The neoliberal era’s rise of pessimistic leftism, and the effort to replace it with revolutionary optimism

Something we should understand about the “red libs,” the “pan-leftists,” and today’s other sources of anti-Marxist deviations is that many or most of them don’t have mal-intent. Elements among them certainly do, as I’ve written about, but the bulk of the people who’ve been funneled into the pan-leftist tendency have gone down this path because of larger factors. Because the primary form that Marxism has taken during the last half-century—at least in the United States and the other imperialist countries—is a highly pessimistic one. And from this pessimism has come all the incorrect beliefs which red liberalism embraces: that the masses are fundamentally reactionary, that the new cold war is an “inter-imperialist” conflict, that armed service members should be reviled rather than recruited, and so on. It’s a mentality that’s come from how U.S. communism got crushed during the 20th century, and hasn’t yet recovered.

We saw the first types of these defeated reactions during the 1970s and 80s, when the communist movement was trying to regroup following the destruction of the old institutions for class struggle. McCarthyism had crippled communism, and left the CPUSA dominated by reformism. The FBI had succeeded at infiltrating the Black Panther Party and assassinating key members of it, leaving the Party defunct. Following the passage of the civil rights laws and the end of the draft, U.S. imperialism had reformed into something that was more stable than it had recently been, as evidenced by how 60s radicalism hadn’t carried over into a sustained mass mobilization. The imagined revolution had failed to materialize, in large part because the imperial state had been able to capture the spontaneous energy from the “New Left” and convert it into a weapon against communism.

There were some signs of continued hope, like Omali Yeshitela’s Uhuru organization (which Huey Newton described as being the carrier of the Panther legacy). For the most part, though, the ones in the United States who still wanted communism were not taking the kind of mass-centered path that Omali and his forebears represented. Instead they were retreating from mass struggles and anti-imperialist efforts, and thinking smaller than any successful revolutionary would. Bob Avakian saw the popular opposition towards communism that existed at the time, cultivated by the rise of the labor aristocracy in post-war America, and felt like his only option was to shrink back in this way.

When neoliberalism started to be implemented, and the Reaganites convinced the bulk of the white population to blame the following living standard decline on social liberalism, Avakian and people like him further came to feel like hope didn’t exist in the working class. As discussed in Caleb Maupin’s book Out of the Movement, To the Masses, upon going to a rock concert Avakian concluded that revolution would come not from the workers. He thought it would come from the kinds of disaffected youths he’d encountered there; the people who are probably not at a place in life to be attached to the means of production, but are feeling alienated from society and are finding comfort in hedonism. Attitudes like these ones were reinforced by Sakai’s Settlers, the 1980s polemic that argued the white workers overall weren’t ever going to come towards revolutionary consciousness even as inequality kept increasing. 

With the fall of the Soviet Union, and the related further weakening of communist formations around the globe, such bleak ways of thinking were further allowed to fill the void left by communism’s decline. It’s likely that during the moment of the USSR’s downfall, Trotskyism replaced Marxism-Leninism as the foremost global iteration of socialism, simply because Marxism-Leninism had become marginal in so many places.

Marxism-Leninism hadn’t really collapsed, though, because the destruction of communism throughout these places wasn’t due to any innate flaw within Marxist-Leninism itself. Marxism-Leninism is a science, one that its professed adherents can choose to either treat as a science or treat as a dogma. The USSR was destroyed because its leadership had discarded the lessons from Lenin and Stalin, opening the system up to being corrupted by liberalism. Likewise, the communist movement in the U.S. failed to recover from McCarthyism and COINTELPRO because its main sources of guidance had abandoned the old communist mentality. Because they had resorted to tailing the left, adopting the intelligence-promoted bourgeois critical theories which say Marxism isn’t really about class. 

Many of the obstacles these 20th century U.S. Marxists faced were beyond their control, but the way they reacted to these obstacles was what made communism stay marginal during the neoliberal era. They could have rallied the workers who were being left behind, but instead they stayed confined to their cultural bubbles in the college campuses and the upscale metropolitan areas.

The CIA-tied Frankfurt School successfully replaced class with identity throughout the main U.S. socialist spaces, incentivizing the socialists of this new era to neglect reaching the workers. Their impulse became to center the students and the middle class radical liberal youths, who are the most socially progressive and the ones most ideologically compatible with Sakai-type racial dogmatism. These ideas are perpetuated today by figures like Gerald Horne, who affirms liberal perceptions of the MAGA base to the effect of demoralizing those who wish to organize the workers. But this ailment which U.S. Marxism has been suffering from for so long, where developing socialists get conditioned to practice petty-bourgeois radicalism, can be ended. We can end it by looking at the places where revolutionary optimism persists, and has become more prominent since the bleakness of the 90s.

There are numerous countries where this rising new wave of hope can be found, because so much of the Global South is progressing rather than regressing in its anti-imperialist journey. Throughout the countries that have so far managed to break away from neo-colonialism and pursue their own development—China, Burkina Faso, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Venezuela, etc—the pessimism that dominates today’s U.S. Marxism is not the prevailing ideology. Anti-popular sentiments and left anti-communism aren’t able to gain a presence beyond certain societal elements, which are tied to the imperialist NGOs. 

The efforts by the enemy to demoralize the revolutionaries isn’t overall working in these countries. This is because the revolutionary-minded people in these places are able to connect to a project that’s actually effective; that’s proving itself to be capable of bringing prosperity. A crucial task of U.S. Marxists is to bring this mentality to the people here, which is why the Marxists in my tendency constantly talk about the hope found within the rising multipolar world. We need to make U.S. workers aware of the great things that are happening in the countries that their government tells them to hate.

A large amount of pan-leftists talk about the multipolar world too. But they undermine their own cause by reinforcing pessimistic attitudes about our domestic conditions, even though they recognize the hopeful developments abroad. They reject efforts to bring in the proto-revolutionary elements of society which exist outside the left, drawing an arbitrarily hard line where only socially progressive people are welcome in their coalitions. They reject efforts at taking advantage of the divisions within our ruling class, pretending that such divisions are trivial and not capable of weakening the imperial state. Many of them reject the idea of reaching the veterans and armed service members, based on the resentful attitude that anybody who’s signed up to fight for the empire must simply have a bad character. Even if they want to reach the broad masses in theory, their pessimistic dogmatism and investment in the left makes them opposed to this. 

This is the disconnect between how U.S. Marxists have been led by their conditions to think, and how the ones who are winning against imperialism think. The ones in the empire’s core see no reason for revolutionary optimism, while their foreign counterparts continue to hold the spirit that U.S. communism used to have. 

When I was a pan-leftist, I believed the way to bring U.S. communism out of its stagnation is by showing China’s achievements to developing radicals, bringing them out of the belief that the existing revolutionary projects aren’t “real socialism.” I was only half correct. Spreading knowledge of the existing socialist states is necessary not just because this convinces more people to become communists, but because it lets the Marxists here unlearn their pessimism. (That is if this information is communicated to them properly, and with more depth than how the pan-leftists talk about existing socialism.) 

Examining the character of these revolutionary projects shows why pessimistic leftism is not a winning mentality. These projects have come about through the same practices that the “red libs” reject: reaching into the masses beyond the left, building ties with military members, and making alliances with the lower-level capitalists (as Mao described he had done). We will apply this knowledge to our own class struggle, and we’ll do so regardless of how many of the pan-leftists come to this knowledge. The important thing is that we build cadres which can apply these lessons, and can thereby bring the people into our efforts.

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