Chapter 4: The Dialectic Is What Gives A Marxist Their Power: It Surrounds Us, Penetrates Us, Binds The Galaxy Together: Part IV

Why anarcho-mallgoths call Stalin a "red fascist" is because, not being workers themselves, they confuse conservativism with fascism, and see this organic principle in both conservativism and Marxism-Leninism, and ergo Stalin must be a conservative and therefore a fascist. Additionally, middle class socialists also have a need to misidentify themselves as workers to maintain their control of the narrative within leftist spaces. Acknowledging the workers' position as what it is exposes that lie, so they must misidentify working class socialism as fascism. It's a facile anarcho-fifth-grader take and fundamentally wrong, ignoring class analysis entirely. Stalin may not have agreed with it, but he nonetheless believed strongly in their right to say it in Siberia, and they're still mad about being sent to their room without dinner. Keep this in mind next time you hear this criticism from the "left," because it is as silly as the day is long, and cannot be mocked hard enough.

Another analogy for this organic principle is the Force from Star Wars. The dialectic is a force flowing through history, and those who wield its power for the betterment of humanity are like the Jedi Knights. The dark side of the dialectic would be the Sean Hannitys and Rush Limbaughs of the world, who turn it to hateful capitalist ends with their politics of resentment and lead their conservative followers to do the same.

Jesus of Nazareth said that it will be better for Sodom and Gomorrah on the day of judgement than for these false teachers, these modern-day Sith, and I see no point in arguing the point with the faithful. It is therefore the job of every Marxist-Leninist to get the proles to turn from the dark side of the dialectic.

Just as the difference between liberals and nazbols is vacuous individualistic love versus vacuous individualistic fear, just as the difference between socdems and fascists is self-interested love versus self-interested fear, the difference between socialists and conservatives is dialectical love versus dialectical fear. Socialists love humanity, and that love drives them to great feats and self-sacrifice to give as much effect to that love as possible. Conservatives are afraid of the many things in a capitalist world that are out to get them, and their organic fear manifests as paranoia about the Other, whatever Other you got. Thence comes Alex Jones and conspiracy theories, thence comes the "paranoid style in American politics" of conservativism (Richard Hofstadter, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," Harper's Magazine, Nov. 1964). But the conservative paranoia is not entirely nonsensical; the particular fears (of vaccines, or oppressed nationalities, or women having rights) are wrong. But in an environment where the thing that's really out to get them, capitalism, cannot be named, it makes sense that conservative workers would reach out with tentative theses, each more outlandish than the last, creating more and more syntheses until they eventually stumble on the truth.

There is a particular news outlet, The American Conservative, that has followed the dialectic unconsciously almost completely to the truth. They have rightfully intuited that capitalism ("zombie Reaganism" in their parlance) has destroyed the life chances of most Republican voters, they have rightfully intuited that it is what has smashed apart the American nuclear family, and they have rightfully intuited that the Democrats are doing nothing about it but competing to see who can be the least problematic SJW in public. They just have not stumbled upon the correct answer to these issues, that the means of production must be seized by the workers, and that it must be seized by force and not reform, because capitalism cannot be reformed. Their solutions lean on standard conservative canards of "personal responsibility" and the same capitalist thinking that got us into this mess in the first place. But because conservatives unconsciously embrace the dialectic, The American Conservative is probably the most Marxist journal of record in the American mainstream media outside of Jacobin in figuring out what went wrong. (Perhaps it's even more Marxist; of all people it was the libertarians who exposed that Haymarket Books, which publishes Jacobin, is a subsidiary of various "democracy-promotion" CIA front groups, and therefore its democratic socialist-leaning takes are probably put there intentionally as another sort of COINTELPRO to keep the left within acceptable boundaries for American imperialism.)

It is standard thinking among the broader left that our natural allies are the liberals, and our natural enemies are the conservatives. This is because the liberals mouth correct platitudes while refusing to get off the fence to change anything, while conservatives glory in making everything worse and laughing about the misery they cause. It's easy to mistake apathy as more empathetic than outright hatred. On a surface level, this analysis feels correct. But on a deeper level, on an organic one, on a functional one, it is downright wrong.

First off, we have to recognize that on a functional level, the Republicans are doing our work for us, in a sort of accelerationist fashion. Trump was elected promising to do all manner of horrible things, and boy howdy has he kept his promises. But nothing he promised to do hasn't been done by most of his predecessors in office; his gift was to do them as impolitely as possible so that the liberals' methods would be discredited once and for all. Obama put kids in cages, Obama voted for a border fence, Obama deported more immigrants than anyone before (or since, at least of the time of this writing). But Obama didn't brag about it in misspelled screeds on Twitter, so polite liberal society was willing to overlook what Trump now forces them all to directly confront. Anyone who thinks this stuff wouldn't have happened under a President Hillary is dead wrong; the only difference is nobody would be upset about it. That is a gift Trump and his conservative stans have given us; the next Democrat President will finally have to stop talking out of both sides of their mouth about immigration, and do something to help the refugees their imperialism creates, or face massive social blowback.

Continue to Part V