ENG
Editor's notes. We bring to your attention an interview of our comrade with the American communist Haz. Haz is one of the participants in the MAGA Communism movement, which we understand as an attempt to bring red ideas into the mass of the Republican Party.
We are watching for this movement with interest and believe this interview would be useful for our communists to understand if this political practice can work in a bourgeois society, or if we are dealing with the American version of Red Putinism. In any case, it is interesting to know.
The interview in English can be read here, in Russian it will be released in several parts.
I. Introduction
- Tell Us about yourself, a brief biography.
- Online, I go by the name Haz. I am part of the Infrared group, an online media collective that was started around the summer of 2020 and which acquired prominence around the winter of 2021.
My parents, both Shia Muslim immigrants fleeing the Lebanese civil war, were moved to the United States in the 1970s, settling in thе largely ethnically Arab part of the state of Michigan, where I was myself later born.
Throughout my adult life, I have pursued a career in Law, briefly associating with certain intellectual circles and avant-garde theoretical trends on the side. After acquiring a scholarship to law school, I completed my first year - yet had to make a difficult decision.
Faced with the relative success of the Infrared project, I took the risk of committing to it full time by taking a leave of absence from law school. I do not regret this decision, as Infrared has since made an irreversible effect on the study of Marxism-Leninism in the United states.
- How did you come to hold communist views, which from the outside seem to be quite rare in the United States?
- When I first began to take interest in communist ideas, I was only around 12-13 years of age. Already amicable to dissident views because of my cultural background, I was stricken by the power, might and beauty of this ideology, and became fascinated with the wondrous history of the USSR.
Knowing there was once a power that challenged the criminal American empire, which slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Iraqis & Afghans with impunity while aiding Israel, awakened in me a sense of messianic faith in the justice of the world. I learned about Lenin and the October revolution, and how the Soviet people stood up to the West in solidarity with the oppressed peoples of the world.
Speaking only as a matter of genealogical description, and not contemporary justification, it was above all else my religious faith that led me to communism. Being raised as a Shi’ite, I already understood in the mystical significance of Husayn’s martyrdom the kernel of my revolutionary conviction.
However at the same time, I was an American born and raised, with a deep and profound sense of love for my country and its people. It became clear to me that the criminal American empire also oppressed its own people, and was very impressed by the way many Americans challenged their own government and its criminal military endeavors.
I saw the morality and conviction of people like Ron Paul standing up to the lies of the American Empire. I saw how the expansion of the Empire abroad corresponded with the destruction of civil liberties at home, as the government grew monstrously powerful. I also learned how the most persuasive and compelling sources of opposition to the government historically came from Communists, armed with Lenin’s theory of imperialism, which provided me a rational analysis of the nature of my own government.
But all of this is only descriptive and genealogical, based purely in feeling, the ‘is’ and not the ‘ought.’ Maturity for me, meant eventually assuming responsibility, at the level of knowledge, for what it meant to be a communist - which could not be justified purely by any specific parochial, religious, ethnic or cultural background. Communism, to me, was a universal truth, through the definite science of Marxism. In Platonic terms, I began to understand Communism as a Good above beauty, justice and truth. Its victory to me was ensured not by morality, feeling or even divine will - but the material laws of history itself.
The view that knowledge of being vindicates the deepest recesses of human conviction is to me the source of Marxism’s greatness as a humanistic science. Communism was not an ideology exclusive to any one nation, ethnicity, religion, culture, or people - it is the universal truth of all mankind’s history.
It is one thing to dwell in the passionate anger of knowing the injustice unignorable from the perspective of ones own parochial identity (such as being a Shi’ite Arab), but it is another to know the deeper wisdom of this injustice in the laws of material reality itself.
And so, I can say, I am not a communist because of any specific background or identity. Communist views were especially rare in America when I began to adopt them, even more than now, but that didn’t matter to me.
As a communist, I have come from nowhere and nowhen. Mankind as a whole must, and will be delivered to the mercy of its own judgment, and to me, the resolution of that judgment is communism. The source of my conviction is thus not anywhere in the past, but in the future.
The message of communism is that there is humanity, and thus mercy, in the cold, indifferent, absolutely alien alterity of material being. That mercy is the beginning of scientific knowledge, the Promethean emancipator of mankind.
I am not blind to the apparent dialectical irony of this. After all, such a universalism would strike anyone as specifically American. America is also a land of ‘nowhere’ and ‘nowhen,’ one can witness this clearly in the paintings of artists like Hopper.
Descriptively speaking, my adoption of Communism has come at the precipice of the collapse of the American era of world-history, and the rise of a new, multi-polar world order. We are the most national in character, not when we directly identify with our nation, but when we reach the limits of our universality.
In a certain sense, I regard communism as America’s own ‘manifest destiny,’ - where America will finally confront itself as a definite, specific, and particular civilization - rather than the universal ‘exception’ of all humanity. American communism means America as one country among others, rather than the center of the world. Finally, the concerns, interests, needs, and reality of our own people can be addressed, instead of trying to act as the world police.
II. The Historical Part
- In Russia, we know very little about the Communist movement in the United States. Of course, we have read Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, we know about Eugene Debs, but that's about it. Can you tell us more about how it began and developed?
- Communism has a very long history in America, as early as the first pilgrims which settled on the Eastern seaboard. Both Marx & Engels regarded as socialistic the various Utopian, communalistic, and religious communities of the first American settlers up to the 19th century - and these such communities would serve as the inspiration for European socialist ideology, alongside the Utopian theories of Saint-Simon & Charles Fourier. In the words of Engels:
“The first people to set up a society on the basis of community of goods in America, indeed in the whole world, were the so-called Shakers.”
Ironically, America is known as the land of capitalism, but its origins are not only communistic - European communism itself has some origins in America.
In arriving to a land with zero civilizational, cultural, or ethnological roots - Americans strived to build an entirely new society from scratch. Such an endeavor is inevitably communistic, as from the perspective of any purely rational or even religious standpoint - the institution of private property, and relationships based on exchange and subjugation cannot help but appear arbitrary.
This type of communism, however, remains immature and blind to the material basis of private property - which therefore inevitably arises anyway. Beyond the Utopian experiments, mass communistic politics already contains a kernel of existence in movement of the American small farmers, or yeomen.
The yeomen would form the basis of Jacksonian democracy and the early Democrat-Republicans, seeking limited taxation, but also land redistribution. This would eventually evolve into phenomena like the Farmer’s Alliance, and later the Populist movement - whose demands eventually went beyond the mere demand for land reform (which is itself inherently communsitic), and into socialistic demands for the nationalization of common infrastructure and the breaking of trusts.
Socialism has an authentically indigenous soil in America, even before the emergence of the labor movement. The American industrial revolution forms the definitive context for the proto-socialist realist works of great authors like Jack London, whom I am glad Russians are familiar with (unfortunately, American students do not learn about Jack London anymore - they are taught to read about transgenders instead).
The spontaneously American form of industrial proletarian socialism had taken on the form of syndicalism, because of the natural yet powerful rise of the union movement. The development of unionism could be easily anticipated in the American context, as spontaneous forms of artificial collective associations amidst a complete lack of definite civilizational, parochial and communal ties. This eventually culminates in the establishment of the syndicalist IWW, which was still only a union and not a political party.
Alternatively, the origins of American political socialism (beyond syndicalism) is interesting, because it has direct origins in the agrarian Utopian cooperative movement. Combining the ideas of European social democracy with home-grown Utopian experimental colonies, the American social democrats eventually were inspired to develop the notion of a cooperative national industrial economy.
This is the context out of which emerges Eugene Debs and the Socialist Party of America, who applied this broad, sweeping vision of a cooperative commonwealth that in part came from the agrarian movement into formulating the political program of the American industrial proletariat.
Simultaneously, the largely agrarian People’s Party, the culmination of the agrarian popular movement, gets assimilated by the Democratic Party in the campaign of William Jennings Bryan of 1896. Around this time we see an acute divergence of two co-historical phenomena - that of geographically rural agrarian populism and geographically urban industrial radicalism, which underwent relative separate development (later conjoining in farmers labor movements).
The formation of what would become the Communist Party is interesting, and would come to define the nature of the party as a whole. It strictly distinguished itself, not by virtue of any actual change in the domestic class struggle - but in the attitude toward the October revolution. The geopolitical counter-hegemonic stance of the Communist Party, from this point up to the Vietnam War, was based purely on allegiance to the line of the Soviet state. This was not, as anticommunists tried to frame it, because American Communists were ‘lackeys’ of a foreign country. It was because the Soviet line was used almost religiously by American Communists to determine whose stances were more legitimate. The problem, of course, lies in the fact that the Soviet line itself underwent intensive contradictions - in the form of the Left (Trotsky) and Right (Bukhrain) deviations. These elements (especially Bukharinites) were never fully expelled from the Communist Party for that reason.
Already in 1929, Stalin remarked on this peculiar sectarian, rootless approach of the American Communists:
“You know that both groups of the American Communist Party, competing with each other and chasing after each other like horses in a race, are feverishly speculating on existing and non-existing differences within the C.P.S.U. Why do they do that? Do the interests of the Communist Party of America demand it? No, of course not. They do it in order to gain some advantage for their own particular faction and to cause injury to the other faction”
As a further side note, this notion of ones stance in relation to foreign powers would come to define the sectarianism of the American Communist movement throughout the entire 20th century. Attitudes toward the Soviet Union, the Sino-Soviet split, Khrushchev’s secret Speech, the Sino-Albanian split, etc. - came to entirely define the nature of American Communist organizations. There was never any real fully indigenous basis for Communist anti-imperialism. It was always based in some proclaimed allegiance toward actual Communist states. The tumultuous relationships between Communist countries would act as a macrocosm for the internal dramas of the Communist movement.
Anyway, by the time of the formation of what would become the Communist party, which was wholly based on the response to the October revolution, the aim was to apply the ideas of Leninism to the American context. But this was not really done in practice. No real initiative was taken to conjoin the urban and rural components of the American popular movement.
There was a type of hubris among American industrial socialists, including Marxists, that there was no use in placing special emphasis on the development of the agrarian movement - given the rapid pace of urbanization and proletarianization. Thus the temporal logic of Leninism, which rejects such anticipatory stageism in relation to urban and rural social formations, was never wholly adopted by American Communists.
America was already a democracy, and there were no remnants of feudalism. So Communists, who were at this time almost wholly confined to America’s emerging urban centers, did not think twice in regarding all socialistic potentials of the agrarian movement to have been rendered superfluous in their industrial radicalism.
This, in my view, was a grave error, and a founding sin of the American Communists. While they continued to gain prominence in paying a large role in the emerging labor movement, and are inexorably tied to the history of the American working class, this narrow-mindedness prohibited them from ever becoming a truly national, popular party. There were some initiatives to organize black agrarian sharecroppers in the South during the 1930s which were met with success, but this never evolved into any broader national movement.
It was the development of the agrarian movement which formed the definitive popular basis of the government of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal amidst the crisis of the Great Depression, which Communists were late to appreciate the significance of.
The inability to fully articulate the lessons of Leninism, and therefore become a truly popular force, would eventually corrupt the party from within. Having an increasingly institutionalized social base, the opportunism of figures like Browder, who sought to dissolve the party into an appendage of the Democrats New Deal Coalition became inevitable. The party itself had no national popular basis, and it was only natural that figures in it would try and merge with the party - owing to its deep historical roots in the agrarian movement - that did.
(On the significance of agrarianism - it has to do with the basis of political institutions, not the specific nature of agriculture. Political institutions are urban - applying dialectical materialism - it is easy to see that their real, material basis is in fact rural. WIthout a basis in the popular strata outside the exclusive reigns of ones institution, no nation-wide movement is possible. That is where, as Lenin understood, the real people are.)
The founding sin would come to destroy the Communists relationship to the working class itself. The union movement began an anti-communist campaign, at the outset of the cold war, to purge Communist elements. Communists became estranged not only from the national masses - which they always were - but even from the urban, working-class strongholds that used to form the core of the movement. All owing to the anti-Leninist prejudices of old social-democracy, the anti-dialectical temporal logic according to which an apparently novel formation renders the older one superfluous. It’s clear how this anti-Leninist logic develops: Soon enough, workers themselves become superfluous in the face of the ‘culturally advanced, enlightened student.’ The student, in turn, becomes superfluous in the face of the ‘advanced’ homeless drug addict, whose insanity epitomizes the meaning of ‘revolution’ for ultra-left radicals.
During the period of the so-called counter-culture and the rise of the New Left, the disease of petty-bourgeois radicalism finally took root. The radical Left wholly repudiated the working class itself as an ‘imperialist labor aristocracy,’ instead turning to students, hippies, lumpen - and ethnic minorities. This long process of estrangement, which had the direct involvement of the emerging American globalist deep state and the CIA, culminates into the insanity of American leftism we see today, which views not the proletariat, but transgender graduate student baristas as the revolutionary subject.
Today, nothing remains of American Communism. The party itself had become completely sterile after it fell out of favor with labor unions that had hitherto defined its concrete social base. The New Left turned out to be a complete been an appendage of the Rockefeller Ford Foundation, which accelerated the creation of the Soros ‘Open Society’ deep state at the expense of the traditional bourgeois-democratic institutions - in the midst of neoliberal deindustrialization. Today, ‘progressive leftism’ is at the vanguard of American hegemony and imperialism.
Eventually, and in line with Soviet directives, the Communist party started to tail the Democrats, who were more geopolitically amicable to the Soviets than the Republicans.
Gorbachev’s revisionism delivered the final blow to the party, which became a fully liberal, bourgeois party, totally assimilating to the Democrats. It has no social base to speak of. For a long time, it was just completely irrelevant, spending all of its time promoting Democrat electoral campaigns even while nobody listened to it.
There are some new changes that have come recently. In response to an initiative started by myself to re-capture the party and revitalize it, suspected agent of the FBI Taryn Fivek, a Trotskyite from the Worker’s World Party, has rapidly taken over the Communist Party, filling it with degenerates, the mentally ill and other antisocial elements. These elements purely serve the purpose of purging my followers. They have made zero progress in reaching out to any demographic base outside their small circle, and the party remains a tail of the Democrats. But now, crypto-Azovites are turning it into a circus - transvestites, drug-addicts, psychopaths, the mentally retarded etc. reign unchallenged.
Additionally, American ‘Communists’ are now fully aligned with imperialism. They claim Russia is a ‘fascist’ state, and are implicitly allied with the Azovites and Ukrainian Neo-Nazis, as a form of international class solidarity between anti-social, degenerate social scum. They are wholly loyal to the American deep state, and believe alignment with the Democrats - who fund Ukrainian Nazis - is necessary to stave off the threat of ‘fascism’ coming from Trump.
Trump, it should be remembered for all his faults - who led a deeply working class movement and is relatively less interventionist than other politicians - is the ultimate figure of ‘fascism’ to these ‘communists.’
This is the sad, sorry picture of American ‘communism.’ I have popularized the MAGA Communism slogan solely in order to bring dignity and honor back to the name of Communism in this country.
- What difficulties did the Communists face in the United States? After all, the United States is the center of world capital, and it is not easy to fight it in the heart of it.
- The difficulties were themselves internal to the Communists. Molotov once regarded that Communism should be easy in a country like the United States, and I tend to agree with him.
The theoretical difficulty lied in the inability to discover the revolutionary subject. Who is the proletariat? How can the interests be aligned with the international working class, namely in the form of anti-imperialism? Especially when the working class is consolidated by imperialist labor unions.
The Leninist task would have been to go lower and deeper into the people to build a counter-hegemony against the imperialist institutions, into the backward rural peoples who were not fully consolidated by them. The Communists did the opposite. They went ‘higher’ - into students, intelligentsia and urban petty bourgeois ‘enlightened’ bohemians. These people, in turn, found their ‘revolutionary subject’ in the mentally ill and in lumpen - such as the so-called ‘LGBT’ movement.
- What was the role of the secret service in weakening the American Communists? Was there an organized campaign against the Reds, or was it all hearsay?
- It played a fundamental role, but not in the way you might think. The Red Scare of the 1950’s was really only the tip of the iceberg. The real method of dismantlement was much less direct.
McCarthyism is looked down upon even by the bourgeois hegemony today. McCarthy, who led the Red Scare, was not even really an agent of the hegemony at all - he was a demagogue possessed with the conspiratorial view that the US government was infiltrated by ‘communists’.
The bizarre irony is, he was somewhat right - except these were not ‘Communists’ of the Marxist-Leninist caliber. They were Trotskyites and Fabian socialists of the English ruling class tradition - who had a vision of global technocratic socialism brought about by monopoly capital, and the oil bankers in particular. These were the ‘progressives’ who formed the bulwark of the CIA.
American feminist Gloria Steinem noted her shock at the ‘progressivism’ of the CIA rank and file - they were anything but the ‘reactionaries’ or ‘conservatives’ of the John Birch society. Even today, there is a clear connection between the Trotskyites and neoconservatism - the engineers behind the Iraq War and the Bush administration.
It’s sort of a funny irony. Trotskyite ‘permanent revolution’ weaponized at the level of the American Empire itself, to spread color revolution ‘democracy’ around the world. Most leftists in America, even if they don’t know it, are fully on board with this.
It’s very strange. The secret services played a role in estranging Communists from the working class movement, and promoting the various ‘trends’ of the counterculture to weaken it from within. But even more so - services like the CIA even RECRUITED from the ranks of American radicals - we see the legacy of this even today.
We should embark on an investigation, together, as Russian and American Communists. I am certain the same elements also infiltrated the Soviet Union from within, and eventually dismantled it. We should together study the ways in which the entire international Communist movement was hijacked from within. The ones who brought you your Gorbachev, also brought us our ‘communists.’
- In your opinion, what mistakes were made? Why did the rise of the "red wave" of the 20s and 30s stop? Do you think it was the result of an organized policy of the authorities or the miscalculations of the communists themselves, who failed to find an approach to the masses?
- I have to apologize for my overly long-winded response above - as I have already preemptively answered this in there. In short, it was the inability to link up with the agrarian populist movement.
- Tell us about the 1960s in the United States. The popular view is that this is the heyday of leftist ideas. However, it is easy to see that this is where the roots of the distortion of communist ideas and the departure of the left from the labor struggle in favor of simulation: the rights of various minorities, etc., lie. What is the American Communist view of this period?
- The Communist Party officially regards it as ‘progress.’ But from above, you can see it was the beginning of the end of any left-wing working class movement.
The working class went overwhelmingly to the Right - to Nixon, Reagan, etc.
- Tell us a little bit about the history of USA Communist Party. We'll talk more about your work within it below, but now let's look at it from a historical point of view. How did the party come into being, what stages did it go through, when was its popularity with the working class at its peak, and how did the party end up in today's - not the most enviable - position?
- That is an important question I have not fully addressed - which is the circumstances and drama defining the lead up to the official formation of the Communist Party in 1929.
From the very outset, what would become the official Communist Party was beset with factional struggles that, in one sense, merely reflected those occurring in the Soviet Union. But there was also a basis in the domestic class struggle for the factionalism within the Party.
This could be reflected in the differences between the personalities of William Z. Foster and Jay Lovestone - the two preeminent figures who vied for control over the party. Foster had a background in the authentically American tradition of unionism (I mentioned the IWW before, which he was a part of) - and most importantly through this a strong connection to the growing agrarian labor parties in the American midwest. I would say that Foster was an authentically American Bolshevik, whose Communist convictions were deeply rooted in the American national context.
The initial formation of the CPUSA is itself tainted by the ultra-leftism of Charles Ruthenberg, whose position did not really have a concrete basis in the American situation. The ultra-left radicalism of the CPUSA was undercut by the fact that it was largely an immigrant party, reflecting the immediate radicalism of their proletarianization in America’s industrial centers.
On the other hand, Lovestone, who would later become associated with the RIght Opposition of Bukharin, was firmly allied with Ruthenberg. How to explain this? Lovestone was a New York academic, wholly detached from not only the American masses, but even the industrial proletariat. The implicit solidarity of Lovestone and Ruthenberg against Foster was a typical urban petty-bourgeois solidarity against the rural element.
Additionally, the Comintern of the 1920’s played a large role in dismantling Foster’s connections to the agrarian movement. So by the time Foster assumed leadership in the early 1930’s, the party was wholly estranged from any genuinely popular movement. In my opinion, it never recovered from the errors already plaguing its initial formation in the 1920’s. All later problems faced by the party - including the opportunism of Browder - reflected its inability to establish its own popular hegemony because of its original severance from the agrarian movement.
Despite this, throughout the 1930’s the party undoubtedly had a strong basis in the American working class. I would argue, therefore, that the 1930’s represent the golden age of the American Communist Party. But one cannot restore the party to greatness without recognizing the factors that led it astray.
The history of the party after the period of the Popular Front can be defined by a gradual estrangement from the labor movement. It began to become a party of bohemians, intellectuals, actors, artists, and other urban petty-bourgeois - and even, it is unfortunate to say, outright degenerate elements. Instead of making inroads with the American popular masses, the party desperately tried to organize marginal elements, sometimes to the point of absurdity. This is reflected in the details surrounding the Hollywood ‘screen writers guild’ - unionizing Hollywood script writers - what kind of worker’s movement is that? This insanity has culminated into today, where ‘socialists’ have taken it upon themselves to try and unionize… Prostitutes!
By the time of Joe McCarthy’s Red Scare of the 1950’s, the party was already nearly obsolete. It’s a myth to say the red scare destroyed the party - by that time, the party was not significantly popular among any segment of the masses. It was entrenched in bureaucracy, and its members already began to move on to high positions in the growing post-war civil society.
After Khrushchev’s secret speech, the party was basically kaput. The bohemian intellectuals were terrified and disillusioned by the revelations of ‘Stalinist crimes.’ The party’s avenue of growth and activity was through the Civil Rights Movement, and various civil-society avenues of Democratic Party, later neoliberal control.
However, to still put the party at this time into perspective - it was still a party of tens of thousands of active members, and a party that remained cognizant of the industrial working class being the necessary core of its organization. It still had, more or less, a basis in the trade-union movement, and most importantly, it tried - even if in vain - to be a popular party.
Under the leadership of Gus Hall, the party ran for office independently, and opportunist trends like Eurocommunism were resisted. In the 1990’s, the pro-Gorbachev and liberal ‘democratic socialist’ elements within the party, led in part by famous Civil Rights activist Angela Davis formed the ‘Committees for Correspondence’ - which sought to more or less dismantle the basic principles of Leninism in favor of complete liberalism.
Officially, they were not successful. But unofficially, they gained control the party entirely after the death of Gus Hall. Since then, and especially under the leadership fo Sam Webb, it has only been a Communist Party in name. It is fully co-opted to Democrat electoralism, and for a period it abandoned all semblance of Marxist-Leninist ideology.
Within the last decade, things appeared to change. After the leadership of Sam Webb, the party has embarked on a re-adoption of official ‘Marxist-Leninist’ ideas, to aestheticize its electoralism for the Democrats. Because of Bernie Sander’s electoral run in 2016, a renewed interest in ‘Democratic Socialism’ led to thousands of petty-bourgeois youth joining the ‘Democratic Socialists of America.’
The most contemptible, petty-bourgeois, infantile, mentally ill, and even degenerate elements of the DSA began to flood the CPUSA around 2021 almost exactly after I called for the revival of the party. I am fully convinced this was a deliberate effort to stop my efforts. As I mentioned earlier, Trotskyite and suspected federal agent Taryn Fivek all but assumed full control of the party - and because of her, I was personally denounced by the Central Committee as a ‘fascist’ and ‘racist.’
Taryn has a special theory of imperialism. For her, Russia, China and others are fascist imperialist states - and Joe Biden is ‘helping the worker’s movement’ in America - despite the fact that Biden oversaw the passing of a Railway act, which suppresses the labor movement in the most unprecedented way since the 1980’s - rolling back collective bargaining rights established under Roosevelt in the 30’s - on grounds of ‘national security.’
For Taryn, America is ‘more progressive’ than China and Russia on cultural issues, and therefore, has her tacit support against them. She will never admit this outright, but all her actions confirm she bares this Trotskyite view.
- I would also like to know about the history of the labor struggle in the United States. What period in the country's history would you say was the most prosperous for the proletariat? What did it have to do with? And what caused the decline of the working class and the deterioration of its situation today?
- The decline of the working class movement has to do with the institutional consolidation of the union movement. The Union bureaucracy is part of the ‘unofficial’ state within civil society, wholly answerable to the Democrats. The increased socialization of labor, in many respects, outmoded the prior form of American unions.
In the period of initial American industrialization, the working class movement was at its most wild, independent, vigorous, revolutionary and strong. It was FDR’s New Deal that more or less assimilated the Union movement into being a corporate wing the government. The labor movement became political. After FDR’s death, the politics ceased to have a popular quality, but became directly controlled by the bourgeoisie in a coalition with professional-managerials. Such was the fate of the labor movement.
By far, the most significant working class movement within the past three decades in the United State was Trump’s MAGA movement.
III. Today's Day - U.S. domestic politics
- How would you describe the situation of the working class in the United States today? What are the major difficulties faced by workers? Are there still industrial centers, places where agriculture is strong?
- America has been rapidly deindustrializing since the 1980’s. This was accelerated by NAFTA and globalization. While agriculture remains strong, the number of small farms has rapidly diminished, and continues to diminish. Big agribusiness is taking over entirely, and billionaires like Bill Gates, with depopulation ambitions, are buying up huge swaths of farmland.
The situation of the working class in the United States is one of despair. They are losing their livelihoods, and losing hope. Fentanyl drug addiction is plaguing them, as they die a slow death, having been forgotten and abandoned by the ruling class.
In working-class East Palestine Ohio, where government negligence led to the worst environmental catastrophe in over a decade, Trump alone went down to the people and gave the workers there some hope. He may be deceiving them. But no one else even bothers to acknowledge their existence. All I have wanted is for the Communist Party to do that.
- Please give your assessment of the current communist movement in the United States. As I understand it, you and your comrades have serious disagreements with a large part of the American Left. What is the nature of these disagreements?
- There is no Communist movement to speak of. The disagreement with leftists stems from the fact that the American left has been co-opted entirely by the civil society NGOs, think tanks and academic institutions of the ruling class.
Those who oppose the ruling class cultural agenda, globalism, LGBT, academia, large pharmaceutical companies, are called ‘reactionaries’ and ‘fascists.’
The theory in America is the idea of ‘red fascism’ - the notion that the Soviet Union was the same as Nazi Germany, and Stalin was the same as Hitler. All sincere Communists are called ‘fascists.’
There is another breed of ‘communist’ which is the psychopathic Democrat. For many years, the Republicans accused Democrats and liberals of being communists. So, many of these liberals, purely in reaction to the Republicans, started adopting the label proudly as a form of subversive and rebellious ‘political satanism.’
These ‘communists’ do not wear such a name with any honor, dignity or pride - it is purely a provocation and even form of psychological terrorism against rural, working class conservative Americans, who have been ingrained with anti-communist propaganda.
I will give you an example. My friend, Jackson Hinkle, is also an American communist. Recently he was put on the Ukrainian government murder list. Almost all American ‘communists’ and ‘leftists’ gleefully applauded Ukraine for this. In other words, they support the murder of an American communist by Ukrainian Nazis. It is not uncommon for them to support Azov and Ukrainian Nazis outright as ‘anti-imperialist heroes’ against ‘fascist Russia.’
These are not communists, but our own type of Azovites weaponizing the irrational fears of the normal, non-globalist Americans.
Every sincere communist in this country is slandered, smeared, and falls victim to a vicious campaign to destroy their reputation - myself included. Every single one. It’s simple: One either aligns with the globalists, or society will do everything in its power to wipe you away. That is especially true if you are an authentic communist.
- Due to the efforts of certain individuals and groups, the Western leftist movement in Russia is firmly associated with topics such as LGBT, transgender, and other "identity politics," the so-called WOKE movement. How do you and your comrades feel about such initiatives? I think none of this has anything to do with communism (neither do my comrades), what do you think?
- We regard them with disgust, and as propagated by the enemies of not only the proletariat, but mankind as a whole. You are right that it has nothing to do with communism. It is American globalism through and through, and all the major capitalist institutions and corporations in Wall Street are behind them.
The ruling monopoly capitalist elites in Wall Street and the City of London are embarking on a campaign to destroy mankind and to promote depopulation. The promotion of LGBT is also a vicious war against the soul. I do not mean to sound metaphysical either. Stalin also spoke of the ‘soul’ as well. A healthy, happy humanity is one that can quickly awaken to the wickedness of the ruling class, and be cognizant of its own interests in the promotion of development, prosperity and peace.
It accomplishes a number of goals: On the one hand, it reduces the population. On the other, it absolutely breaks the will of the working class, cudgels them into humiliation and misery. To be a normal, dignified man or woman is increasingly a crime. Everything that gives pride and power to the working class is slated for destruction.
Even basic literature, the arts, is under attack. The average education level of the people is diminishing rapidly. They are, more or less, trying to grind us into worms.
- One of the most serious points of division among the Russian Communists is the question of patriotism, the love of one's homeland. My comrades and I stand on the position that without patriotism, the working class has no future, and that cosmopolitanism is a bourgeois trick. What is your point of view on this question? What would you say to people for whom "patriot" equals "fascist"?
- I agree with you entirely. We have been attacked for the same reason. History is one our side. All major Communist thinkers agree with us on this point - even Lenin, who fervently fought against national-chauvinism, stressed the pride he and other Russians felt for their homeland.
To be a Communist without being a patriot is unthinkable. I am even surprised that this is even a point of contention in the Russian context. The entire body of Marxist-Leninist literature, surely supports this! We ourselves had to dig up some old Soviet textbooks, which stressed the inexorable connection between Communism and Patriotism to use against the woke leftists.
As for the notion of fascism being equal to patriotism. Let us just consult what Stalin said. Stalin said: Hitler is not a true patriot. How is it in the interests of the German people to wage a war of aggression toward the East, and enslave the Slavic peoples? Hitler was a disaster for Germany, so says Stalin. A true German patriot would have opposed him.
The German Communist, Ernst Thalmann, said -
“My people, to whom I belong, and whom I love, are the German people, and my nation, which I worship with great pride, is the German nation, a knightly, proud and hard nation Flesh of the flesh of the German workers, and therefore, as their revolutionary child, have later become their revolutionary leader”
This type of sentiment was a given for all Communists historically. It pains me to hear that the disease of American globalism is taking root in a country with such historical wisdom as Russia.
- And continuing the theme raised above. How, in your opinion, do the traditional values of the people fit in with progress, which, by definition, is associated with communism? A common (in my opinion, erroneous) opinion is that tradition and communism are incompatible, and that we should abandon them and follow the road of dubious progress, dictated by the oligarchy and its tame leftists. Please share your thoughts on this matter.
- But the experience of history, as I am sure you know, proved to the contrary to such common opinion. It was in Communist states that the traditions of the people were revived and flourished to an unprecedented degree. The golden era of Russian traditionalism was in fact the Stalin era, even more than Khrushchev! Such movies as Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible - why?
Under the Romanovs, a minority of westernized and Germanized elites reigned over a 90% Russian peasant majority that had no political subjectivity. Communism restored Russian civilization and its deep roots in the East during the era of Muscovy, before Peter the Great.
The simple explanation is that - Communism preserves the lifeblood of the people. All progressive transformations of cultural life, happen at a collective level. The communal and family ties of the people are not destroyed absolutely or liquified, but preserved as a given. I speculate this is even the reason for policies of ‘collective punishment.’ One cannot simply punish the individual, but also the family, and sometimes the whole village - because it is impossible to separate the individual from the communal context.
The traditional lifeblood of the people is given new invigoration under Communism, in addition to being preserved. People are allowed to breathe as a people. Changes in cultural life - new rights for women, and new socialization - do not alter the fundamental laws of civilization and the bedrock of the family. They rather produce a more productive, happy and prosperous society - removing fetters to the growth of the productive forces, which is the mechanism for the flourishing, enrichment, and expansion of the cultural life of the people.
In liberal capitalism, in the first place, peoples communal ties are destroyed, and everyone is reduced to an atom. Then, as an atom, new ‘progressive’ trends - like the LGBT movement - are promoted, and new identities emerge to replace the old communal ties. People are cornered, like animals, utterly depraved, alone and alienated, to be at the mercy of cultural engineers, molding them into the shape of psychological slaves from scratch. Reminiscent of the CIA MKULTRA program!
The phenomena of mass prostitution was the first instance of this depravity. The family was destroyed, and women were reduced to a commodity. Not soon after, pederasty became commonplace among the ruling class. This was severely opposed during the Stalin era.
The LGBT movement is the latest tool by the bourgeoisie to exterminate the cultural lifeblood of the people. Communism seeks to not only preserve, but even enhance the traditions of the people, as boundless as the wealth of humanity itself!
- I've noticed that you often bring up religion in your streams and debates. Do you think communist views and a religious worldview are compatible? Again, from a "classical" point of view, communism and religion are antipodes, but even the experience of the Soviet Union shows that people could not break with their religious worldview completely, while remaining very conscious supporters of socialism. What do you think about this?
- Traditionally, Communism was a form of atheism. But why was this? During the 19th century, the Church was not only a religious institution, but also a political one. It opposed the heavenly to the worldly, and thus was employed as a tool by the ruling class to distract people from worldly justice. The various religious institutions were easily corrupted. Many traditional Muslim institutions in the middle east became servile to the colonial occupiers, even!
So Communists hastily condemned religion as a whole, not understanding the deep roots of religion in the feeling of the people. They did not give religion any proper attention beyond the institution of religion. The deep texture of the biblical and religious unconscious, that was undoubtedly the source of real conviction even for atheist Communists, was taken for granted.
Toward the end of his life, this religious unconscious reappeared to Engels, when he discovered in the origins of Christianity a parallel to the contemporary Communist movement. Religion as a living, rather than dead force, should now be respected and appreciated by Communists regardless of affiliation. It is, more or less, what separates us from being worms. Communist countries like the USSR eventually realized this - which is why the Church was reestablished. Even the atheist Communists took the civilizational significance of religion for granted.
I refute the view that Marxism-Leninism is incompatible with religion, in its deeper and more profound sense, as a living force among the people. There is even a Christiological significance of Lenin in his split with the old Marxists. He cleaned the slate entirely, ‘forgiving the sins’ of the so-called ‘backward Asiatic masses.’ He gave them light, and redeemed them.
The more one studies the ancient religious texts, the more one witnesses the living force of Communism throughout the history of mankind. Marx understood religion to be the ‘heart of a heartless world.’ I think then, to give the world heart, is to make it alive with religious feeling, like never was before. Our art, our culture, our surroundings, and our way of life, should remind and fulfill us with gratitude, happiness and love toward our creator, and passion for mankind as a whole. When I witness artifacts of Soviet culture, it is clear to me that it was one such civilization.
- Please describe the following social groups in a few words: conservatives (like Matt Walsh, Ben Shapiro, etc.), Black Lives Matter, SJWs. What do you think of them? What is the communists' place in this picture? Whose agenda do you think is closer to the working class? Or maybe you need to distance yourself from all this discourse and promote your own agenda?
- Many of these ‘conservatives’ are sellouts, neoconservatives, and agents of the establishment. Some of them, though less mainstream, are authentic opponents of the globalist regime.
Black Lives Matter is a front organization for the Democrats domestic color revolution, funded by Soros. SJWs are mentally ill young people who have been brainwashed by bourgeois academia, transformed into a kind of ‘terminator’ against all dissidents and opponents of the ruling class.
Communists should find more allies in conservatives. Not necessarily mainstream ones, but ordinary, everyday people who have conservative sensibilities. It is a conservative sensibility to oppose the Hitlerite pro-war agenda of the Democrats and globalists. It is also a conservative sensibility to oppose the LGBT agenda, the Soros, Bill Gates, and World Economic Forum.
We live in a very advanced, industrialized country with a large working class. The sentiments of the working class are conservative: They want to conserve their humanity, conserve the deeper texture of family and religious values, while promoting prosperity, peace, and wealth. They don’t want aggression against other country, don’t care about human rights, and don’t want America to be the world police. I think these align with the goals of Communists, more than the pseudo-leftist wokes do.
- Let's talk about the current political parties in the United States. How would you characterize a typical member of the Democratic and Republican parties? Who are these people, what brings them into the ranks of one political structure or another? Has the image of the "average" voter of each party changed over time, and if so, in what ways? Which mainstream party supporters do you think the Communists should work with first? Judging by the MAGA-Communism hashtag and your video of you going to a Trumpist demonstration where you discussed socialist ideas, you and your comrades opted for Republican Trump supporters. Why did you make that decision?
- There has been a big re-alignment. Traditionally, the Democrats were more a party of the working class, because of their ties to the union movement. Then, after NAFTA, they gradually abandoned the working class. Before this, Nixon was popular among them - and Reagan made more inroads among them for his pseudo-populism.
Traditionally speaking, Republicans were the party of wealthy business owners, antisocial corporations, country-club wealthy elites, and upper-middle-class suburbanites. More or less, the party of the wealthy, privileged few.
Democrats were the party of minorities, urban petty bourgeois, professional-managerials, academics, and before 2016 - had some footing in the blue-collar working class.
All that changed with MAGA. The blue collar working class overwhelmingly went over to Trump. They are the ones who won him his election, and gave him a political existence. Now, there is a civil war in the Republican party - between the ‘traditional’ Republicans and the MAGA Republicans.
The traditional Republicans are simply put, no different than Democrats. Two sides of the same coin. They form one great Center and are fully aligned when it comes to foreign policy. The MAGA Republicans are the real dissident and counter-hegemonic force. They oppose the status quo, and have an authentic basis in the people.
The slogan of MAGA Communism was coined with a simple premise: We need to stop trying to win over leftists, liberals and wokes - and go down to the MAGA people, to accelerate the development of the MAGA movement into an independent party of the working class. We need to be at the vanguard of the civil war against the Republican establishment, who want to bury MAGA forever.
The decision to launch the MAGA Communism slogan was to me a sudden realization, after the culmination of various developments. The American left is fundamentally, and irredeemably corrupt. We need a ‘year zero,’ a clean slate to start from scratch, to revive and rebuild Communism.
There was a strong sense of destiny compelling this decision - it seemed to me that MAGA and Communism were soul-mates - that American Communists should ‘go down to the people’ instead of remaining comfortable in their echo-chambers and bubbles, that we are living in an era of unprecedented political realignment, and this would be a chance to seize the day.
I sincerely believed that MAGA contains the kernel of an authentic, home-grown American socialism, representing a real commonality of the people and a form of solidarity that was not only outside the bourgeois hegemony, but was targeted against it. I imagined the American Communist partisan of the future, free from all of that woke, LGBT nonsense, who would draw from the soil of the people - the soil of the MAGA movement.
Let me explain my interest: the most mainstream Russian leftists (Konstantin Semin, for example) struggle to paint an image of the "typical" Trump supporter as "white trash," ignorant and fascist, thereby promoting the agenda of the Democratic Party and the Western leftists. Russian youtube-leftists are trying to get their supporters to stay away from Trump and his sympathizers, while you, on the other hand, have gone out of your way to help these people. Please disclose your position on this issue in as much detail as you can.
They are the working class. Xi has a saying - even if the people jump off a cliff, you just jump with them, because there is no Communist party without the people. A Communist can never turn their back on the working class of their homeland, without them - there is no purport to being a Communist - no meaning to it.
Trump supporters might be called ‘white trash.’ That is fine. The proletariat has always been regarded as ‘trash’ by the bourgeoisie and its pseudo-intellectual lackeys. They are the trash left behind by a system that has lost all pretense for any regard for human life. I think Communists should be among the trash. If we don’t believe in trash, we don’t believe in humanity - because humanity itself is being turned into trash.
The so-called ‘enlightened’ pseudo-intellectual leftists who look down upon so called ‘backward trash’, are enemies of the people. Lenin despised them. Stalin persecuted them, and rightfully! The Democrats are interested in creating a fake mockery of society. Politically correct, respectable, nice, clean and inoffensive. Communists must draw from the real masses and the real society. And that is what MAGA is - the reality behind the curtain.
- If one looks at the United States from the outside, without being deeply immersed in the domestic agenda, one gets the impression of a deep division in American society. This split runs along a variety of lines: race, Democrats versus Republicans, liberal-minded big-city residents on both coasts, who have embraced the modern dogma of the left versus the traditional working class in the hinterlands. How do you comment on this impression? Is there some truth in such observations? And how should communists behave under such circumstances?
- It is, quite simply, the truth. Although regarding race, the Democrats are increasingly unable to control the minorities. Latinos are going to MAGA in droves. Black Americans are starting to wake up to the hideous racism and evil of the Democrats. Many forget that the Democrats were the party of the southern slave owners and Jim Crow racists. Joe Biden himself was a segregationist.
Communists must absolutely fight the hegemony. The urban center is hegemony. Lenin learned this lesson. He thought he could simply unify the urban proletariat with the peasantry. But when the urban proletariat was liquidated by the civil war, he realized that the city dwellers were an unreliable bunch, full of petty-bourgeois tendencies. He drew his strength from the overwhelmingly peasant Red Army.
Stalin solidified this - he was the ultimate populist in history, empowering the ordinary Russian peasant against the arrogant urban ‘intellectuals’ and the party functionaries, who he persecuted in the Great Purges. It is not by accident that he is regarded with love and adoration by the most remotely rural of Russian population today - at least that is my impression.
Rurality is the site of counter-hegemony. Hegemony solidifies in the urban centers. To build a counter-hegemony, one most go to the base, the basis - and that is the rural hinterlands. That is where counter-hegemonic organization is truly possible. That is what MAGA basically is.
- Many Russian comrades also ask whether there are any of the most "red" regions in the U.S. where Communists work most easily? If so, what is the reason for this favorable environment?
- Exactly the same regions that Trump is popular. Additionally, there is a re-alignment. New Yorkers, who protested the vaccine mandates are quickly leaving the Democratic party. Among black, Latino, etc. peoples, and among the MAGA working class, there is fertile soil. The question is: Which people have been fully institutionalized, and which people are outside the hegemony?
One must go ‘down, deeper into the people’ as Lenin put it.
- Another very interesting issue concerning domestic politics in the United States is the issue of civilian weapons. In Russia, as you probably know, acquiring and owning weapons is a rather complicated process, tightly controlled by bureaucracy. How is this situation in the United States? Are you an advocate of free gun sales?
- America has a culture of gun ownership, especially rural America. The truth is, we simply aren’t a civilization yet! By that I mean, we don’t really have any central government respected by the people. Our government is a kind of indifferent, blind, sadistic force - it has no roots in the people. It is stoic and not partial to them in any determinate way.
There is no organic connection between the people and the state. So, it is very important to Americans that we can have guns. Vigilance against government is a basic American value. Our own government basically agrees, since it spends all of its time being vigilant against the people!
We have no tradition of any ‘people’s state.’ If we did, we could simply have an organic, collective militia integrated with the state - as China did under Mao, and the USSR did to a certain extent. Since we don’t, Communists here should be vigilant about protecting our liberties. We are living in an almost outright bourgeois dictatorship and need all the breathing room we can have to wage a counter-hegemonic war against the globalists.
Civilization means an organic relation between state and civil society, rooted in the material existence of the people. We don’t have anything like that, almost all other countries do. If our American state collapsed, America as a nation would cease to exist. If the Russian state collapsed, for example, I’m sure the Russian people would survive as a nation. It’s a real civilization.
So part of the task of American Communists is to build an American civilization.
- Let's talk some more about the "average" American. What is his opinion of Russia? Are Americans at all interested in what is happening outside of their country? If so, from what sources do they get their information?
- Americans are uneducated about almost everything outside their immediate personal life. They know about music artists, sports teams, junk food and celebrities.
Some Americans care about politics as a fashion trend. So they will just support Ukraine because it’s fashionable. Others will posture as conscious concerned citizens trying to make the world a better place. These people are on reddit. It’s all a silly fad.
Americans who think for themselves, which is a huge part of the country may not know about Russia, but sympathize with it more. They sympathize with it because they are aware of how the media is lying about Ukraine - about the corruption, the neonazis and how much money Zelenskyy is taking. They also applaud and like Putin’s speeches against wokeness.
In general, I think among rural Americans there is a type of implicit solidarity with the Russian people, even if they don’t fully understand it. Their grandfathers were allied to Russians against Nazis. These are the ‘fossils of history,’ they remember the simpler, more basic times - before all the rubbish that came from the top started accumulating.
Anti-communist propaganda came from the top. The cold war was something that concerned the ruling class - finally, anti-Russian hysteria is something promoted by the out of touch coastal elite Media. So, when you sweep away the rubbish, I think American people’s own memory of fighting alongside the Russians against Nazis is still there, and still somewhat potent. The media can say whatever they want, but that was a real experience for many elderly Americans.
Even despite the cold war, I think Americans respect Russians as as strong, fierce and powerful people. I think they are eager and curious to cultivate relations with them.
In general, most dissident minded people - the average Joe at a Trump rally - would likely see Russia as an ally against globalists.
- To summarize all that has been said in this section, please answer: How do you see the future of the United States? Not aspirational, but most realistic from your point of view. Now we are talking exclusively about domestic politics, how do you think American society will (or will not) be able to resolve its accumulated contradictions?
- I am anticipating the complete collapse of the American state, and have the expectation of a civil war.
It might just be brief, and used as a pretext to enable emergency powers to suppress dissent, similar to the January 6th incident.
To put it plainly, I don’t think the traditional classical liberal state can sustain the contradictions of American society. People don’t respect the institution of the state any more. The mass media, academia, internet, technology, culture, has outmoded the previous state superstructure. The antagonism between Trump supporters and Democrats - simply cannot be tamed by the institution of democracy.
It is already a civil war in a sense. I think full on chaos is coming. You know, the African country of Liberia was an American invention. If you want to see the future of America, look at what happened to Liberia. Just total, absolute chaos. Or if you like, watch movies like The Purge.
I think America is destined for something like this. I don’t think people see elections, judicial rulings, as the source of legitimate power anymore. People would probably obey some TikTok influencer instead of the President. So we will probably enter a Warlord era of some kind. Gang warfare, like Liberia.
Whether it is full fascist dictatorship or chaotic civil war - the American democracy, the constitutional republic as we know it will not survive.
IV. U.S. Foreign Policy
Now let's discuss perhaps the most important topic of the day: the foreign policy of the United States.
- Let's start with a question you touched on in your recent stream about imperialism. Do you think the United States today is an imperialist state? If so, why, what characteristics of an imperialist state in the 21st century would you point out? And in general - is the term "imperialism" relevant today?
- Not only is it imperialist, it is the culmination of the system of imperialism into a Unipolar world order. To study the transition from Lenin’s imperialism to American unipolarity, one must look at the works of people like Micheal Hudson, and the establishment of the Bretton Woods system, the petrodollar, etc.
The unipolar world order is the culmination of the Anglo-Saxon period of world history. It is the culmination of European modernity, colonialism, and the capitalist mode of production. Universal human rights, wokeism, environmentalism, eugenics, depopulation, color revolutions, etc. - are all characteristics of American unipolarity.
Stalin noted that even the classical liberal values, and the right to national self determination was flung overboard by the bourgeoisie. This is what characterizes the American era of dictatorial technocratic pragmatism. There’s no regard for sovereignty. If you’re not aligned with the unipole, you are simply obliterated.
- And, continuing with the previous question: please tell us briefly your opinion about Russia's "imperialism," because not all of our readers watched your stream, and the opinions expressed on it were extremely interesting.
- I see. Well, I don’t think it’s possible to characterize Russia as imperialist. Imperialism is a system of monopoly financial capital. But that system is not abstract, it has a real history - and it culminated in American unipolarity and the Bretton Woods system, alongside the role of the financial center of the City of London.
This is the global financial system as we know it, which is based on the accumulation of financial capital, the use of the world bank for the export of debt-capital, etc. - it’s a determinate, real system. There is no ‘Russian’ or ‘Chinese’ or ‘Iranian’ or even European ‘imperialism.’ It is all rooted in one, central system, with one money trail, and one history.
Russia was partially assimilated into that system economically, and still is to some extent. But politically, what Russia has done in launching the special military operation is a complete secession from the world system of imperialism. The Russian elites that benefited from American unipolarity are the loudest voices against the SMO for that reason!
Russia has been cut off from the global financial system, and now must start from scratch. So, regardless of whatever corruption, or distribution of power - Russia is transitioning into a society based in production for use, not strictly profit. Indigenous Russian industries will have to develop for the purpose of raising the productive forces - all based on a central planning initiative. I think that’s why Putin started to entertain socialistic ideas recently.
I mean, this is why America regarded Russia as an enemy in the first place. The energy industry was nationalized, and this is a threat to monopoly capital. It was nationalized for political purposes - these purposes may be corrupt but it doesn’t matter. The purpose was not to enrich and strengthen the power of the financial institutions centered in the city of london or wall street. In fact, not even the financial institutions of Russia! But for a real, concrete, determinate goal of - in Putin’s case, and I apologize if I’m wrong - supporting the great mass of pensioners.
The threat that an alternate system might be built, because of the sovereign ownership of the energy industry (which is the real source of economic sovereignty) is what made Russia a target. That system may not be Communist. It may not be anything identifiable in ideological terms. But it is concretely opposed to the actually existing imperialist hegemony, and that is why Russia is a target.
- Let's talk about the hostilities in Ukraine and, more generally, the military conflicts in which the U.S. has been involved in the recent past. Tell me, what is the attitude of the "average" American toward the combat operations conducted by the U.S. army abroad? How does American propaganda explain to the people the need for another military operation? How closely do Americans follow the fighting?
- Americans are sick and tired of foreign interventions. A new class of mentally ill people, including transgenders (whose very sense of self identity is inexorably tied to their loyalty to hegemony), are being created through psychological warfare to be utterly loyal to the State Department agenda. They basically promote US interventionism much like an instagram influencer promotes ‘black lives matter.’
- How do Americans feel about the special military operation in Ukraine? The Russian media and Telegram channels periodically post the results of various opinion polls, but not all of them can be trusted (too much depends on which side the pollsters take). Also popular in Russia is Tucker Carlson's show (translated by Russian enthusiasts), which is sharply critical of Biden's position on Ukraine, and I follow Jimmy Dore, who is also sharply negative about helping the Nazi regime in Kiev. But what is the opinion of ordinary Americans?
- It’s unpopular to ordinary Americans. But it’s popular among the trendy, woke kind of people. The people who believe everything the media says, basically, we call them NPCs.
- How would you yourself characterize the events in Ukraine since Maidan 2014? Many Russian liberals and leftists stubbornly refuse to see Western (U.S., European Union, and NATO bloc) interference behind these events, calling such assumptions "Putin's propaganda. What would you say to such people?
- I am surprised about the feelings of Russian leftists. It’s obvious to me that it was a US backed coup. When the Maidan happened, Ukraine’s claims to sovereignty were nullified. The people in the donbass voted for Yanukovych, then suddenly their votes meant nothing! So their legal, representative form of sovereignty was nullified. Imagine if in America, we voted for someone, and then there was a coup by some New Yorkers to overturn the will of half Americans! It would be rightfully understood as the end of the American state.
So the people in the Donbass had every right to secede from that illegitimate state. Maidan is a harrowing story. It shows how the Western disease of woke, trendy liberalism, so seamlessly morphs into genocidal, bestial Nazism, against the ‘backward Asiatics.’ I think we will have our own Maidan in America, against the ‘backward Trump supporters’ too. It’s sociologically a similar phenomena.
Ukraine is a typical story of fascism. You have an official, ‘democratic’ state, and lumpen, terrorist thugs who are the real source of power - terrorizing the Russian speaking peoples, as the hypocritical democratic state looks the other way. These Nazi thugs are the real basis of state power, without them, the state collapses, so they are not only tolerated, but officiated! Just as Hitler was promoted to chancellor with emergency powers to ‘save the German state.’
That’s always how Nazis were deployed by ‘liberal democracies’ in history. The US and CIA used to use them as mercenaries against communists in the cold war.
- And it is very interesting to know your opinion, as an American communist, about the regime that came to power in Kiev after Maidan? Again, I will share my Russian experience: back at the beginning of 2014 - and with the beginning of the UAS especially strong - there was a global split on the Ukrainian issue among Russian communists. Some of the pro-Western leftists, along with the liberals, are whitewashing the Kiev authorities in every possible way, either refusing to consider them fascist or directly equating them with the Russian authorities. The other part (to which my comrades and I belong), the patriotic part, is certain that an absolutely Nazi and Russophobe regime has come to power in Kiev, totally non-self-governing and subordinated to the interests of NATO. And it has one goal: to defeat Russia and - in the long term - to weaken China. What do you think about this?
- I whole heartedly agree with your analysis. It is identical to mine. I will add, I think it’s also a type of experiment, for something that will also be imported to ‘liberal democracies’ too, and the US. We are already heading in that direction, in my estimation.
- Is there any anti-war movement in the U.S. today that opposes the war in Ukraine and the provision of loans and arms to Ukraine? Do you and your comrades keep in touch with such movements in your country and in other countries?
- It’s funny, some are trying to build one. There was a ‘Rage Against War’ rally recently in Washington DC. What happened is, leftists immediately attacked it, because it included libertarian elements. It’s a sad, pathetic situation. These federally controlled leftists now want to hold their own ‘anti war’ rally on March 18th, with various stipulations, making sure they express no solidarity with the Russian peoples fighting fascism, making it as divisive as possible. They basically want to weaken all anti war sentiment.
Our ‘left’ is wholly responsible for the absence of the anti war movement. Because whenever one tries to appear, they are at the vanguard of smearing, defaming, attacking and wrecking it. They are utter scum.
- Do you or your comrades know or have friends who serve in the U.S. Armed Forces? If so, could you please tell us what their sentiments are? Are they ready for a dialogue with the Communists? What do they think about the many wars your country has fought and is fighting? Do you think it necessary to conduct propaganda among law-enforcement officers, policemen and soldiers? How do you approach them?
- Some of my viewers are soldiers. Soldiers are not always very ideological. And many have very anti-war sentiments. I think they are generally cynical of all official narratives. I think it’s necessary to conduct propaganda among soldiers, definitely. Among police I don’t really think so.
Soldiers are very skeptical and vigilant against the government in my experience. It’s easy to promote anti-government kinds of views among them. They can see first hand that the people pulling the strings don’t represent the sovereign interests of the United States as a country.
- I think no one today doubts the need to establish international relations between communists in different countries. Tell me, how should this work be done from your point of view? How should we strike a balance between patriotic sentiments and internationalism, so that the movement does not slip into isolationism on the one hand and cosmopolitanism on the other?
- We need to form concrete relations based on sharing our respective circumstances. Instead of creating a global community, we should root ourselves in our own communities, and establish relations between our respective national communities and circumstances. But most of all, we need to work together to combat the woke virus - the virus of American unipolar ideology. Fighting against, ideologically, the growing CIA sponsored ‘international left’ is top priority.
We should work together to fight globalism. But we should go further. We should have a genuine exchange of experience, perspectives, and even culture. These exchanges will not lead us away from our own people. On the contrary, they will teach us how to be closer to them.
- Do you think the modern communist movement in the world has a resource capable of seriously influencing the policies of the elites to stop the current conflict, and maybe even to make a socialist revolution somewhere? Assuming that a revolution today is possible, where would be the first place where it could happen, from your point of view?
- I don’t think it’s possible for us to influence their policies, though I could be wrong. The Russian situation is very different from ours in that respect: You are fighting against the entire West, who is waging a war of genocidal aggression to destroy you. So, to stop the conflict means stopping the West and NATO.
Socialist revolution will mean nothing if it is not rooted in a concrete contradiction of some kind. No revolution has been made based purely on ideology. Socialism must be something useful and unique in resolving the overall contradiction faced by a country. My advice to Russian Communists would be - you should be at the fore, and at the vanguard of the patriotic effort to repel the bestial forces of globalism, Western ideology, liberalism, and NATO - and that will earn Communists hegemony among the people.
And to wrap up the interview, I'd like to ask you some general questions:
- In your streams you often talk about global elites as a single entity, a more or less organized force that has a common plan for the future of humanity (if I understand you correctly. Correct me if I don't). For orthodox Marxists, this view may seem heretical: capitalists are in perpetual competition and under no circumstances capable of joining forces for any global projects. For orthodox Marxists, the idea of such a unification of the world's major capitalists is a conspiracy theory. Tell us, please, about your point of view on this question.
- The conspiracy is real, because of the law of monopoly and aggregation. Competition defines the early period of capitalism. But already as early as Lenin’s writing, competition between capitalists transformed into competition between countries. And after the world wars were finished, this culminated in the American unipolar system. That system is indeed undercut by one entity - the oligarchic cabal of financial institutions centered in the City of London and Wall Street. There is indeed a very real ruling class.
Capitalist competition has almost completely been destroyed. We are in the early stages of transition into a global socialist mode of production already. No major capitalist enterprises obeys any capitalistic economic laws any longer.
- If we accept that the globalist elites do have a plan, what do you think it is? What is their image of the future, and to what extent does it coincide with our communist future? For so many people, the very notion of progress means something positive a priori, regardless of who drives this progress and who controls the movement and the means to achieve the goal. From this point of view, what do you think of the initiatives being promoted under the guise of inevitable progress: artificial intelligence, robotics, transhumanist projects, the so-called fight against climate change? To what extent does all this now correspond to the interests of the class struggle?
- The plan is simple: Depopulation. Reducing the global population to one billion people. The Marxist analysis is simple: Capitalist competition used to be based on increasing production relative to other capitalists.
In the era of monopoly capitalism, competition is unprofitable. So the goal is to form a mutual pact to ‘de-grow.’ To shrink in size various portions of the economy, and to roll-back production. In a twisted way, this is the only way the economic system can be saved - by destroying its own material foundations, which are paradoxically a huge source of profit!
By destroying the productive forces more, profit margins can increase fictitiously, without any material investments at all. This is the only way the monopolies can maintain their stranglehold on society while simultaneously keeping the system alive: Through ‘degrowth.’ While the material economy undergoes ‘degrowth,’ the fictitious capital increases, increasing their social power, control, and profits.
This corresponds to the twisted, genocidal and Malthusian ideology the elites have: Because you cannot roll-back production without accounting for how it will kill off huge segments of the population. Depopulation and degrowth go hand in hand.
Quite simply, it is a war of extermination against humanity. They might envision a world of one billion people, harmoniously living with nature. It’s all a twisted pipe-dream. What matters is the nightmare that actually will come before then.
Interviewed by Matvey Korchagin.