COMBAT SETTLER LIBERALISM

Estimated reading time: 20 minutes

“Liberalism is extremely harmful in a revolutionary collective. It is a corrosive which eats away unity, undermines cohesion, causes apathy and creates dissension. It robs the revolutionary ranks of compact organization and strict discipline, prevents policies from being carried through and alienates the Party organizations from the masses which the Party leads. It is an extremely bad tendency. Liberalism stems from petty-bourgeois selfishness, it places personal interests first and the interests of the revolution second, and this gives rise to ideological, political and organizational liberalism. People who are liberals look upon the principles of Marxism as abstract dogma. They approve of Marxism, but are not prepared to practice it or to practice it in full; they are not prepared to replace their liberalism by Marxism. These people have their Marxism, but they have their liberalism as well — they talk Marxism but practice liberalism; they apply Marxism to others but liberalism to themselves.” – Combat Liberalism, Mao Zedong, 1937

In order to combat the liberalism that grips the throat of the Communist movement in these occupied lands, it’s necessary to reflect on the ways in which liberal ideology and habits are uniquely expressed in the current historical moment.

1. “Someone Should Do Something”

The first type of settler liberalism is perhaps the most common among the settler masses. It is the “someone (else) should do something” type. These individuals are aware to some degree of the hardships and oppression faced by others (and often even themselves) but will at every turn find justification to externalize their responsibility to the land and the oppressed. “There’s nothing I can do” is the credo of the first type of settler liberalism. This first type can often be found twisting themselves into knots to politically justify their self-imposed helplessness, usually by blaming others for their failures. The fault is aimed upon the misleadership of the movement, their attachment to their luxuries and comforts, or their attachment to their personal safety. In the last case they will justify their inaction by inflating the threat posed by the settler state, painting it as an invincible force which must not be provoked to violence. This stubborn attitude leads inevitably to political nihilism or self-interested electoralism (or a deeply cynical overlap of the two). Many individuals who identify as communists, socialists, anarchists, etc but refuse to struggle for radical organization are in fact guilty of the first type of settler liberalism, and are simply using radical rhetoric and symbology to mask their complicity with the imperial system, consciously or not. The salve for this first type of liberalism is organized action with concrete goals, and a rejection of the habit of political performance devoid of substance.

The first type of liberalism has its most complete expression in the mass performative protest, wherein huge crowds assemble to loudly proclaim their demand for someone else to do something (legislators, the public at large, etc.) — or in other words, they proclaim their intention, in full view and supervision by the state, to continue doing nothing. Their purely rhetorical demands and their vapid politics mask the underlying reality that in practical terms they are there to struggle against escalation. Each “protest” prides itself on its mass participation, its multi-national representation, and has as its only concrete demand that everyone seeking to struggle against the state must instead co-operate with it. Consider the leadership of these actions — these are largely petty bourgeois protest organizers (e.g. take the national and professional makeup reported by the DSA’s own membership survey for instance), whose appeals to pacifism, “non-violent resistance”, and “peaceful protest” are largely conscious reactions to the accusations slung by bourgeois media: that protest organizers are enemies of the state, secretly in league with or being tricked by “the real bad guys”, who seek to disrupt peaceful democratic processes for nefarious purposes. Such protest organizers wish to maintain “good optics”, but good optics in the eyes of the bourgeois media only comes by bowing to bourgeois demands. When bourgeois media accuses protest groups of violence and crime, it’s a veiled threat: “whose side are you on, ours or theirs?” The protest leaders wish to avoid the struggles and sacrifices of the inevitable escalation of violence should they truly place themselves on the side of the oppressed, and so regardless of their intentions setting out, by adhering to bourgeois demands for “peaceful protest” they draw their line of allegiance firmly on the side of the bourgeoisie.

Protest leaders making appeals to pacifism are the white flag of surrender to the state. The red flags waved about at these legal protests are merely bait to draw the gullible.

2. “I Have To Do Something“, i.e. the Cult of Action

The inverse of the first type of liberalism is the “I have to do something” form of individual or organizationally amateurish spontaneous direct action. Individuals, either disillusioned by the prevalence of liberal rot in the movement, unaware of the real tasks before them due to inadequate education, or perhaps just mesmerized by fantasies of heroism, ignore the necessity of disciplined professional organization as a precondition for revolutionary activity, and carry out disorganized activity on an individualistic, amateur basis. This is certainly the most sympathetic type, and the closest to revolutionary action.

However, if these second-type individuals come together to form organizations guided by the same second-type error, they will remain limited to local work that can only react to the problems at hand (for example, providing survival services to homeless folks). They will be unable to chart a course for changing local conditions on a lasting basis (for example, by providing permanent decommodified housing to formerly homeless folks). Because immediate action takes priority ahead of political clarity, even the most effective and well-organized work is carried out on an essentially amateur and ad-hoc basis. Without coherent revolutionary politics as the baseline necessity for unity of work, there inevitably comes a point where some of the participants in these organizations have different ideas for what direction to take their work than a strictly revolutionary outlook would provide for. This produces an inherently unstable political unity that will inevitably lead to catastrophic splits.

The second type of settler liberalism has the most potential to become revolutionary, but only if a really revolutionary outlook takes firm charge of their activities. In all other cases, the activities of this type decohere the revolutionary movement by subordinating revolutionary politics to local matters and by misleading its participants. More often than not, participants in second-type organizing burn out entirely. This can be due to overwork, wherein unprofessional orgs demand excessive volunteer work of their most active and dedicated members. Liberal and hobbyist attitudes often dominate the membership of these orgs and such liberals and hobbyists will never do as much as they can on a consistent and long-term basis (because their priorities are elsewhere!) which places increasing pressure on the dedicated members to contribute more labor to meet the needs of the org. Organizational burnout can also be the result of sheer disillusionment with the possibility of a revolutionary mass movement. After all, when everyone around you claims to be a socialist but fails to live up to these claims in deed and do the work, or years of work go down the drain in an organizational breakdown, it can be very difficult for the local would-be revolutionary to see a path out of their political quagmire.

In the best case scenario, where this liberal approach to political struggle has led to the creation of an organization which is concretely providing for the needs of the community, serious and swift effort must be made by its members to seek the assistance of other, more developed, communist organizations in beginning the process of proletarian professionalization. These orgs may be called upon in sharing the duties the members have taken on, to ensure the services being provided are not interrupted. All possible measures must be taken to ensure the lives of vulnerable individuals are not disrupted or put at risk. The few tenuous roots we actually have in the masses must be carefully defended! Proletarian professionalization will be more fully detailed in a later article, but for the moment should be understood as the process by which an organization and its members adopt a militant, decolonial, anti-american political line both in word and in action. The liberal organization must be split in two: a semi-clandestine cadre org comprised of the revolutionary leadership, and a semi-open mass org comprised of the tailing elements under the control or guidance of the cadre org.

3. “The Multi-National Working Class”

The third type appears to be the most common type of liberalism found within the leadership ranks of the Four Opportunists and the litany of organizations and individuals which orbit and tail them. Each big national organization comprising the Four Opportunists has a slightly different flavor of the Multi-National Working Class line (henceforth referred to as MNWC for brevity), but they all follow a general trend of assumptions, divorced from historical fact and present reality, which pre-suppose the necessity of revolutionary leadership by the white working class.

MNWC is a smokescreen which smuggles white nationalism into the ranks of Communism. How is this the case? Proponents of MNWC may openly speak at great length, sometimes even to the exclusion of anything else, of the great and terrible crimes of the white settler nation, but they always deny the necessity of its complete subjugation and liquidation. They will dance around this denial by inventing mythical prophecies of a “multi-national working class” which will surely soon unite and overthrow their “mutual oppressors”, the big imperialist bourgeoisie (if only the divisive minorities would stop being so self-centered!). The crimes of the oppressor nation are offloaded onto the oppressor elites, denying the white working class’s complicity in Global Colonial Holocaust. MNWC launders this denial by ideologically positioning the white workers as oppressed comrades-in-arms alongside members of the actually oppressed nations, erasing the real material processes which reproduce national oppression in order to absolve themselves of the need to do anything which might jeopardize their material privileges. The MNWC proponents then have the gall to call upon the oppressed to adopt their line in the name of “multi-national unity” and will accuse those who reject this heinous demand of being “wreckers,” “ethnonationalists,” or worse.

What is wrong with this “multi-national working class” view? Why is it incorrect? The reality is that the white settler nation is an oppressor nation. Oppressor nationalities constitute a unique form of reactionary nationalism which derives its ideological cohesion from a cross-class collaboration in imperial conquest. Thus the mythological concept of “American equality” is manufactured along reactionary imperialist lines, sublating the antagonism between worker and bourgeoisie by externalizing and projecting it onto other nationalities. The oppressor nation’s very existence as both a political concept and material force is predicated on the subjugation of other nationalities, therefore the revolutionary overthrow of imperialism necessarily requires the overthrow and subjugation of the entire oppressor nation, not merely its bourgeoisie! The sublated class antagonism can only be restored by militant opposition to the white nation as a whole. The white working class — which serves as the muscle, nerves, and arteries of the white nation — has centuries of blood dripping from its hands on account of its evergreen allegiance to the white nationalist state, blood which has richly nourished the roots that firmly hold their feet in place. The white workers can only even begin to abolish their deeply rooted material positionality as the ever-loyal compradors of colonial genocide and environmental holocaust by completely uprooting themselves and entering life-and-death revolutionary struggle for complete independence from the imperialist system and all the benefits it offers. “Complete independence” should be taken to mean especially and most importantly independence from the land-expropriation regime of colonial private property, which necessarily preconditions unity with revolutionary national liberation. Landback.

The white working class, as a class, can never find unity with the workers of the oppressed nations — rather white individuals who break from white society will continue to find unity with the oppressed by actively seeking the abolition of the white working class. Revolutionary-minded settlers must engage in revolutionary reconstruction of their identities — participate in the creation of a new, anti-settlement, socialist identity — and purge themselves of their oppressor-national class ideology in order to fully participate in the political life of the new society. Only those whites who see this reality clearly and firmly grasp all its implications can be considered revolutionary. The so-called “communists” peddling MNWC should be exposed for what they are: liquidators of revolution whose principle concern, regardless of what other words fall out of their mouths, is the reproduction of white privileges predicated on national oppression. In a word, white nationalism.

The third type of liberalism is the most dangerous and insidious. Where ever it has ideological hegemony it slanders the international tradition of revolutionary communism by claiming its name and its inheritance. The third type’s leaders position themselves atop colonial corporations bearing red branding, whose sole business is selling bloody scraps of the flayed hide of communism on the political market. Their depraved insistence on flattening national oppression into a difference of opinions serves a concrete purpose, which is to sustain the ideological hegemony of white supremacy among even the most left-radical of settlers. This process reproduces the unity of settler colonial politics by reframing non-antagonistic differences (white worker and white bourgeois) as “antagonistic,” and reframing antagonistic differences (settler and colonized) as “non-antagonistic.” Thus a mythology of communism as a white movement is manufactured and turned against the oppressed, acting in lockstep with colonial white supremacy. A twisted reflection of liberation is waved before us promising us salvation if only we help the whites get better wages. As a consequence even those settlements with large populations of white radicals become rigidly and impenetrably white supremacist. A potential ally of the revolution is thereby turned into a militant defender of the spoils of colonial conquest.

4. The Bourgeois Media Revolutionary

All media of communications in the age of universal class dominance are necessarily class media, thus the political character of social media takes on the political character of the dominant class, and all aspects of the functional processes of social media become aspects of the functional processes of class development and class conflict. Social media, i.e. the dominant means of communication (in a previous age this was commonly newspapers) becomes a critical component of the class superstructure, and class oppression is in part structured through and embodied in social media. The flow of information through all channels is tightly regulated according to the interests of the dominant class, and in the case of social media this is most plainly evident in the form of “the algorithm,” but also is heavily influenced by and determinant of legal regulations, market structures and incentives, accessibility and infrastructure, location and language, and the daily habits, devices, and software used to access social media.

The fourth and final type of settler liberalism we will discuss here is the revolutionary of bourgeois social media. Often recognizing the above three types of liberalism as such, the liberal of the fourth type rejects the clueless misdirection of the first type, the amateurish tactics of the second, and the bureaucratic obstructionism of the third, and thus left with no apparent alternative political avenues to pursue, finally arrives at the point of individual or amateur online agitation. The fourth type sees clearly that all internal opposition to the imperialist state lies scattered and fragmented and atomized, unable to build sufficient strength to stand up on its own two feet, and they resolve correctly that the solution at hand is unity of action, and that agitation must be conducted towards such. Taking to the figurative streets of social media they shout their message from atop their soapbox and begin to develop a following.

All too often they fail to see that the soapbox itself was issued to them by the bourgeoisie, and that the crowd gathering around it was brought to them by the bourgeoisie. Both the entertainer and their audience begin to perceive that new, more radical, and more revolutionary thought is growing in strength as the audience grows. The parasocial relationship that forms between this bourgeois media personality and their followers convinces both that a qualitative change is occurring, and that this strategy is working.

Thus placated, the aspirant revolutionary and their audience endlessly tread water and swim in circles through the very same morass containing the above three types of liberalism. A bourgeois social and economic dynamic develops to support and reproduce these relationships, wherein the bourgeois media revolutionary becomes a petty bourgeois proprietor of an entertainment business peddling their political message.¹ Constrained by the censorship of advertisement and sponsorship deals, and the censorship of algorithmic content delivery, and the self-censorship implicit in “building a brand,” in marketing their ideas and so on to an audience of largely petty bourgeois radicals, the fourth type completely loses sight of the revolutionary horizon and drowns their own ideals in the murk of class naturalization. The class character and therefore class function of their activities and of the social media environment they perform their activities in is rendered invisible. They lose sight of the class character of the practical aspect of their activities and place exclusive focus on the theoretical aspect of their activities. The class content of the dialectic of theory and practice is flattened to the “pure” class content of the theory, and unable to move forward with this alone their practice devolves into an endless campaign to struggle for a “pure” understanding and approach to revolutionary politics.

For the fourth type, the universal is subsumed into the particular, the concrete totality of political practice becomes the theoretical and the struggle therein,² and every difference of opinion in strategy threatens the shaky and unstable practical basis for the work. Every theoretical disagreement in effect becomes a disagreement in practical activity and threatens a split, and the long-term outcome of this tendency is the regular fractal fragmentation of political unity into sects and microsects, whose re-building and re-coherence is only ever a temporary illusion of misunderstanding to be exploded back into disunity at a moment’s notice. The incoherence of the movement, in the eyes of individuals immersed in this environment, thereby becomes exclusively the “fault” of everyone else except the individual or organization in question. Criticism and self-criticism are seen as wrecker behavior and defeatism. A deep emotional insecurity is produced, and the necessity of candid discussions on the class character of these activities is subsumed into the cold detachment of bourgeois “professionalism” — rather than proletarian professionalism, which necessitates an ability to receive and give criticism while recognizing one’s place within a collective whole, the “professionalism” of the bourgeoisie is the competition of individual brand management; each criticism received as an existential attack, produced in an environment where a brand only strikes at another to climb their dazed body like a ladder.

“Every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programs”

To presume that theoretical struggle can precede organization is to misunderstand the purpose of both. A proletarian approach to politics can only be an organized approach. Regardless of their level of theoretical sophistication, any given single individual or undifferentiated mass of informally or loosely associated individuals can never practice proletarian politics. “Discourse cycles” must give way to formally planned inter-organizational struggle, the terms and purview of which must be agreed upon in advance by the organizations in question. The principle of democratic centralism, of freedom of criticism and unity of action, can then produce the conditions for proletarian discipline, wherein individuals are held accountable by their organizations who in turn hold one another accountable through inter-organizational criticism. Unless political struggle is consciously structured as disciplined and co-operative organizational struggle, theoretical struggle remains the exclusive domain of artisanal craftsmanship. No matter how intricate, sophisticated, beautiful, and scientifically precise the artisan’s craftwork is, it remains the exclusive domain of petty bourgeois production and will not advance to the status of proletarian production without a conscious plan for building organizational discipline. This is the basic precondition for any forward motion.

1. At times a more “grassroots” “community” may form instead of an individual and audience, wherein the individual and audience comprise one another. “Communities” can take many forms but generally have an amorphous or nebulous structure largely reproduced by the content delivery algorithm itself (typical of platforms with follower and group systems), or are rigidly contained within walled gardens of activity (e.g. platforms with discrete “servers”). In any event however, the underlying bourgeois base relations reproduce the bourgeois superstructure by the same process patterns as the individual-audience dialectic described above, albeit with a greater emphasis on accumulation of social capital rather than money capital. ↩︎
2. The ideological expression of the revolutionary purist however often takes a contradictory appearance to the above, wherein the “practical” aspect of the work is articulated as primary. This excessive focus on practice ahead of theory becomes the theoretical over-emphasis, and therein the Cult of Action is reproduced. The Cult of Action demands the perpetual subordination of theory to practice, but in doing so misunderstands the purpose of theory and merely rigidly adheres to a “practice first” theory. ↩︎