simply trust the flowery words of the ruling class. We look at their actions and the economic material conditions which drive those actions. Bill Clinton spoke of uniting humanity even as he acted to preserve the division and inequity of capitalist class society.

And this brings us back to our present circumstances. Both Elon Musk with his American party and Andrew Yang with his Forward Party claim to represent the “silent majority” of Americans who are tired of the two-party system. This is yet another manifestation of bourgeois monism. Both capitalists are acting as pied pipers, striving to lead American workers along a primrose path that leads away from class struggle.

A political party, by definition, develops and implements ideological programs for a specific class. If this Musk/Yang alliance manages to succeed as a third party it will only mean that the duoparty configuration becomes a triparty configuration which exclusively represents the interests of the bourgeoisie. Musk and Yang are both attempting to build parties which they, themselves, control as capitalists in an attempt to capture dissatisfied workers and to prevent them from moving to a working class movement. The current “duoparty” represents the ruling class from two standpoints. Such a third party as Yang and Musk seek to build would only serve the ruling class from a third standpoint. In economic terms  -  in terms of class structure -  in objective terms — this would not be a change in anything more than aesthetic and ideological configuration. “The ideas of the ruling class,” to quote Marx, would remain “the ruling ideas.”

As for Sellers, he is repeating the same mistakes which many preceding liberals have made: the hubristic notion that fascism is a force which can be controlled through shrewd political maneuvering. This self-deception which liberals fall into, leading them to believe that they can manage fascism, has led to the downfall of many a liberal democracy. History provides numerous precedents where liberals enabled and empowered fascists under the mistaken belief that such brutal political currents could be contained. It happened in Italy, leading to the fascist domination of Benito Mussolini and Italy’s ruin. It happened in Weimar Germany, leading up to the Third Reich and Germany’s downfall. It happened with Pinochet, who was backed by Chilean liberal centrists, resulting in decades of strife for that nation. Again and again, throughout history, liberals have thought they could manipulate and maintain control over fascists. And time and again this has led to strife, chaos, and ruin.

As stated before, this dangerous tendency often surfaces precisely when working-class consciousness begins to challenge the hegemony of bourgeois liberalism. The mere consideration of extending an olive branch to a fascist figure like Musk signals deep-seated opportunism which has historically been quite ruinous to liberal parties. The lesson from history is undeniable: fascism must be opposed uncompromisingly. Those who would befriend fascists, whether through explicit alliances or opportunistic political maneuvering, must be resisted as strenuously as the fascists themselves, lest history’s greatest calamities be repeated.

It is an unfortunate fact that bourgeois liberals do not ultimately seek to build a world free of oppression, for all their pretty words. Rather, they cling to the capitalist political economy which is built upon class division that brutalizes and dominates the majority of humanity. Fascism and liberalism are distinct ideologies with distinct political programs and institutions. They are not one in the same. They emerge from different material conditions and they serve different factions of the ruling class who have conflicting views about how best to rule over the workers of the world. But in terms of function they are one in the same. Both exist to serve and defend capital.

A materialist understanding of history is indispensable for effective anti-capitalist struggle. It is crucial to grasp the historical-economic roots of both American proto-fascism and 20th century fascism to accurately identify and combat similar tendencies today. Historical Materialism is the best framework for analysis and critical thinking that has yet been discovered for understanding the development of human society. Only Historical Materialism can reveal the objective conditions which drive society and only Historical Materialism can offer a solution to all of these problems.

That solution is communism.

Communism seeks to unite humanity; but unlike the Third Way position of Clinton and Blair, it seeks to achieve this unity by ending class society once and for all. Only communism, rooted in a Historical Materialist conception of humanity, can hope to achieve meaningful, egalitarian unity among all the peoples of Earth. The multi-generational dream of communism is an end to class division, but this can’t be achieved by compromising with our oppressors… and it certainly can’t be achieved through compromise and alliance with fascism. Ultimately, humanity can only transcend the historic cycles of oppression brought about by class society through class struggle against the capitalist system which both liberals and fascists serve.

If you found these ideas useful or interesting, we have a free ebook on the Vietnamese curriculum of Historical Materialism coming out soon. Join our mailing list to be informed when it becomes available. In the meantime you can read the free ebook on the philosophy of Dialectical Materialism which Historical Materialism is built upon.

In 1990, Marxist historian Michael Parenti produced his “Real History” series of lectures which explored aspects of historic record which had been forgotten - or buried - in popular consciousness. Each lecture explored a different historical moment through a critical lens of class consciousness. Today, thirty five years later, we have published a documentary based on Parenti’s lecture from that series entitled “Myths of the Founding Fathers.” You can watch that documentary here on YouTube:

In this lecture, Parenti challenges the prevailing narrative of America's origins, which often casts the “Founding Fathers” as monumental icons of liberty and democracy and architects of a uniquely free nation. This deeply ingrained image was shrewdly cultivated by the “Founding Fathers” themselves, as they were keenly aware of the historical moment which they inhabited. They were, therefore, not merely drafting a governmental framework; they were consciously constructing a national mythology designed to secure their legacy and ensure the enduring preservation of the institutions they forged.

This presaged the blending of aesthetics and politics which German-Jewish Marxist Walter Benjamin would identify a century and a half later, just as the Third Reich was taking power. In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Benjamin reasoned that fascists “introduced” aesthetics into politics as a way of deceiving the working masses and diverting them away from class struggle:

“The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life.”

We would revise Benjamin’s argument only mildly: the fascists did not introduce aesthetics into politics; they simply developed political aesthetics to a higher form. The aestheticization of politics is clearly present in the socio-political craftsmanship of the Founding Fathers. Their aesthetics - rooted in their class interests - aimed to foster a political cult that would imbue their work with an almost sacred reverence. This, too, was a precursor to what Benjamin saw in Nazi political aesthetics:

“The violation of the masses, whom Fascism, with its Führer cult, forces to their knees, has its counterpart in the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into the production of ritual values.”

The Founding Fathers, like the Nazis, understood that the stability of their republic (which was designed to protect the interests of the propertied capitalist class) would depend upon the shaping of public perception and the cultivation of a specific civic identity.

John Adams, reflecting on the immense undertaking, directly addressed future generations, stating, "Posterity! You will never know how much it cost the present Generation to preserve your Freedom! I hope you will make good use of it. If you do not, I shall repent in Heaven, that I ever took half the Pains to preserve it."

Hitler had a similar awareness of legacy-shaping, and similarly wished for himself and his fellow Nazi leaders to be perceived as having sacrificed greatly for future generations, proclaiming that the conquest and colonization of Eastern Europe for “lebensraum” (“living space”) was the only action “which will make bloody sacrifice before God and our German posterity appear justified.”

This aestheticized and intentional composition of legacy, practiced by both the Founding Fathers and the Third Reich, reveals a deliberate attempt to instill a sense of inherited obligation and gratitude which would bind future generations of citizenry to the true nature of their respective visions. George Washington, in his Farewell Address, urged the nation to consider its "Union" as the "main prop of your liberty" and to cherish it, implicitly elevating the constitutional order to an object of veneration. Furthermore, Adams explicitly envisioned the national celebration of the Declaration of Independence as a perpetual "great anniversary Festival," to be "solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.”

Such prescriptions for ritual and public spectacle demonstrate a clear intent to embed their creation myth within the national consciousness through emotional and ceremonial means, fostering a collective memory that would reinforce the legitimacy and permanence of their class-based political order. James Madison, recognizing the power of narrative, observed that: "When one side only of a story is heard and often repeated, the human mind becomes impressed with it insensibly.” This observation pairs disturbingly well with Goebbels’ infamous advice: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”

The Founding Fathers may not have practiced propaganda as a science, as the Nazis did, but they certainly had an intuitive talent for the art of shaping public perceptions. Both the Nazis and the Founding Fathers excelled at deliberate autobiographical story-weaving and myth-making, and these efforts were integral to their project of establishing a state that would serve their material interests for "remote futurity” (to borrow a phrase from the Federalist Papers).

All of the narrative structuring, philosophizing, and grand proclamations of both the Nazis and the Founding Fathers were ultimately in service to one aim: the preservation of economic class relations. As Marx explained in The German Ideology:

“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.”

Under capitalism, the bourgeoisie command not just the means of material production, but also the means of intellectual production. It is not coincidence that so many of the Founding Fathers were publishers and printers. These men, as vanguardists of the bourgeoisie, could grasp the importance of political indoctrination for the new era of capitalism. Whereas the superstructure of feudalism was underpinned by the church and religious mythologies of the “divine right of kings and nobles,” the reign of the bourgeoisie would be defined by mass politics. The party program and illusions of democracy would take the place of church doctrine and royal decree as a means of controlling the oppressed classes in the new society.

It has often been said that the American revolution was a bourgeois revolution, in the sense that the Founding Fathers overthrow the “feudal monarchy” of King George III. Within the framework of Historical Materialism, such a revolution - the overthrow of feudalism by a revolutionary bourgeois class - id considered to be forward progress for the working masses, insomuch as the capitalist political economy reduces class structure down to two primary contending classes. This class structure is what fundamentally leads to the material conditions for communist revolution.

While none of these fundamental principles of the forward development tendency of human society are in question, the framing of the American revolution as a “bourgeois revolution” can and should be interrogated. A strong case can be made that the American colonies were already possessed of a capitalist political economy well before the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776.

In England, the Civil War (1642–1651) and Glorious Revolution (1688) had long-since destroyed feudal/monarchical absolutism. It could be argued that the empowerment fo Parliament during this era constituted the foundation of an essentially bourgeois state controlled by Parliamentarians, financiers, and merchant capitalists. By the 18th century, England’s economy was much more governed by capitalist relations of production than by feudalism. Enclosure acts had proletarianized the peasantry, industrial production was expanding, and the empire was run for profit by entities like the East India Company. By the time of the American Revolution, the colonies had largely shed remnants of quasi-feudal land systems inherited from England. While early colonial charters granted vast estates to absentee nobles (e.g., the Penn family’s proprietorship in Pennsylvania or the patroon system in New York), these feudal holdovers were increasingly undermined by market forces and settler resistance. Southern plantations operated as commercial enterprises tied to global markets while Northern merchants built capitalist trade networks, and on the frontiers yeoman farmers increasingly functioned as small-scale agrarian capitalists rather than feudal tenants.

While remnants of the feudal class certainly held power in England and the colonies, to include King George to whom the grievances of the Declaration of Independence were addressed, it would be ahistorical to characterize England of the late 18th century as an essentially feudal political economy as such. The transition towards capitalism was well underway both in England as well as in the thirteen colonies, and in this sense the American revolution could be described more as a coup - a power struggle between factions of the nascent capitalist class which ruled in colony and motherland alike. Indeed, the most of the "abuses" which were listed out in the Declaration of Independence were, in fact, implemented through parliamentary legislation or enacted by royal governors under Parliament's direction. The core of the conflict stemmed from the British concept of "parliamentary sovereignty," which held that Parliament had ultimate and indivisible legislative authority over all parts of the British Empire, including the colonies, "in all cases whatsoever." American colonists, however, increasingly argued that their own colonial assemblies held exclusive rights to legislate on internal matters, particularly taxation, as they were not directly represented in Parliament. This principle was famously articulated via the slogan: "no taxation without representation."

Indeed, the “Acts” which the Revolutionists were revolting against were Acts of Parliament. The Stamp Act of 1765, the Townshend Acts of 1767, and the Coercive Acts of 1774 (dubbed the "Intolerable Acts" by the colonists) were all machinations of Parliament. While King George III did play a role in endorsing these parliamentary actions and maintaining a firm stance against the demands of colonists, the crown’s constitutional power had diminished significantly since the days of the Glorious Revolution. George often acted to uphold what he saw as the legitimate authority of Parliament and the integrity of the British Empire rather than imposing his personal will in a fashion akin to an absolute feudalist monarch. Indeed, many colonists, even as late as the Olive Branch Petition of July 1775, still sought reconciliation with the King, hoping he would intercede on their behalf against the perceived tyranny of Parliament. It was Parliament's assertion of unlimited legislative power, rather than solely the King's personal despotism, that ultimately pushed the colonies toward declaring independence. Although Parliament was heavily populated by titled nobility, the power which these feudal remnants wielded was in many cases essentially the power of capital, especially since the enclosure and privatization of land and the development of cottage industries and the textile industries which would lay the foundation for the industrial revolution in the following century.

There is a reason that all of this is important, and it has to do with the function of the American revolution. We contend that this political-economic function is one and the same with the function of fascism, and that this, more than anything else, connects the political movement of Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson with the likes of Hitler, Mussolini, and Pinochet.

As Michael Parenti masterfully argued in Black Shirts and Reds, the function of fascism as a political program is the maintenance of capitalist class relations in the face of existential threats of working class revolutionary movements. Parenti contends that fascist “revolution” is, indeed, false revolution, conceived and designed to fool workers into fighting against their own class interests. Hitler may have declared his movement to be National “Socialist,” but as soon as he seized power in Germany he began to serve the interests of the capitalist class. He wiped out the anti-capitalist faction of the Strasserists any along with them any semblance of anti-capitalist sentiment and resistance to capitalist domination during the Night of the Long Knives. Similarly, Mussolini consolidated power for capitalist elites through his programs of corporatism and capitalist-syndicate rule over the economy.

Both the Italian Fascists and the German Nazis rose to power only with the support and blessing of the bourgeoisie. Italian and German capitalists saw Fascists and Nazis as a violent solution to communist fervor which had broken out in the wake of World War I. Italian communists were seizing and occupying factories at gunpoint. German communists were making strides in the Weimar Reichstag. This made propertied interests nervous enough to back the virulent likes of Hitler and Mussolini, and this relationship between capital and fascistic forces fundamentally defined the class character of both Fascist Italy and the Third Reich.

Fascism has been described as an “antibody” of capitalism against the threatening germ of communism. Whenever the position and power of capitalists are threatened, fascism has a tendency to rise and take hold. And we contend that this phenomenon had origins, at least in part, in the American revolution.

In the late 18th century, the ruling class of the thirteen colonies faced prototypical labor movements in three primary forms:

First, there were the poor whites. Indentured servants, laborers, and other unlanded colonists who relied on wages to survive. Poor white settlers were prone to insurrection, rebellion, and uprising, and most threatening of all were the so-called “levellers,” who sought economic egalitarianism and therefore threatened the class power of the capitalist class.

Second, there were the indigenous Native Americans, who had strong ties to the land which the Founding Fathers zealously coveted for financial gain. Native Americans were, in a sense, an oppressed class that were organized by default. Their customs and traditions made them competent and motivated rivals against the interests of the colonial bourgeoisie, which is one reason figures like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington were so intent on “civilizing” Native Americans by turning them into farm laborers who would be indistinguishable from poor white colonists. This would serve to proletarianize the original inhabitants and neutralize them as a threat to colonial capitalism.

Third, there were the enslaved black laborers. This was a massive population of workers who had great incentive to rise up in rebellion to secure their own freedom. Indeed, slave revolts and uprisings were numerous in the American colonies, and there can be no doubt that word of the successful Haitian Revolution of 1791 - an uprising by which slaves had completely overthrown and dispelled their former masters - made the Founding Fathers even more nervous about the prospects of similar revolutions brewing in the slave quarters of their own plantations.

Most alarming of all, there were instances of these divided segments of the embryonic American proletariat working together. The New York Conspiracy of 1741 saw poor whites and enslaved blacks alleged to be working together to struggle against their oppressors. Armed conflicts such as Bacon’s Rebellion and the French and Indian War saw instances of poor British colonists marching, quartering, and fighting shoulder to shoulder with indigenous comrades. The Founding Fathers had an objective need to keep the workers divided and powerless and this was fundamental to the structuring of the American revolution.

In “The Path Which Led Me to Leninism,” Ho Chi Minh observed that: "The so-called ‘democratic’ revolutions in the West were merely the replacement of one exploiting class by another." This certainly described the tempestuous relationship which the Founding Fathers had with the British Parliament and its rivals among the British feudal and capitalist class. The American Revolution was indeed progressive insomuch as it shirked off feudal remnants from any semblance of domination of the colonies once and for all, but that is not the full and complete story. What is arguably more important to understand is the relationship which the bourgeois Founding Fathers had with the burgeoning colonial working class.

The American Revolution was not just a struggle to wrest control from the British state; it was also a struggle to solidify control over the political economy and to extinguish any threat of proletarian resistance or uprising.

It should be stated plainly, here, that the Founding Fathers were not Nazis. Nazism, after all, did not emerge until centuries after the American revolution and it arose as a distinct historical phenomenon. Instead, what we argue is that the foundational ideology and practices of the early American republic, while not explicitly fascist, contained, to borrow the term from Marx, the “seed” or “germ” of Fascism. Founding Father ideology and revolution were, in other words, a lower form of proto-fascism which would inspire the fascists of the 20th century and would bring about the higher form of what we call “fascism” today.

As Michael Parenti explains, the "much venerated Founding Fathers" were fundamentally "slave owners and wealthy men who wanted a system that favored their interests with democracy for the few.” From a Historical Materialist perspective, this highlights how the material conditions and class interests of the ruling elite shaped the very structure of the foundational American state, and the Nazis would bring this to an even higher and more pronounced form as they conceived of societies that were even more explicitly and overtly segregated along lines of race and political domination of the many by the few.

Fascist regimes, characterized by their promotion of myths of rebirth which are centered around perceived greatness and supremacism, often exploit such historical amnesia. By examining the fascistic tendencies inherent in America's founding - tendencies which are driven by the material interests of the ruling class - we can better understand how historical-economic processes, rooted in class struggle, provided a blueprint for the brutal manifestations of both the United States of America and the fascist states of the 20th century. This analysis will also help us to understand how America is now arriving into an era of explicit, outright fascism in its own right.

In this sense, we can see the Marxist conception of the “negation of the negation” on display. What began with the Founding Fathers, their bourgeois revolution, and their genocidal programs of ethnic cleansing, human slavery, and brutal oppression of proletarian insurrection was negated and elevated to a higher form by the Nazis and Fascists with their aims to dominate the world with similar programs of “Manifest Destiny” coupled with visions of supremacy of a “Master Race.” And now, Trumpism and MAGA fascism are elevating fascism to an even higher form, carrying forward the germ of development which was originally planted with the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Characteristics of the Founding Fathers’ political program were inherited by the fascists, developed, and in turn are now being inherited back into the land from which they came.

From a Historical Materialist perspective, the formation of the American republic was not a universal triumph of liberty but a strategic consolidation of power by a specific class: the propertied elite. The architects of the American state held a distinct vision for governance; one that prioritized their material interests and sought to insulate the state from the perceived volatility of the general populace. Parenti reveals that the Constitution was meticulously crafted as a "conservative document" to "resist the pressure of popular tides" and safeguard the burgeoning capitalist interests of a "rising bourgeoisie," particularly their freedom to "invest, speculate, trade, and accumulate wealth.” This indicates a deliberate intent to protect bourgeois economic interests over broader democratic participation, reflecting the class struggle inherent in the period.

Leading figures of the era openly articulated this classist perspective, demonstrating a profound distrust of the working masses. Alexander Hamilton, a key participant in the Constitutional Convention, famously asserted that: "All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and well-born, the other the mass of the people... The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share in the government.” This statement is a clear expression of bourgeois class consciousness, advocating for the perpetual rule of the propertied class.

James Madison’s class consciousness was almost Marxian in its explicit understanding of class struggle. In Federalist Paper #10, Madison wrote:

“The most common and durable source of factions (re: classes) has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society. Those who are creditors, and those who are debtors, fall under a like discrimination. A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views. The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation, and involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of the government.”

Here, Madison more or less explicitly admits that the motivating factor for the construction of a bourgeois state is to manage and enforce capitalist class relations.

John Adams echoed this sentiment, cautioning that "democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself.” He further questioned the capacity of individuals "wholly destitute of Property" to form a "Right Judgment" in public affairs, viewing them as "too dependent upon other Men to have a Will of their own.” Adams, therefore, advocated for property qualifications for voters, believing such measures were necessary to prevent the "confound(ing) and destroy(ing) all Distinctions, and prostrat(ing) all Ranks, to one common Level.” For Adams, property was as "sacred as the laws of God,” underscoring the deep intertwining of economic status with political capacity in the founders' worldview.

The Founding Fathers often openly admitted a disdain for democracy and egalitarianism. Eldridge Gerry (from whom we inherit the practice of “gerrymandering”) admonished democracy as “the worst of all political evils,” and Roger Sherman wrote that “the people should have as little to do as may be about the government."

These sentiments among the Founding Fathers betray a distinct prejudice against the class interest of the workers. The founders' apprehension regarding the "turbulent masses" was not merely theoretical; it manifested in direct actions to suppress dissent and a deep-seated fear of what they termed the "leveling spirit" - the term of the time for the political-economic impulse toward class equalization. This fear was fueled by numerous popular uprisings that challenged the existing social and economic order both before and after the American Revolution, demonstrating the ongoing class struggle.

We have already remarked upon the New York Conspiracy of 1741, also known as the Slave Insurrection of 1741. This purported plot involved enslaved people and poor whites who allegedly conspired to burn down and take over New York City. During a particularly severe winter, a series of fires erupted in Lower Manhattan. A 16-year-old Irish indentured servant, Mary Burton, implicated hundreds of enslaved people and poor working-class whites in a conspiracy to burn the city. The ensuing hysteria led to the arrest of 172 people, with thirty four executed, including seventeen Black men burned at the stake and four whites hanged. This event underscored the anxieties of the ruling class regarding potential alliances between marginalized groups that could threaten their class dominance.

In the Carolinas, the Regulator Movements (1760s-1770s) saw farmers and settlers in the backcountry protest against perceived corruption, unfair taxation, and inadequate law enforcement by British officials. In North Carolina, these grievances escalated into violent confrontations, culminating in the Battle of Alamance in 1771, where Regulator forces were defeated by Governor William Tryon's militia. The Regulators embodied a widespread demand for just governance and fair treatment, highlighting the "perceived failures of established institutions" to serve the interests of the people.

Following the American Revolution, Shays' Rebellion (1786-1787) in western Massachusetts saw indebted farmers take up arms against foreclosures and economic hardship. This uprising, a direct response to the material conditions imposed by the ruling class, was met with decisive force by the state militia. This campaign was funded by private merchants and resulted in casualties as well as the rebellion's suppression. General Benjamin Lincoln, who led the militia, viewed the uprising as a direct threat to the "newly formed government" and to "law and order,” which, in this context, meant established property relations.

The Whiskey Rebellion (1791-1794) in western Pennsylvania further tested the authority of the new federal government. Frontier farmers violently protested an excise tax on whiskey imposed by Alexander Hamilton's treasury. They felt the tax unfairly targeted Westerners while favoring large Eastern distillers. President Washington responded by mobilizing a large militia force to suppress the rebellion, demonstrating the federal government's willingness to use military force to protect the property and financial interests of the ruling capitalist class.

Slave rebellions continued to plague the newly formed nation well beyond the Revolutionary period, particularly in Louisiana. Although the Pointe Coupée Conspiracy (1795) was uncovered and brutally suppressed, it stoked fears in the hearts of Louisiana plantation owners. Sixteen years later, the 1811 German Coast Uprising became the largest slave rebellion in U.S. history, with over 200 enslaved laborers marching towards New Orleans, intending to overthrow the system of enslavement. Led by Charles Deslondes, this armed uprising was ultimately crushed by a local militia and U.S. troops. Their heads were displayed on poles to terrorize the enslaved population.

These forceful suppressions of dissent from workers and enslaved people provide early examples of the American bourgeois state's willingness to use violence in order to maintain the economic order. The Founding Fathers had set the precedent with their violent suppression of poor whites, indigenous people, and enslaved black laborers. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the U.S. government frequently deployed federal troops to quell strikes, a notable example being the Pullman Strike of 1894, where President Grover Cleveland dispatched 10,000 federal troops to break the strike. Such actions demonstrate the American bourgeois state's highly developed role in protecting capitalist interests by suppressing the organized power of the working class. This approach prefigures the methods employed by fascist regimes.

The underlying principle of using violent force to protect capitalist interests was clearly carried forward and inherited by the Fascists of the 20th century, as Parenti documents meticulously in Black Shirts and Reds. In Germany, capitalist factory owners paid fascist brawlers and thugs to violently break up strikes and attack communist meetings during the tumultuous 1920s. In Italy, upon seizing power, the fascists' immediate action was to "crush the unions.” This aspect of European fascism was, in fact, viewed positively by some segments of the American ruling class, such as Henry Ford, who saw it as a means to control the working class and prevent challenges to their economic dominance.

The American ideology of Manifest Destiny, though formally coined in 1845 by journalist John O'Sullivan, was built upon much older colonialist ideals which had been deeply ingrained in the American psyche since long before the revolution. From a Historical Materialist perspective, Manifest Destiny served as the ideological superstructure which justified the material expansion of the American capitalist system. According to Manifest Destiny, the United States was "destined by divine will” to expand across the entirety of North America. This expansionist vision was fundamentally tied to a belief in the inherent superiority of white Americans. This notion of a divinely ordained mission to expand and "civilize" frontier lands was reproduced almost exactly by 20th century fascist ideologies, which frequently involved a "quest for a united, indissoluble society" and a drive for "external expansion,” as Hitler called for in Mein Kampf.

In both America and Fascist Europe, the implementation of Manifest Destiny led to devastating consequences for indigenous populations. It justified the violent extermination of indigenous peoples of the frontier lands. In America, the colonial era saw both violent ethnic cleansing operations, such as the Trail of Tears and many other such “removals” which came before and after, as well as campaigns to force Native Americans into white economic practices and cultural norms. Thomas Jefferson described Native Americans as "culturally inferior" due to their traditional hunting lifestyle. He actively sought to encourage them to abandon hunting and to take up agriculture, thereby rendering their "extensive forests necessary in the hunting life" available for white settlement. Jefferson grimly foresaw their "degradation and extermination" if they remained within the territories which the Founders coveted. This policy was driven by the material demand for land for white settlement and agricultural expansion, serving the interests of the land-owning and speculative classes as well as a desire to proletarianize the indigenous masses, as noted above. The Nazis, in their colonial quest for “lebensraum,” reenacted the atrocities of the Americas with vicious fervor, building concentration camps and wiping out Eastern Europeans and those dehumanized as “untermenschen” on an industrial scale.

We can perceive uncanny resemblance between George Washington's plans for colonizing the American West and the vision which Heinrich Himmler had for colonizing Eastern Europe:

“I am perfectly convinced that [the West] cannot be so advantageously settled, by any other Class of Men, as by the disbanded Officers and Soldiers of the Army. . . Lands should be granted at the expiration of the War. I. . . give my sentiments thus freely on the advantages to be expected from this plan of Colonization, because it would. . . extend our Settlements progressively, and plant a brave, a hardy and respectable Race of People, as our advanced Post, who would be always ready and willing to combat the Savages.”
-George Washington, speaking in 1783 of the Soldier Colonists who would settle the American West.

Compared with:

“Villages inhabited by an armed peasantry will form the basis of the settlement in the East. . . Germanic villages inhabited by a military peasantry. . . It's the greatest piece of colonization which the world will ever have seen, linked too with a most noble and essential task, the protection of the Western world against an irruption from Asia."‘
-Heinrich Himmler, speaking in 1942 of the “Soldier-Peasants” who would colonize Eastern Europe.

The respective plans of Washington and Himmler highlight a striking similarity in the fundamental logic of colonization: the use of a militarized settler population to expand territory and secure it against a dehumanized "other." This is not merely a coincidence. Adolf Hitler explicitly saw the United States colonial projects as a model for German colonial expansion. He even envisioned the conquest of Ukraine as a direct replay of American frontier history, expecting Slavs to fight "like Indians" and anticipating that "a similar process will repeat itself for the second time, as in the conquest of America.” American expansionism, particularly its genocidal aspects, thus provided a historical blueprint and a legitimizing narrative for Nazi Lebensraum. The shared false consciousness that allowed populated lands to be imagined as "open" through racist worldview is a critical link which demonstrates how the material drive for land and resources can be rationalized through racial ideology to serve the bourgeoisie’s radical agenda of property accumulation.

The "Manifest Destiny" ideology, often presented as uniquely American and benevolent, contains core elements that are functionally indistinguishable from the imperialist and genocidal aspirations of Nazism, including:

• Racial superiority

• A divine “destiny” and right to land

• The dehumanization and violent removal or extermination of indigenous peoples

This suggests that the roots of such destructive ideologies are not confined to specific social formations but can emerge from similar historical-economic conditions involving the objective need of the bourgeoisie to constantly accumulate property and to increase profits and wealth. American colonial expansion provided a successful model (from an imperialist perspective) that fascists later sought to emulate. This demonstrates how historical precedents can be adopted and developed to higher, even more horrific forms.

Adolf Hitler and other Nazi ideologues explicitly viewed American history as a successful precedent for their own class-driven imperialist aims. Hitler was famously a fan of Western novels (though he proclaimed that German authors wrote superior “Indian romances”), and his chief critique of the United States of the 20th century was that the state had softened somewhat on the enforcement of oppressive race laws.

Hitler viewed American expansionist conquest as an "inspirational model for planned and partially actualized Nazi policies of territorial expansion, racial cleansing, and settler colonization.” He frequently complained that Germany's existing territory did not permit a standard of living "comparable to that of the American people,” directly linking the drive for Lebensraum to a desire for greater prosperity achieved through conquest. The Nazi justification for seizing European lands directly paralleled the American rationale for dispossessing Native Americans of their lands. Hitler famously proclaimed that: "our Mississippi must be the Volga, and not the Niger," referencing Washington’s feverish desire to expel Indians beyond the Mississippi River. He chillingly asked, "Who remembers the Red Indians?" implying a similar fate for the Slavic peoples of Eastern Europe. This demonstrates a direct transatlantic transfer of capitalist-imperialist logic, where the success of American racial conquest provided a template for Nazi Germany's genocidal ambitions, all in service of expanding the material base of the German ruling class.

Both the Founding Fathers and 20th century Fascist regimes shared an objective need for protecting the economic interests of the ruling class. Parenti's analysis, which characterizes the American Constitution as a document designed to protect "capitalist interests over popular rule,” coupled with Hamilton's desire for the "rich and well-born" to hold a "permanent share in the government,” establishes this foundational American inclination. Fascism, in turn, explicitly protected corporate power and suppressed organized labor. As both the Founding Fathers and the Founding Fascists demonstrated, when economic power is concentrated and protected by the state, and popular movements (like labor unions) threaten that power, the state is inclined to use its coercive apparatus to maintain the status quo. This tendency, amplified to an extreme in fascist states, reveals how the state can be used as an instrument of economic control by the ruling class. The historical trajectory of American economic policy and labor relations, marked by significant state intervention to protect capital and suppress worker organizing, reveals a shared underlying principle with fascist economic models: the subordination of individual and collective labor rights to the material interests of the bourgeois state and the dominant capitalist class.

Critical re-examination of America's founding, through the lens of Historical Materialism and class analysis, reveals a complex and often uncomfortable truth: the nation's foundational principles and policies, particularly those concerning bourgeois governance, territorial expansion, and racial hierarchy, established precedents and models that later resonated with and, in countless meaningful ways, directly inspired aspects of 20th century fascism. The elitist nature of early American governance, the direct influence of American racial laws and attitudes on Nazi policies, the shared tendency to suppress labor and prioritize capitalist interests, and the imperialist logic of Manifest Destiny with its genocidal consequences (as starkly illustrated by the Washington/Himmler parallels)… all of these characteristics are held in common between the politics of the Founding Fathers and the politics of the Nazis and Fascists of the 20th century. This, we would argue, reflects a continuity of political-economic development across the seemingly disparate historical contexts of American Revolution and 20th century European fascism.

Acknowledging these uncomfortable historical connections is not an attempt to equate the United States with Nazi Germany. The American Revolution and Fascism are, indeed, distinct phenomena which arose from drastically different material conditions and which led to very different outcomes in terms of socio-historical development. The state which was designed by the Founding Fathers has endured and developed thus far for two and a half centuries, while the states constructed by Hitler and Mussolini were cut down in a matter of mere decades. It is imperative, however, to understand that these political formations have in common shared ideological currents and - more importantly - shared economic foundations.

Founding Father ideology and fascist ideology are both superstructural manifestations of the capitalist political economy, and both responded to organized proletarian movements with similar disdain and brutality as violent class conflict writ large across society. Marx and Engels discovered that History is not a series of disconnected events but an interconnected and ever developing network of relationship and contradiction. It is the material/economic base of society which is the primary engine of history, and by extension we thus understand that it is the capitalist political-economic base which led to the development of both Founding Father ideology and fascism. By understanding how certain foundational American ideas and policies, particularly those rooted in racial hierarchy and expansion, were later adopted or mirrored by fascist regimes, we become better able to identify and combat similar tendencies in contemporary circumstances. Such critical self-reflection, grounded in a materialist understanding of history, is essential for a workers’ movement to survive and develop in this hostile capitalist-imperialist world.

As the current ruling regime of the United States seeks to “Make America Great Again” by constructing concentration camps, by drastically increasing the funding of the ICE Gestapo police force, and by destabilizing foreign nations through expansionist-imperialist projects in Israel and beyond, it is vital that we understand the “germ” of fascism as a throughline which runs from Washington to Hitler to Trump.

Editor’s Note: This article is a followup to a video we posted in March of 2022:
“Here’s Why Joe Biden Calling to Fund the Police is REAL BAD.”

Bourgeois Parties Won't Save Us

The clarion call was deafening in 2020: "Vote Blue No Matter Who!" We were told that electing Joe Biden, despite his conservative track record, was a necessary bulwark against fascism. The promise, endlessly repeated across social media, was that once Biden was in the White House, we could then "push him left."

Fast forward to today, with Donald Trump once again in the White House, and that promise rings hollow. Not only did the "pushing left" largely fail during Biden's term, but the Democratic establishment, including figures like then-Vice President Kamala Harris, consistently demonstrated their role in pulling political discourse further to the right. This isn't surprising; it's the historical function of the DNC as a bourgeois party within the capitalist political system to redirect the working class away from revolutionary class consciousness and to preserve the ruling class position of the bourgeoisie.

A History of Reaction: The Democratic Party's Role

From a Historical Materialist perspective, the Democratic Party, much like the Republican Party, functions as a fundamentally bourgeois party, meaning it primarily represents and upholds the interests of the capitalist class, even while occasionally adopting populist rhetoric or enacting minor reforms. This is not a moral judgment of individual politicians, but an analysis of the party's structural role within a capitalist society.

As Friedrich Engels observed in The Civil War in France: “The state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy."

The Democratic Party, despite its progressive veneer and reliance on working-class votes, consistently prioritizes the stability of the capitalist system, ensuring the continued accumulation of capital for the bourgeoisie through policies that favor corporations, financial institutions, and wealthy donors.

In the words of Vladimir Lenin put it in The State and Revolution:

“To decide once every few years which members of the ruling class is to repress and crush the people through parliament--this is the real essence of bourgeois parliamentarism, not only in parliamentary- constitutional monarchies, but also in the most democratic republics.”

This leads to a politics of managing the unjust circumstances of the existing political economy rather than fundamentally challenging the exploitative nature of capitalist production, ensuring that even when some concessions are made to the working class, they are ultimately designed to preserve the overarching class structure.

Consider Joe Biden's selection as Barack Obama's Vice President in 2008. While Obama was, surprisingly, perceived as a "radical progressive" in popular media at the time (a testament to how far right US politics have become over the course of the last century), Biden was specifically chosen for his deeply conservative credentials. This was a deliberate move to reassure the "Blue Dog Democrat" wing - the centrist and right-leaning elements of the party - that Obama's administration wouldn't stray too far from established capitalist norms.

Biden's history as a rightwing anti-progressivist speaks volumes. He was instrumental in manufacturing consent for the invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003. This pro-war stance, a hallmark of American imperialism, has remained a bipartisan constant, as we discussed in our most recent video essay.

Today, with Trump and his fascist coterie in the Whitehouse, understanding the nature of the bourgeois duoparty system is more pressing than ever. Children are still held in cages, and now even lawful American residents and citizens are being deported and detained in unspeakably inhumane foreign prisons. Now Trump is paving the way to remove birthright citizenship, and for all the lip service Democrats have given to immigrants, the DNC party apparatus has played a vital role in building, maintaining, and expanding America’s pogroms against immigrants.

This is hardly a deviation for a political figure like Biden, who, as Vice President, was a key architect of the very system that led to these concentration camps and the transformation of ICE into a gestapo agency. In 2014, as the humanitarian crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border intensified with thousands of unaccompanied children, Biden met with Central American leaders to discuss strategies, emphasizing that children apprehended would be immediately put into deportation proceedings. The stark reality of these holding cells – concrete walls, concrete floors, single toilets – persisted, as these border patrol stations remained ill-equipped for long-term detention, especially of children.

The violence which the USA participates in extends beyond our domestic conditions, and remains largely unchecked by the DNC. With full backing of DNC leadership, the U.S. military still engages in bombings and interventions in foreign countries. The recent situation in Iran was more publicly visible than usual - such imperialist interventions typically proceed with minimal public awareness. Critical issues which Biden failed to address in his term of office, such as the closure of Guantanamo Bay and the lifting of sanctions on Cuba, will continue to inflict suffering on the working class both at home and abroad for years to come and, indeed, are likely to worsen under the Trump administration.

Funding the Police, Funding Repression: A Materialist Analysis

One of the most stark betrayals of the "push left" fantasy came directly from Biden's mouth during a past State of the Union address: "The answer is not to defund the police. It's to fund the police." This call for increased police funding received a standing ovation from both Democrats and Republicans, a gut-wrenching sight for anyone who understands the historical role of policing in the USA.

This stance is no surprise given the backgrounds of figures like Kamala Harris, a former federal prosecutor, and Biden himself, who was instrumental in promoting the "super predator" narrative of the 1990s, directly contributing to the mass incarceration of countless black Americans. Biden championed the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, often referred to as the "Biden-Hatch Crime Bill," boasting that it would end the notion of Democrats being "weak on crime." This bill authorized 60 new death penalties, 70 enhanced penalties, funded 100,000 new police officers, and allocated funds for 125,000 new state prison cells, contributing significantly to the era of mass incarceration.

Despite popular perception, there was never any meaningful "defunding" of the police in the U.S. In fact, the total amount of funding for U.S. police budgets continued to rise, reaching $135.6 billion in 2023, a figure higher than when George Floyd and Breonna Taylor were murdered in 2020. This clearly demonstrates that Biden's call for more funding wasn't to compensate for cuts, but to further enrich an already bloated, overfunded, and fundamentally oppressive institution.

The claim that police "solve problems" is a myth. Police collectively spend only about 4% of their time on what they themselves classify as "violent crime." Moreover, police steal significantly more property through civil forfeiture than all burglary crimes combined in the U.S. In 2019, federal and state law enforcement agencies seized over $3 billion in assets through civil forfeiture, while victims of burglary and larceny-theft lost an estimated $3.5 billion.

Even these figures pale in comparison to the theft committed by employers. Wage theft – which includes minimum wage violations, overtime violations, and off-the-clock work – costs workers in the U.S. an estimated $15 billion each year, far exceeding all other property crimes. Yet, employers are rarely arrested or prosecuted for this widespread criminal activity that severely damages the livelihoods of the working class. Similarly, banks make about as much money in fraudulent and illegal overdraft fees (estimated to be around $11 billion annually) as all combined property crime in the U.S. every year, yet bankers are not subject to mass incarceration.

The concept of "crime" itself, as defined by the ruling class, is a doctrinal propaganda tool used to oppress specific demographics while ignoring the immense harm caused by the capitalist class. Police even manipulate statistics and often fail to count violent and sexual crimes committed by their own officers. For instance, approximately 4% of prisoners and jail inmates report being sexually assaulted annually (of course… the unreported numbers are no doubt much higher). Between 2016 and 2018, adult correctional authorities reported 2,666 substantiated incidents of inmate sexual victimization by another inmate and 2,229 incidents by staff. Of these staff-on-inmate incidents, correctional officers perpetrated 64% of these horrific abuses. We also know that police officers are often caught committing sex crimes in their line of duty, often even in uniform, though these crimes are almost certainly highly under-reported, given the tendency for American cops to cover for each other. Indeed, 79% of law enforcement officers themselves, when asked, stated that a “Code of Silence” exists which prevents officers from reporting on each other.

Furthermore, there is no evidence of a widespread "crime surge" in the U.S. that would warrant increased police funding. The idea of a crime surge is largely a manufactured narrative used to justify increased repression and expand police power.

The pervasive narrative of "crime surges" in the U.S. is largely a political construct, often inflated by media sensationalism and selective data presentation, failing to reflect comprehensive crime trends. Crime rates have since declined significantly throughout this decade, with 2024 reports showing major drops across multiple categories including homicide (down 20.9%), motor vehicle thefts (down 18.6%), and larceny/theft (down 9.0%) compared to 2023.

Police departments frequently contribute to misleading perceptions by manipulating crime statistics, sometimes to demonstrate effectiveness, secure more funding, or simply due to inconsistent reporting practices. Investigations have uncovered instances of misclassification of serious crimes as minor offenses, discouragement of victims from reporting, and even "clean-record agreements" that conceal officers' misconduct, all of which distort the true picture of crime to serve institutional interests rather than public safety.

Social Murder: The Real Crime of Capitalism

As Friedrich Engels powerfully articulated in The Condition of the Working Class in England:

"When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another, such that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call this deed murder. But when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live, forces them through the strong arm of the law to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence; knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual, disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offense is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains."

We call this kind of death by structural inequality social murder. In this sense, capitalists and politicians like Biden (and now Trump), the complicit federal government, and indeed the police-prison industrial complex are all guilty of social murder on a genocidal scale.

The media, controlled by capitalist interests, does not run alarmist stories about the countless deaths caused by pollution or poverty. For instance, air pollution contributes to an estimated tens of thousands of premature deaths annually in the U.S., and water pollution also leads to significant health issues and deaths. Fraudulent home foreclosures, which dispossess thousands, cause untold suffering but rarely lead to arrests or convictions. You are conditioned to see what the police call "crime" and ignore the suffering and death caused by the police themselves and the capitalist class they serve. This is a phenomenon known as “hegemonic framing,” which was well documented by Michael Parenti in his book Inventing Reality:

“The function of the media, on the whole, is to legitimize the existing social order and to demobilize opposition to it. This is done not so much by outright lying as by a selective filtering and weighting of information that serves to divert public attention away from the realities of power and class and toward the more superficial aspects of personality and lifestyle. The media do not simply reflect reality but play a crucial part in constructing it, creating a hegemonic culture that serves the interests of the powerful.”

The widespread perception of surging crime is deliberately exaggerated by capitalist media; in part to distract the population and to instill fear through spectacle, and in part to run cover for the much more pressing and damning phenomenon of social crime committed by the institutions and social phenomena of capitalism. Crime rates, even what we generally think of as "crime," are heavily exacerbated by economic inequality. Studies consistently show that drug use and homicide rates are heavily correlated with inequality in rich countries. Similarly, the prevalence of incarceration is higher in richer and more unequal countries, as well as in richer and more unequal states within the U.S.

Police use their massive budgets not for public safety, but to build invasive, fascistic surveillance programs and to crush social, economic, labor, and racial justice movements. This has been their function since the very beginning of policing, tracing its roots not to community protection, but to the violent enforcement of capitalist property relations and racial hierarchies. In the American South, the earliest forms of organized policing were slave patrols, established in the early 18th century to prevent slave rebellions, capture runaway enslaved people, and enforce the brutal system of chattel slavery. These patrols were explicitly designed to maintain the economic order of the planter class by controlling and terrorizing the enslaved population. Simultaneously, particularly in the West, early policing efforts were instrumental in the suppression and displacement of Native American populations, clearing land for white settlers and resource extraction, thereby facilitating the westward expansion of capitalism. As industrialization took hold, police forces in Northern cities emerged to control a burgeoning, often striking, working class and to manage the influx of immigrant labor, brutally suppressing labor organizing efforts and strikes throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries. From the Lattimer Massacre to the Haymarket Affair, police have consistently acted as the armed wing of capital, protecting private property and quashing any collective challenge to the status quo. This foundational history reveals that the core purpose of policing in the USA has always been to maintain the power of the ruling class, violently enforcing racial and class hierarchies, rather than serving the broad public interest.

Real Solutions: Funding Communities, Not Cops

Public safety is paramount, but the bourgeois institution of policing does not contribute to it; in fact, as outlined above, American cops often make us less safe, especially people of black, queer, and other marginalized communities. The solutions are clear:

• Invest in our communities: Instead of funneling money into the carceral state, we must prioritize providing people with housing, food, healthcare, clothing, and education.

• Create safe spaces: Ensure clean and safe spaces for children and adults.

• Accessible infrastructure: Provide access to robust public transportation, public utilities and equipment, and community resources.

• Social support: Offer comprehensive mental healthcare and other forms of social support.

These are proven strategies to increase public safety, save lives, and reduce harm. They stand in stark contrast to the bourgeois pseudoscience of “policing” that have done nothing to stop the real perpetrators of harm: employers and capitalists who steal from their employees and destroy our planet with their negligence.

As workers, we must demand not just the defunding of the police, but the funding of our communities. We must listen to the science, understand the systemic problems, and do what it takes to actually reduce harm, rather than falling for dogmatic lines about police "protecting and serving" us when they cause so much harm and fail to protect us from the capitalist class.

None of this will be achieved by voting for bourgeois politicians and deluding ourselves into believing we can "push them left." These politicians will never serve our class interests, because they fundamentally serve the interests of the ruling class. This is a core lesson formulated by Marx and Engels and proven in practice by revolutionaries throughout history, from Lenin to Ho Chi Minh to the Black Panthers.

The only way to have our demands met is through direct action, community organizing, dual power building, and building class consciousness as we build power for the working class. These are the tools of liberation which we must forge through class struggle. Ultimately, the only lasting solution to the problems of public safety and harm-reduction is to end capitalism. So long as class society exists, workers will face inequality, suppression, and violence from the ruling class and the state it controls.