(The following article brings together several chapters from Danny Shaw’s forthcoming book Social Death: The Fake Left, Identity Politics and Cancel Culture. Thank you to the comrades at Midwestern marx institute for teaching me so much)
As the 2024 presidential elections approach, should we — the vast majority, the 99 percent, the working-class voters — be more concerned with who is the lesser of two evils or who is the more effective of two evils? Do we want to solidify the genocide in Gaza, the decimation of the Middle East and the Western capitalist-imperialist project or hasten its demise? This article addresses how the Democrats remain politically hegemonic and use wokeness in similar ways to the purportedly anti-establishment “movement left” to shore up anti-class politics and reproduce the status quo. It is the conclusion of Red America that both parties of the dictatorship of capital are dangerous but that the Democratic Party represents the more effective danger.
This essay will then show how certain segments of the left have adopted the snake-in-the-grass politics of the Democrats, relying on hollow virtue-signaling, or identity politics and cancel culture, as our lives as workers plummet more every day. The NGO left, or the fake or compatible left — toeing the line of the liberals who exercise political and ideological hegemony in the West — promotes a brand of anti-dialectical identity politics blurring the line between the left and the liberals. Only a determined return to a class politics that can unite us instead of dividing us along the myriad lines of identity is a winning strategy for all of us who have been denied our slice of the American dream.

Snakes in the Grass
Italian historian Domenico Losurdo’s Liberalism: A Counter-History makes the argument that liberalism has long been the ruling class’s preferred ideology. Liberalism provides cover for brutal, colonial content with a glossy, “democratic,” enlightened form.. As one year plus of the Gaza genocide now expands into the West Bank and Lebanon, Haaretz and CNN can still publish headlines where they are the good guys and the native Arabs are the despotic “terrorists.” Liberalism allows the capitalist elite to devour markets, resources and surplus labor across the globe, all in the name of “human rights” and “humanitarianism.” In Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Frederick Engels cites Henri de Saint-Simon, the early French utopian socialist who “points out how everywhere [under capitalism] the most pitiful reality corresponds with the most most high-sounding phrases.” Social critic Chris Hedges examines the case of Libya and Western “humanitarian imperialism.” The colonial West invoked the R2P, Right to Protect, to justify their bombing, dismemberment and recolonization of what was at the time of the 2011 War on Libya the richest country in Africa. Though Losurdo stops his study at World War I, there are chapters yet to be written about liberalism as the preferred ideology of the imperialists a century later. Syria, Nicaragua, Russia and beyond are in the crosshairs of woke imperialism. In fact, every sovereign or semi-sovereign state fights an everyday battle against ever-intensifying imperialist encroachment. The woke agenda has become part and parcel of the cultural and ideological machinery of imperialism. It is but one front in hybrid wars waged on Global South states and their quest for true independence.
Liberalism allows the snakes in the grass to present themselves as polished and civilized. The Trump-supporting conservative today, while generally a dedicated mouthpiece of capitalism and imperialism, is characteristically not as refined and says what they really think. It is enough to remember Prime Minister Emmanuel Macron welcoming the U.S. “back as a cooperative leader of the free world” when Joe Biden was inaugurated president in 2020. The capitalist class always prefers bourgeois democracy, that is the semblance of democracy, to any form of proto-fascism which reveals its true nature. The sleek Barack Obama was the perfect antidote to the graceless George Bush Junior. I was in Western Africa in Cape Verde at the time Obama won and it felt like all of Africa was pregnant with hope that at last the United States had moved beyond imperialism because the son of a Kenyan was president. How wrong they were then. And how wrong identity politics is now. On Tuesday November 4th 2008, Barack Obama won the elections, and overnight our anti-war marches for Iraq and Afghanistan went from having millions involved across the country to hundreds. In Obama, the ruling class had found their antidote to class politics – identity politics. As Professor Christian Parenti and journalist Chris Hedges have shown us “Wokeness Kills Class Politics and Empowers Empire.”
Kamala the Fox
The essence of liberalism is to project the appearance of real change while ensuring that power remains concentrated in the same corporate elite hands. Liberalism is close-minded and non-dialectical at its core because it seeks to preserve the present order. It is the fox Malcolm X warned us about who still “ends up with the lambchop on his plate.” Malcolm went on to explain who liberals are at their core: “The Negro community is controlled by the white liberal who usually poses as the friend of the negro, who actually differs from the white conservative in the same way that the fox differs from the wolf. Their appetite is the same. Their motives are the same. It is only their mannerisms and methods that differ.”
Kamala Harris is representative of the foxes the Democratic Party establishment parades out in front of its faithful. Harris showed moral outrage during the September 10th presidential debate when Trump accused Haitians and other immigrants of streaming across the border and “eating dogs and cats.” What ABC and the rest of the legacy media ignored is the fact that as Trump spouts his customary ignorant xenophobia, the Biden-Harris administration is invading and occupying Haiti for the fourth time in the past century. Trump Derangement Syndrome is everywhere, preventing Democratic voters from seeing that Biden’s health has dramatically deteriorated since he first assumed office. The liberals can’t sleep at night because of how “disgusting” they see Trump as being, and indeed he, his worldview and politics are anti-worker. Meanwhile, the Democratic administration in power is paying the neoliberal Kenyan government of William Ruto $333 million dollars to send mercenaries to invade, occupy and keep Haiti subjugated as a neocolony, because they could not get U.S. public opinion behind another invasion using U.S. boots on the ground. This is but one example of how shallow, liberal moral outrage often masks far more dastardly and sophisticated crimes.
As political analyst Dr. Wilmer Leon discussed on his weekly show “Connecting the Dots,” the Democrats specialize in “opportunistic outrage and morality.” The liberal obsesses over and warns of Project 2025 as Project 2023 and 2024, aka Project Genocide, intensifies, as does the censorship and repression in the West to justify the forever wars against Palestine, the Middle East, China, Russia and any other country that does not cower before U.S. unipolar domination. Meanwhile at home, one in four of us does not have work. Our children and siblings are dying of overdoses at the highest rates humanity has ever seen. Inflation, artificial intelligence and automation continue to bulldoze over working class lives, sparking a strike by the 50,000-member-strong International Longshoremen’s Association.

High-and-Mighty Hillary’s Disdain for Workers
Let’s return to Hillary Clinton’s infamous “basket of deplorables” quote from the 2016 presidential campaign. At one of her fundraisers in New York City, where plates of food sold for $33,000, Clinton told us how she feels about tens of millions of Americans:
“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he [Trump] has lifted them up.”
The butcher of Libya and coup-monger of Honduras, and promotor of other foreign coups, has a right to sermonize us?
A faithful supporter of genocide, aka a Zionist, lectures us on Islamophobia?
Hillary Clinton thinks she is better than you and me. At Georgetown and Yale and throughout their careers, the Clintons mingled with the Bushes, Trumps and other ruling class figures. Liberals lecture about freeing Tibet, Hong Kong and Taiwan but what have they done for Houston, Cincinnati, and Brockton? “Freedom” in the (neo)liberal sense is the freedom of foxes to roam among chickens. All of the fancy, “globalist” (to use the Trumpian term, Marxists say imperialism) dogma seeks to “free” up any corner of the globe from Zimbabwe, to Bolivia to Vietnam, for further capitalist penetration.
What a disdainful view this career politician has of millions of our class peers.
Trump, a showman and hustler of the oligarchical sort, along with his advisors who are not far behind, are ingenious to call her “Crooked Hillary.” “Swamp,” “deep state,” and “Sleepy Joe” are sly, populist slang words that cut to the heart of liberal hypocrisy. No wonder my cousins talk about Trump like he is coming to their cul-de-sac in rural Manchester, New Hampshire to drink with them this weekend. He is their hero because he says what they feel. The problem is that this false prophet has tapped into their sincere anti-establishmentarianism with more racism, homophobia, xenophobia and misogyny designed to scapegoat and divide.
Sociology 101 teaches us that we are merely social creatures shaped by our social environment. No baby emerged from the womb saying “We’re gonna put watchtowers on the border with Mexico and put the mafia in them to shoot the Mexican illegals.” But this is exactly what we hear in Ohio and Indiana, and in “Trump Country” New York and Massachusetts. It is predictable. Study the means of communication. An uncritical populace consumes the media which manufactures consent. The nicest family man on earth sees his exploited neighbors to the south as “migrants” and “cockroaches,” as threats and as their enemy. Trump, the dog whistler, knows exactly what he is doing, and Democrats bring him tens of millions of voters on a tray.
Are the liberal-left, coastal elites just going to abandon “Trump Country” to our class enemies? Have we forgotten how to speak to our neighbors, teammates and coworkers and how to organize them through local struggles? Carlos Garrido’s book The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism was what first attracted this lifetime “leftist” to head (mid) west. I put the term “left” in quotations at various points of this essay because I no longer recognize certain parts or expressions of it. Garrido quips: “For these Marxists the traditional communist slogan is no longer “workers and oppressed people of the world unite,” it is “socially enlightened workers and oppressed people of the world unite.” He cites Lenin who reminds us: “one can and must begin to build socialism, not with abstract human material, or with human material specially prepared by us, but with the human material bequeathed to us by capitalism.” The cancel culture left has disgraced itself in the eyes of the masses of workers. If we cannot find common cause to organize with our “deplorable” sisters and brothers, why call ourselves Marxists? Calling ourselves charlatans, dilettantes and Clintonites would be more accurate.
There is a psychology chestnut or proverb that comes into play here; all obnoxiousness is a cry for help. Poor white people have as little control over the mainstream media, educational curriculum, family apparatus and religious institutions as do working-class black and brown people.
There are 12 LGBTQ billionaries in the world. There are 17 black billionaires in the world, mostly from Nigeria and the United States. There are 369 women billionaires in the world, almost all from the West or the colonizing countries. There are no poor white billionaires.
Trump is our enemy. “Trump Country” is not.
Trump the Wolf
Trump’s hateful rhetoric is not for liberals nor for us, the highly politically-literate, critical readers of this journal, , but rather it is for his base. Trump uses his billions to speak from a pulpit of class privilege to his voters, who are largely down-and-out, high-school-educated, working-class whites, and easy prey for his divisive, anti-worker scapegoating and conspiracy theories. Instead of correctly analyzing these class contradictions, liberalism in both its bourgeois and left iterations, has turned its back on the post-industrial working-class. “Trump Country” as the Midwest and other “deplorable” places are now often referred to, is nothing more than the inevitable product of neoliberal arrogance and economic neglect. These class contradictions, in both their bourgeois and petit-bourgeois manifestations, are partly what forces us to think of new forms of organization. The rejects, castaways and “deplorables” of liberalism and leftism demand their day in the sun too.
While Red America rejects the demagoguery and anti-poor worldview of the MAGA movement, on October 1st vice-presidential hopeful J.D. Vance said what has never been said on CBS news, a network owned by the billionaire, zionist Redstone family (originally the Rothsteins). Vance questioned Russiagate, the Democratic Party’s handling of COVID and the big-tech censorship that has stunted the active thinking of America. His opponent, Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota, a mouthpiece of liberalism who has paid his dues to rise up in the ranks, had no response to these points.
Liberals feel most comfortable wading in surface-level or symbolic politics, afraid to go deeper, less they inconvenience their consciences and lives. The more privileged classes will never see what is behind a Biden or Harris because it would impact their interests. How do we reach everyday Americans when they have been so thoroughly conditioned to think a certain way? The shadowbans, demonetization and algorithmic censorship around us tightens every day to make sure liberals and conservatives remain right where they are. It was the U.S. company Oracle and the House of Representatives that suspended hundreds of thousands of TikTok accounts for political content that was not favorable to empire. Any account today that critiques the U.S.-NATO proxy war against Russia and its geopolitical interests is being taken off social media. @DD_Geopolitics is one of the latest victims.
Though they hide behind their woke appearance, the Democratic Party today is the party of war and censorship. The GOP is by no means any less guilty, but this article addresses a fundamental question: are the Republicans as effective? This is not a personal slight against the millions of Americans who identify as liberals or conservatives, who are indeed the vast majority of us. These everyday “liberals” and conservatives,” including my family members, are good human beings on a personal level but are severely misinformed. Malcolm X reminded us: “Don’t be in a hurry to condemn [someone] because he doesn’t do what you do or think as you think or as fast. There was a time when you didn’t know what you know today.”
The More Effective Evil
This analysis is what led the late Executive Editor of Black Agenda Report, Glen Ford, to call Obama not the lesser of two evils, but “the more effective of two evils.” Ford wrote: “No matter how much evil Barack Obama actually accomplished during his presidency, people who call themselves leftists insist on dubbing him the Lesser Evil. Not only is Obama not given proper credit for out-evil-ing George Bush, domestically and internationally, but the First Black President is awarded positive grades for his intentions versus the presumed intentions of Republicans. This is psycho-babble, not analysis. No real Left would engage in it.”
The liberal is ensnared by individual oppression and loses sight of the big, anti-capitalist picture. They insist that we have no choice and “must vote for Kamala or you’re a fascist.” Without nuance and a dialectical understanding, liberal analysis ignores the creeping fascism that surrounds us everywhere.
Liberalism relies on the political mouthpieces they themselves have groomed. Trump is a clumsy, untrained loose cannon. In fact, this is his appeal. At times, he tells it exactly like it is. Trump told the world what we all knew but had never heard from the centers of power themselves: the war on Venezuela is nothing more than another war for oil. Imagine if other presidents told the truth in such a fashion? What impressionable young patriot would ever sign up for the U.S. military? The truth would throw into question the legitimacy of the entire system. Well-known and censored social media personality and organic intellectual Eddie Liger Smith explores the difference between Trump and a more polished, bewitching Obama who waged war on Honduras, Libya, Syria and beyond, but always claimed to do so in the name of democracy. Precisely because the national wrestling champion Smith and others of his generation reached millions with an anti-NATO and anti-genocide message, the ruling class has censored them.
Trump disobeyed the cardinal rules of bourgeois democracy and questioned the results and legitimacy of the system in 2020, throwing the entire system into crisis. His refusal to peacefully and diplomatically pass on power as the Obamas had done in 2017, when Trump and his wife Melania moved into the White House, is an example of how he is “unpresidential” from an elite perspective. Homelessness, unemployment and budget cuts are fair game for the capitalists, as are genocides, invasions and the squandering of hundreds of billions on foreign aggression. But being a sore loser and not accepting the results of the elections are a grave transgression. That is why both Walz and Vance have received strict instructions to pretend to be civil and nice to each other. Trump’s intransigence inspired the January 6th storming of Congress which as clumsy as it was could be analyzed as a type of coup attempt, albeit a pathetic one. Fox News declared Biden the winner in 2020 before any of the liberal outlets did. The ruling class was solidly united behind Biden, as the “Weekend-at-Bernie’s” puppet zombie they needed.
Trump marches to the beat of his own transactional drum. He pursues his own interests. The U.S.-NATO Proxy War on Russia is the heart and soul of the Biden-Harris White House’s foreign policy. The Kiel Institute for the World Economy tracks the total amount of military support the EU countries and the U.S. have sent to Ukraine which sits at about $100 billion dollars. Imagine Trump, with his bloated ego and opportunistic nature, daring to declare that he will end this proxy war on Russia before he is even elected president again. The two assassination attempts on his life have to be analyzed in this context. In fact the second would-be assassin admitted that “the Ukraine War,” that is the liberals’ propagandized version of the U.S.-NATO-Ukrainian ruling class war on Russia, motivated him to try to take out Trump. Trump would prefer to build 10 of his own hotels in Pyongyang and Moscow rather than see these handsome profits squandered in the coffers of the Military Industrial Complex. It is not that Trump is in any way morally superior to any other candidate, but rather that his style objectively clashes with the needs of the ruling class who are accustomed to grooming their own hand-selected politicians. This analysis has to be balanced with Trump’s threats against women reproductive rights, to deport masses of immigrants and to use the military to repress leftist protestors. Though Trump has a penchant for such bombastic statements and is often bluffing, every “minority” in the U.S. has a right to feel under the gun if Trump again wins the presidency.
America’s number one addiction is “The American Dream.” From an internationalist perspective, this mentality and ideology is called “American Exceptionalism.” To think that a Barack Obama or Kamala Harris became the CEO’s of the U.S. empire through simple hard work is the illusion the liberals feed us. Trump did not pay his dues and genuflect before the real power structure. Though a sleazy, real-estate mogul born with a silver spoon in his mouth, Trump did not work his way up through the traditional political circles. An economic insider, he became a political outsider. An economic swamp monster, he dared challenge the unchallengeable, the political swamp. His boldness and appearance of integrity calling out the fake, opportunist politicians struck a chord across working-class America. The actor and conman, elevated by self-interested TV networks, opportunistically usurped the voice of the common American and his life-long resentments against the ruling elites like Hillary and Bill Clinton. How can those whose life savings are roughly 500,000 times less than Trump, see in Trump their savior? (I arrived at this math by dividing Trump’s net worth, roughly $4,000,000,000 dollars by the median amount of savings American families have in their bank accounts which is $8,000.) Do any of us honestly think that Trump, Governor Burgum of North Dakota or Governor Pritzker of Illinois would ever sit down with us and actually feel any concern for our American problems? For so many of our class to embrace filthy rich billionaires, imagine how much we must hate the traditional politicians.
Trump is not a true leader; he is a huckster. A true leader, like Fidel Castro, Rafael Correa or Joseph Stalin, would have been there, no matter how right or wrong they were, in the trenches on January 6th. Trump sent his followers off to battle and went to play golf.
The Abandonment of the Working Class
The liberal left has abandoned so many of us to the detriment of class unity.
The pro-NAFTA, highly educated liberal intelligentsia mocked and canceled the poor whites of Appalachia and the opioid addicts of Fitchburg, MA, resulting in the MAGA insurrection among “the deplorables” that the liberal establishment now excoriates. Though I am 100 percent east coast, I identified with the rest of the castaways and threw my lot in with the deplorables of the Midwest and the rest of the U.S. This was what brought me (mid)west to work for one year and a half with the Midwestern Marx Institute. Large swaths of the left throw away the baby with the bathwater, ignoring the popular, anti-capitalist rage contained within the MAGA base. It is into this void that the MMI seeks to strategically place itself to absorb this righteous anger and channel it against the system. While we could never embrace MAGA politics, we refuse to condemn and turn our backs on MAGA’s base, millions of Americans who thrive for economic equality and justice.
Where else can we “deplorables” turn, if the woke left thinks they are better than us? How do we push back against the spectrum of liberal leftists who they felt were playing right into the hands of the Scapegoater and Demagogue in Chief? Who aspires to replace the Misguider-in-Chief? Effectively cashing in on the social alienation that so many working-class voters feel, Trump and his pro-billionaire politics cannot concretely resolve any of our people’s needs or demands, in 2028 or whenever, the pendulum will swing back to the liberal wing of the ruling class who will then cash in on Trump’s failures. How do we get our people off the merry-go-round of the two parties of capital? Keenly aware of the dead-end nature of both wings of the ruling class, we seek to reroute the popular frustrations and rage towards an effective struggle to bury liberalism, capitalism and all its billionaires once and for all.
The Left-Liberal Slippery Slope and its Slovens
It is important that we understand our number one enemy through and through. It is the opinion of Red America that both Trump and Kamala are bad for the working man and woman of the United States but that liberalism is our greatest threat because it lulls us deeper to sleep. The wolf remains outside of our circles, distant and recognizable, but the fox is crafty and able to infiltrate in beguiling ways. This essay will now concern itself with what happens when this devious enemy and its ideological expressions have seeped into “the movement.” As a 30-year veteran of “the left,” I no longer recognize a movement I helped build beginning in the 1990’s. Nonprofits, Gender Identity Politics and cancel culture are three 21st century pillars of a new liberalism that is eating the left from within.
Never did I think the day would arrive when the left had more in common with the Kamalas and Hillaries and turned its back on the average working man and woman. This is what fuels the right-wing media’s ability to pigeonhole and manipulate the movement. Despite the offensive nature of the comments, it is important to understand the perception of millions of American workers who now see the left as “nothing more than blue-haired, matcha-latte drinking college students and privileged bubble boys who want to be women.” MMI founder Carlos Garrido takes on the need for an authentic change in our organizing culture in Why We Need American Marxism, a must read for anyone in “the movement” who knows our salvation does not lie in Havana but in Harlan County, Kentucky and not in Caracas but in Cleveland, Ohio. How we wrest this movement back from the identity-obsessed, nonprofit foundations and alien liberal cancel culture is a question American Marxists can no longer delay.
The Trillion Dollar Nonprofit Noose
Fredrik DeBoer’s How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement takes on the burning question of “why so much of the political energy in this country gets diverted into affective and symbolic issues.” The former University of Rhode Island student organizer offers an overview of the George Floyd and Occupy organizing moments which mobilized millions but effected few if any real changes. DeBoer’s new book addresses why “then, very little happened.” DeBoer’s thesis is that “elite capture” wrested control over our movement.
His fourth chapter “The Non-Profit Industrial Complex” (NPIC) builds on a necessary read The Revolution will not be Funded. DeBoer dissects the deleterious effect that nonprofits have on organizing. Nonprofits grew out of the deregulation of the 1970’s and Reaganomics of the 1980’s which gutted the public sector. There are five main points the social critic raises:
- Nonprofits siphon off revolutionary talent and channel it in a reformist direction. In the author’s words, “It’s the nature of nonprofits to take radicals and make them bureaucrats.” Quoting the National Association of Nonprofit Organizations and Executives, the author reminds us that “a successful nonprofit knows that their #1 Customer is their donors, period.” An adverse class oversees our social prerogatives, budgets and tactics. If we speak up too loudly about serving the people, we risk our jobs and grants. A high, undisclosed percentage of money goes to the maintenance and bureaucracy of an estimated 1.5 million nonprofits. A lower percentage of donations actually reach the “targets” or “shareholders,” to use nonprofit doublespeak.
- As the nonprofit Common Dreams explains, or admits, “the purpose of the nonprofit sector writ large is not to solve social problems—it is to perpetuate them.” If the grant writers, Board of Directors or Executive Directors were to admit a problem was solved, though this is materially impossible under capitalism, how would they continue to justify the financing of their jobs? It is in their interest to only superficially address the opioid pandemic, the random shootings crisis or domestic violence. These problems are intrinsic to capitalism. Band-aid liberal solutions do not touch the underlying causes of social crisis. This is by definition. Nonprofits exist as tax havens for the rich, not as genuine instruments of working-class power. The women-owned executive search firm Battalia Winston asserts that 87 percent of nonprofit execs were white as of 2017. “Whiteness” is not just a racial measure in the United States; it is also a class measure. The bourgeoisie has captured the nonprofit world. There are more “member-led” grassroots groups who are ignored by the foundations precisely because they pursue social objectives independent of the NPIC.
The $1 Trillion NGO Republic
As of 2019, the Urban Institute’s National Center for Charitable Statistics documented 1.5 million nonprofits in the U.S. registered with the Internal Revenue Services (IRS). These nonprofits spent a combined $1 trillion dollars, which DeBoer calculates as 5.5 percent of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product. The Non-Profit Industrial Complex employs more Americans “in terms of wages than finance, retail and food service.” Beginning circa 1973, neoliberalism reduced the number of unionized jobs, displaced many of the social services and other work done by this sector and rolled back, took back and cut back the safety net of welfare capitalism. The result was the proliferation of the non-profit sector which became the main site for social services and community organizing. This replaced a proud proletarian history of independent organizing, such as the Communist Party of the United States of America (the CPUSA) in the 1930’s and the Black Panthers and Rainbow Coalition of the late 60’s.
Parenti exposes the Professional Managerial Class (PMC) “tasked with managing a hierarchy, and protected by new [woke] armor in a Hobbsian war of all against all for posts and material incentives.” As organizers, are we aware of the disproportionate influence these professional activists have, backed by astronomical amounts of money? Contrast this with the resources that we have as everyday working-class volunteers. The liberal wing of the establishment uses their PMC agents to set agendas and priorities, and most importantly keep us divided into subcultures at war with one another.
The organizer and author DeBoer distrusts this “activist culture.” In balanced writing, overly fair to liberals, showing some of his own liberalism (he was published by Simon and Schuster after all), he denounces that “expressions are often the ends themselves. Canceling, or making critiques or accusations with the intent of provoking widespread personal and professional shunning, is an example of where the political action stops at the level of expression. ‘MeTooing’ proved to be perhaps the most powerful version of canceling, and individual targets have had their public personae effectively vaporized.” For Harvey Weinstein and R. Kelly this makes sense. What about everyday men who knew patriarchy but never knew Hollywood? Did losing their jobs, social media or reputation help them transcend their mistakes? Are people traumatized from living in this dehumanizing society acting out their traumas on people who look like their enemies? How can comrades and fellow travelers be held accountable without forgetting that they are human? Who is measuring this? Nonprofits who receive money according to their “Transformative Justice” (TJ) and “Restorative Justice” (RJ) results?
Is the point to isolate us into more acting out or to grow in community? Cancel culture isolates and atomizes; Marxist dialectical culture creates community and a way back.
Noah Khrachvik, Organizing Director of the Midwestern Marx Institute (MMI), levels the same criticisms against what he calls “the activist brain.” The Cleveland-based carpenter and Marxist theorist and teacher challenges the students of the Institute, posing necessary questions: Are we seeking to please the hundreds of us in online or in-person organizing circles or win over the tens of millions who do not know about, much less relate to, these small circles? Khrachvik calls them out in a forthcoming piece from the Journal of American Social Sciences called “Against the Fake Left.” Many at the MMI consider themselves as refugees, rejects and survivors of the left, more than traditional activists. It was precisely the liberal-left slope evaluated here that pushed us away. When we sought to work with the established left, they dismissed us as “Pat Socs” and “Nazbols.” In doing so, this fake, petty bourgeois left has shown their aversion to dialectics and their absolute disdain for us and everyday, humble Americans seeking to survive, fight back and win.
It is interesting to note that U.S. capitalist hegemony exercises the same strategy globally. If New York City and Los Angeles, as command posts of neoliberalism, are Republics of Nonprofits, how has the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) converted countries like Haiti and Ukraine into Republics of Western NGOs? The Foreign Policy Establishment, through mouthpieces like CNN and the New York Times, attacked Vladimir Putin as anti-democratic, anti-gay and anti-women. The most undemocratic institution in the history of humanity — the U.S. Military Industrial Complex — determines who is a dictator and who is a democrat? Woke politics keeps the flow of our tax dollars into the war chests. By learning about international struggles, we can more easily recognize the tentacles that suffocate us at home.
The term “deep state” is understood to be a MAGA term. DeBoer asks, is this phalanx of nonprofits not an example of “the deep state?” From a Marxist view, the term deep state is redundant. The state are specially armed bodies of men tasked with protecting and reproducing property relations. Whether “deep” or highly public, whether armed with guns, batons or endless deep, nonprofit pockets, the state exists to keep us in our place. While it is easier to see the police’s role, can we see how nonprofits and NGOs form part of the ruling state machinery? What anti-establishment roles can well-intentioned “lefties” play within nonprofits that have a base of oppressed people in neglected communities? Perhaps we should ask the 171 million people of Bangladesh where the U.S. government-funded “International Republican Institute trained an army of activists including rappers and LGBTQI people, even hosting transgender dance performances, to achieve a national ‘power shift.’”
“I Mistrust Sex Theories”
The German revolutionary leader Clara Zetkin sat down in Lenin’s study in the Kremlin to discuss women’s liberation in 1920. There is a reason the bourgeoisie spends so much time maligning and spreading misinformation about Lenin, the definitive leader of the Russian Revolution. The mentor of Trotsky, Stalin and two generations of Bolsheviks was crystal clear on questions of sex and sexual identity in the communist movement: “I mistrust sex theories expounded in articles, treatises, pamphlets, etc. in short, the theories dealt with in that specific literature which sprouts so luxuriantly on the dung heap of bourgeois society. I mistrust those who are always absorbed in the sex problems, the way an Indian saint is absorbed In the contemplation of his navel.”
What is the leader of arguably the most important event of the 20th century, the Russian Revolution, telling us? Stay focused on the class struggle. The gender-obsessed cottage industry of nonprofits, like that of “white privilege,” is by design. It divides us. It castrates the unity and strength of the movement. It directs all the attention towards identity politics and away from class struggle.
As CPUSA leaders Claudia Jones and William Foster, and Comintern leader Georgi Dimitrov and so many others lay out, “Marxist-Leninists fight to free woman of household drudgery, they fight to win equality for women in all spheres; they recognize that one cannot adequately deal with the woman question or win women for progressive participation unless one takes up the special problems, needs and aspirations of women – as women.” Red America is not critiquing honest attempts to defend proletarian women and their class interests but rather liberal outsiders who use this rhetoric to divide our class along identity fault lines. Women and the queer community have every right to justice, in every realm of their lives. And queer activists are not all “man haters,” as the right alleges. But the question stands for some who have not done their own healing but are on the front lines of “healing” others: does hating, punishing and isolating men or whites or any relatively socially-privileged group of our class bring women and the LGBTQ community justice? Who is the main enemy? Why are we attacking other people who are victims and organic opponents of the same system? What makes the entire “gay community” a community? A shared sexual orientation towards the same sex unites gay billionaires with gay homeless people? Giving up on any of our people is not an option. We sink together or we rise together. Which do you choose?
Now you know why the PMC hates Lenin. He was the chief theoretical force behind the emergence of millions of human beings from desperate prehistory into the realm of freedom. The PMC doesn’t want liberation; they want pronouns, promotions and profits. Pats on the back and more grants from important white, liberal donors are the PMC’s “revolution.” Toeing the line, these nonprofits that come out of the movement against police brutality (which became known as Black Lives Matter in 2014) and the queer movement are unthinking, proponents of Washington counter-revolutions from Kiev to Managua. This does not take away from the rank and file of member-led nonprofits who fight the system with everything they have; the critique is of the well-paid PMC agents who misguide the members.
Divide et Impera
Censored and fired doctor, Ranjeet Brar, puts the Gender Identity Politics phenomenon into the colonial continuum of capitalist ploys to divide and conquer the toiling classes. The labor organizer and his party The Communist Party of Great Britain sees these manifestations of Gender Identity Politics as “ultra-individualism” which “plays such a disorganising and reactionary role.” For courageous ideological and organizational stances, Brar and his party have endured attacks from all quarters on the slippery slope of the liberal left.
The term Gender Identity Politics refers to the liberal mainstream media’s obsession today with pronouns, “gender identity” and the entire edifice that has become known as the “Trans movement.” While this is a principled critique of the liberal capturing of “the left,” it is important to recognize how women, gay and trans comrades stood up to confront the racism, sexism and homophobia that plagued the movement itself. This analysis is not anti-people; it is anti-systemic.
It is of no concern to the communist, what any individual does with their body. What is of concern to the communist are petit-bourgeois theories and fads, what the right often calls “the transgender or activist agenda,” that infiltrate the thinking and everyday lives of our class. Today, how many “left” or “movement” spaces are in fact anti-working-class?
The very same legacy news cycle that ignores labor struggles whips up hysteria about setbacks and advances for different subsets of the gay community. A school curriculum that ignores the truth about U.S. foreign policy now has special focus on what they frame as our ability or right to change our genders. This is not an attack on any individual and their personal expression which is everyone’s inalienable right. It is a sociological evaluation which seeks to unearth the sources of the divisions and backbiting that characterize the left today. This new phase of gender politics is a priority of liberalism. It has a definitive ideological function. Making this connection does not seek to deny anybody their sexual freedom, but rather contextualize this new social phenomena.
Parenti reminds us that the Founding Fathers were the original proponents of Identity Politics. In the Federalist Papers No. 10, James Madison replies to the ruling class fear that the constitution was over-empowering the dispossessed masses who made the 1776 American Revolution (for more on the protagonist of our ancestors see Herbert Aptheker’s The American Revolution 1763-1783). A proponent of divide et impera (divide and conquer), the slave owner and aristocrat Madison had a surefire way to keep the propertyless from coming together to fight. He sought to divide the biggest faction, the have-nots, into subgroups or “factions” in order to obscure who the enemy is. The factionalism parachuted down between the rural and urban, black and white and different trades were the identity politics of that era.
In 1890, Frederick Engels wrote: “According to the materialistic conception of history, the production and reproduction of real life constitutes in the last instance the determining factor of history.” What this means is the bourgeoisie consistently does everything in its power to reproduce social relations under its continuing control. Engels and Marx understood that every social phenomenon was perfectly explicable because they were rooted in the ruling class’s domination of its rival class, the working class. Translated to 2024, nothing around is coincidental. Think of any social phenomenon — alcoholism, gangs, segregation, high-school, dropout rates, single parent homes or any others. Taken as isolated facts, they are difficult to understand. But as we unpack what factors caused them to inevitably occur, we shed light on the dialectical reality that what can be done, can also be undone. Nothing is inevitable. Nothing is eternal.
The elites through mass media and social media have set workers and society against one another over secondary and tertiary contradictions. One worker hates another because one side sees the other as “transphobes” and the other hollers back “Go get a job you lazy, America-hating hippie liberals.” Lost in algorithm-fueled aggression are the central questions that plague society, mainly that eight individual billionaires now possess more wealth than half the planet. What appears to so many in the left of New York City or Los Angeles to be a life-and-death issue is the best of distractions from the issue leading to all of our annihilation, a small clique of billionaires who are burning the planet to the ground.
Canceled by the PMC
PMC is a term that writers Barbara and John Ehrenreich coined in 1977 in an essay for Radical America. They were searching for a term to describe “activists” or “salaried mental workers” who came from privilege and had managerial ambitions. Dissent author Alex Press defines the “Professional-managerial class” (PMC), as technocratic liberals, or wealthier Democratic primary voters, or the median Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) member.” POC stands for “People of Color.” Black and brown communities or oppressed nationalities are another way of saying POC. We communists seek to unite all workers to fight against the common enemy while not denying for a second the history of white supremacy and xenophobia in the U.S. Is the goal to unite workers or further fragment them? Do the white and POC PMC seek liberty for all or chairs closer to the capitalist masters’ table?
The communists don’t want to cancel the MAGA workers conditioned to be racists from birth; we seek to cancel and rebuild the society that creates them. Chris Hedges’ article “Cancel Culture, Where Liberalism Goes to Die” makes the point that over 50 percent of the protestors who attacked the capital on January 6th were in desperate financial straits. His point is that within that multitude, there are good people who want to fight the very enemy with whom this very essay is concerned. But our people do not know how. Do we have the luxury of turning our backs on this complex and stratified group of people and scoffing at them as CNN and the Washington Post have done every day since January 6th 2021, and long before?
We should study cancel culture empirically. What impact have all the movement suspensions, expulsions and cancellations had? Have comrades from more stable class backgrounds been subjected to cancel campaigns? Who has bounced back and rejoined the left? Who went a different direction in life feeling like they left behind a cult? What are the racial, gender and class dynamics of cancel culture? Who is canceling who? Have comrades come back stronger, more sensitive and more committed, meaning as better revolutionaries? Because if that is not our goal, what is?
Is it even their goal?
PMC “leaders” want to maintain top-down, corporate organizational structures, opposed to collective, critical thinking. To reference my own personal experiences, I have repeatedly received letters and commands isolating and suspending me from the movement since 1996. They read like they were written by the Human Resources departments of a Fortune 500 company. And indeed, they have been. 95% of Fortune 500 companies now invest in lawyers and Human Resource and Diversity Equity Inclusion (DEI) infrastructure to avoid expensive lawsuits over discrimination. The merger of capitalism and hollow DEI initiatives is what gave birth to Ibram X. Kendi and Boston University’s Center for Anti-Racist Research. The liberal establishment poured tens of millions of dollars into such projects as tens of thousands of families down the street in Dorchester and Roxbury live below the poverty line. This well-trained cadre of experts are able to become millionaires, as long as their concern remains with “etiquette and aesthetics,” to again cite Parenti.
In a legal sense, their attitudes and “official” correspondence smack of bourgeois contractualism. The PMC agents are more concerned with walking a tightrope around legality than building an actual unifying movement. People can now be kicked out of small Palestine solidarity organizing groups if they make someone else feel “uncomfortable.” Liberal bullying of others ensures that the bureaucrats stay on top. Identity politics and abstract talk about “structures of power” which focus exclusively on race, gender and sexual orientation is a convenient way to deflect from liberals’ own class origins and interests. Identity Politics is their petit bourgeois shield to make sure they never have to give up their own sinecures and access to power.
This offers the Non-Profit Industrial Complex many “victories” to stand on. These are “victories” that include the disposing of revolutionaries, “victories” that keep the NGO complex going because it funds their machinery and “victories” that fragment our movement.
True dialectical leadership and dialogue potentially exposes an organization’s shortcomings, forcing a new understanding, a resynthesizing or an ascension to a new concrete. A true reckoning with the class dynamics of cancel cultures forces all of us to grow but liberal wreckers and cancellers only seek to grow their egos, power and savings accounts.
Cancel Culture: Appearance versus Reality
Anarchist AK Press’s Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement reads as an authoritative work on community strategies to keep everyone safe. It is nearly impossible to find anything objectionable in the eloquent words of the dozens of contributors and practitioners of this work. There is no intention of taking anything away from honest individuals who work with these collectives. In anticipation of the critics, trapped in their own “safe spaces” and liberal silos, who may refuse to engage with this work, no conclusions are ever black or white, that is cut or dry. They are dialectical. Even in the most well-funded liberal bastions of identity politics, there are kernels of truth. For example, no Marxist could deny that there is a history of hate crimes and murders of people because their sexual orientation is not the dominant societal one. Nor could we deny that there is a history of sexism that has hurt social movements. Discipline is a must; cancel culture is petit bourgeois.
For Ejeris Dixon and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha the editors of Beyond Survival, the easy part is filling the pages with beautiful words and concepts; the challenging part is how to apply it in real time and real life. My own experiences and research confirm how some of the organizations and individuals who put this anthology together betrayed their very own creeds. Regardless, of my prefaces and disclaimers these liberal forces will continue to dox, bully and cancel us. They have to. That is their job under neoliberal capitalism. In fact, they already have. Too many times to count. Now, how can they accuse the accused, dox the doxed, or cancel the canceled? Most of us who have these critiques have already been threatened and marginalized and are on the outside of the movement. What do we have to lose at this point?
In a chapter entitled “Beyond Firing: How do we Create Community Accountability for Sexual Harassment in our Movements,” Amanda Aguilar Shank offers the compelling, feel-good-story of Francisco. Francisco worked at Voz Hispana (Hispanic Voice). He had a track record of stalking, intimidating and forcing himself onto women colleagues. Dozens of women avoided him while many others fell victim to his aggression.
Aguilar Shank walks the reader through the process of isolating Francisco from the movement. Francisco was a veteran of the Salvadoran resistance to the 1980’s U.S. Wars of Aggression against Central America. In his combat experience, the former FMLN guerrilla saw murders and massacres perpetrated by U.S.-trained and funded Contras. He had flashbacks of military intelligence officer Major Roberto D’Aubuisson and the other CIA-trained torturers who murdered an estimated 50,000 Salvadoreans to ensure that El Salvador remained part of the U.S.’s neocolonial backyard. In Franscisco’s case, we can observe a basic law of psychology, trauma and capitalism. The terrorized terrorize their comrades. The traumatized traumatize their coworkers. The denigrated denigrate their colleagues.
Ultimately, according to Aguilar Shank, Francisco did the work, was rehabilitated and rejoined the movement, making amends for the damage he caused. This was a tremendous tale. How motivating that someone misogynistic, sick and suffering had reinvented himself. There was only one problem with this happy-ending story. It did not line up with the reality of “the movement.” I have no way of confirming or debunking Aguilar Shank’s account and in theory her account deserves much praise. It was the right way to deal with an abuser and survivor like Francisco. However, neither myself nor any of the other survivors of cancel culture I work with knew of this particular case. The happy-ending blueprints Beyond Survival lays out is not how so many of us have experienced these nonprofits and their cancel culture. We have rarely seen these types of successful results in the world of “transformative justice.” We have a liberal left before us where TJ and RJ are preached by many and practiced by few. In dozens upon dozens of cases I’ve experienced or observed, the PMC’s preferred weapons are isolation and whispering campaigns. None of this is considered by Dixon and Piepzna-Samarasinha, two pop stars of the nonprofit industry.
While the fairytales of woke triumphs dominate their worldview, it is foolhardy for revolutionaries to ignore the reality on the ground. The triumph of wokeism sounds the death knell of Marxism. “The left” has become obsessed with finding purity in their ideology and methods. This was exactly what the ruling class foresaw and adapted to. Liberal foundations have armed and funded sections of “the movement” to do their dirty work for them.
“The Progressives” and their Distorted Sense of Progress
Malcolm made it plain yet again: “I will never say progress is being made. If you stick a knife in my back 9 inches and pull it out 6 inches, there’s no progress. If you pull it all the way out, that’s not progress. The progress is healing the wound that the blow made. And they won’t even admit the knife is there.” This quote applies to all our struggles from Gaza to Greensboro, Beirut to Asheville. The reformist left has led us astray.
Parenti’s work outlines the exploiting class’s many underhanded moves to subvert the growth of class consciousness. He begins with the post-WWII Taft-Hartley Law which banned solidarity strikes when unions wanted to stand with one another, the Congress of Industrial Organizations’s (CIO) purging of Marxists and the Smith Act which enabled the government to hunt down communists as criminals. After undermining class politics, they swooped in with foundations to build a compatible left. Karen Ferguson’s Top Down: The Ford Foundation, Black Power, and the Reinvention of Racial Liberalism tracks “the white liberal effort to reforge a national consensus on race which had the effect of remaking racial liberalism from the top down—a domestication of black power ideology that still flourishes in current racial politics.” The $16-billion Ford Foundation built its own “black movement” which was a cheap mimicry of Malcolm’s fledgling Organization of Afro-American Unity and the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. The owning class’s entire focus was on race, black Nationalism and the co-optation of leadership and discourse to elevate divisive, race politics over class politics.
The former German parliamentary leader of the social democratic party Die Linke (The Left), Sahra Wagenknecht wrote the book The Self-Righteous: My counterprogram – for Social Cohesion and the Public Good. She critiques the German left who she sees as having abandoned workers to live in their own holier-than-thou, pharisaic bubbles. She sees the two key features of “left-liberals” as “having extreme intolerance towards anyone who does not share their view of things and fighting for quotas and diversity, i.e. for the unequal treatment of different groups.” She quotes a summer 2020 letter by 153 intellectuals from different countries, including Noam Chomsky and J. K. Rowling: “The free exchange of information and ideas … is becoming more restricted by the day. While we expect this from the radical right, an atmosphere of censorship is also spreading in our culture.” With concern they see “Intolerance of dissent, public denunciation and ostracism and the tendency to turn complex political issues into moral certainties. We are paying a high price, in that writers, artists and journalists no longer risk saying anything because they fear for their livelihoods as soon as they deviate from the consensus and do not howl with the wolves.”
As promised prominently on their website, the Sparkplug foundation which has total assets of $7.07 million awards grants to “Black, Indigenous, People of Color, people with disabilities, women, lesbian, gay, bisexual, pansexual, transgender, queer and other queer-identifying communities, organizations or organizers.” What unites everyone of these identity-based groups? They focus on specific tiny, ever-fragmented and shrinking demographics. The Sparkplug foundation embraces every shade of gender identity and sexual orientation and rejects every communist. Follow the money and we can learn to what extent the state has its hand in the cookie jar of the merry-go-round of sectarian protests across the U.S. Having marched hundreds of times with every expression of the left for three decades, I do not speak from a place of bitterness, but rather one of recognizing the class character of “our movement” today. To not do so, would be a disservice to the only struggle we can all be loyal to, the class struggle. Only along class lines can we unite the struggle to free everyone who is oppressed because of their race, sex or sexual orientation. Identity politics diverts us into liberal deadends. Class politics are the mighty tidal waves of internationalism the Bolsheviks of 1804 and the Haitians of 1917 rode all the way to power.
Different groups in the movement to stop the genocide in Palestine are at war with one another. If anyone raises questions about disunity in a time of genocide, they are shut down. The irony is that almost all of these groups receive money from foundations that push a divisive, anti-dialectical agenda.
Who would have thought that censorship, intolerance and repression would end up flowing from the woke liberal mobs and their social media shock troops? “A left” conditioned to think of the MAGA base or “the right” as the enemy cannot see the anti-proletarian, anti-dialectical hogwash in our midst because it masquerades as “progressive.” Every day the holocaust in Gaza progresses, while they consider themselves more “progressive.”
“We Don’t Believe in Isolation, Just Don’t Come Around Us or the Movement”
The above quote captures how the liberal left talks left but walks right.
The gurus themselves Adrienne Maree Brown, Ejeris Dixon and others are but a few of the superstars of the LGBTQ non-profit movement. It is a must to follow the money to locate what class forces support their stardom. If Beyond Survival’s approach is truly part of dismantling this system, why would so many liberal foundations embrace it so wholeheartedly? What is missing is class analysis.
This impassioned, 10-chapter collaboration serves as a manual of sorts but where are the testimonies of those charged with harm who came out on the other end as better comrades? Who was not banished into spiritual Siberia, forever judged as a bad person? One of the most important things we can lead with as Marxists is that we never give up on our people. No matter how down and out and traumatized one may be there is a way forward.
Brown themself speaks for many of us when they critique the call-out culture many of us have succumbed to and participate in. Who can deny the dopamine hit from seeing a high-profile “as*h*ole” get outed in front of the world? They ask if it is “transformative justice when we are throwing knives and insults, exposing each other’s worst mistakes, reducing each other to moments of failure.” Those who consider the words of the PMC hypocritical are correct. It is this author’s contention that through a dialectical lens there are kernels of truth we can rescue from these petit bourgeois politics.
Brown’s provocative question, “Is it possible we will call each other out until there’s no one left beside us?” reminded me of the poetic reflection inspired by the anti-Nazi, German, Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller: “First They Came:”
“First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me”
While a comparison to the Nazi war machine is overblown, the question persists: Where is the woke left leading us?
First they came to cancel the white comrades
because they were taking up too much space.
Then they came to cancel the men
because they made us uncomfortable.
Then they came to cancel those over 35
because they were using the wrong words.
Next we came to cancel the heterosexual people
because they could not relate to our terminally-unique oppression.
Then we canceled ourselves
and there was no one left to speak for us.
Marxists Never Give Up On the Masses: Towards Dialectical Justice
Isolation or Social Death is not how we will treat our sisters and brothers in the class struggle. We will not give up on our fellow Americans and class sisters and brothers because of the hegemony of the Democrats and their left-liberal allies.
At this juncture, “Restorative Justice” and “Transformative Justice” are empty buzzwords and paradigms that have been thoroughly maligned and hijacked by the nonprofit world. These cliches have been used to purge the working-class movement of the poor and the impure. Objective necessity demands a new approach.
Dialectical Justice creates space for conflict and contradictions to exist without encouraging us to vilify, exclude and cancel one another. It admits that organizing the schools of communism Lenin helped theorize and build will necessarily involve finite steps back to take infinite steps forward. I use the term “Dialectical Justice” to differentiate the Marxist or class-struggle approach to ensuring there is justice, discipline and equality in our organizing ranks. While Dialectical Justice will surely never be a Department of Education or academic buzzword, it captures the spirit of the collective healing process a truly revolutionary movement deserves. What unites these other groups who have got it wrong is the class reality that petit bourgeois politics were in command. We can do better when our parties and organizations are not infiltrated and dominated by class interests alien to our own.
Why are the liberals only interested in identities and feelings? Because that is where they can hide. Dialectical logic and growth, which Mao Zedong and the Chinese leadership referred to as “Unity, Struggle, Unity,” exposes the deadend that is liberal identity politics. If we cannot overcome this liberalism, we will continue to cannibalize ourselves. Dialectics is the real movement of history. If you are looking to join a fighting organization, search for one who doesn’t just talk the talk, but walks the walk.
Marxists have a dialectical sense of justice and see the folly and hand of the capitalists in the infantile Cancel Culture. It will be important to further elaborate on these concepts, first through practice, then through theoretical summations. The best way to critique the snakes in the grass in the Democratic Party and the liberal left is to build the dialectical pole of justice.
MMI founder Eddie Liger-Smith said it best at the conclusion of the Free America to Free Palestine conference in Dearborn, Michigan in May of 2024: “And for those people who do nothing but deride, attack and smear us, guess what, the door will always be open. We’ll be here building when you get over your purity fetish and you come and decide to help us change this social system into one that actually serves the people!”
Join us! We won’t betray you. We won’t turn our back on you. We won’t cancel you. Because we never have. We are the Congress of the Canceled and the Convention of the Condemned. Without over-glorifying the task before us, we see the potential in everybody. Materialist philosophy teaches us that what can be done, can be undone. We can combat and transcend centuries of indoctrination, disunity and underdevelopment and free America and the world once and for all.
(Some of us in the Midwestern Marx Institute were forced to go our separate ways once Eddie, Noah and Carlos fell under the sway of Kyle Pettis and Ali “Haz” Hammoud. Nonetheless, I will forever be grateful for what I learned from my comrades in Cleveland, Carbondale, Dubuque and beyond.)