Red star tribune | revolutionary news & history

For years now, the resurgent Communist movement in the US has had a reactionary thorn in its side. A splinter in our eye that we cannot ignore and pretend doesn’t matter. Not because it has real power in the movement, not because this specific iteration of it has boots on the ground we have to deal with like open fascists. No, this is because it’s a petulant nuisance that should have been swatted away already, but the material and theoretical soil from which it sprouts is a real issue that needs to be addressed. 

First, it’s important to specify who and what we are discussing and, ultimately, why. For those reading this that may have no contextual understanding of who and what the “Patriotic Socialist (PatSoc)” or “MAGA Communist” movement is, let’s recap who the players are. Virtually all of them have direct connections and ties to the cult of Lyndon LaRouche– ex-Trotskyist turned crypto-fascist state asset. Dennis King’s book, “Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism” expands greatly upon his life and legacy. For a shorter version of that history, this Cosmanout Magazine article is also worthwhile for a quick background on this inception point. LaRouche and his cult, the National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC) turned into a pseudo-private intelligence agency giving information to the CIA, FBI, local police departments, and the KKK. They would develop a reputation for sending fascist street thugs to attack communist meetings as well. 

The new adherents to LaRouche’s pro-industrial capital and reactionary politics like Jackson Hinkle, Haz Al-Din, Midwestern Marx, etc., may not all have explicit ties to these types of institutions. Still, the most prominent adherent, Hinkle, does. He rapidly went from an environmentalist liberal influencer with brand partnerships with Jaden Smith to surfing with the lieutenant colonel of the US Army’s psychological warfare unit, Tulsi Gabbard, turning hard right and very eclectic. Hinkle has also joined former President Donald Trump Jr, Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene, Roger Stone, Erik Prince, James O’Keefe, and other fascist reactionary assets and politicians at the Park Avenue Young Republicans Gala. He’s promoted transatlantic slavery apologia, transphobic conspiracy theories linking them to Nazi Germany, praise of Benjamin Netanyahu before October 7th before flipping to opportunistically supporting Palestine, has railed against Indigenous sovereignty, promotes anti-Black Lives Matter conspiracies, uplifts private property, and more all while pushing “MAGA Communism.” There’s a direct connection to the LaRouchite-controlled Schiller Institute, founded by LaRouche and now run by his wife. Hinkle and Haz have been to their events and worked with Center for Political Innovation’s Caleb Maupin–who has been “Me Too’ed” in a sex cult scandal in that organization as well. They have promoted fascists like National Bolshevik co-founder Aleksandr Dugin and Nazi party member and German philosopher Martin Heidegger.

The leading figure, Hinkle, is proven to have ties to the US military–and specifically their psyops department–MAGA fascists, quasi-intelligence agents in the LaRouchite cult, while pushing the most reactionary social chauvinistic lines. People like Haz and Midwestern Marx are mere sidekicks to that movement, and Hinkle is potentially a middleman for the LaRouchite cult and the US State Department. Their attempts to have “anti-imperialist” lines are only a trojan horse to get into Left spaces internationally, to develop intelligence contacts, and information to sell to the highest bidder, as the LaRouchites have done historically. 

These reactionary bigots and followers of Lyndon LaRouche have tried to reimagine his philosophy and branding, and while they have had some success in infiltrating organizations, the root of why their ideology can find people is key to understanding. Their sloganeering for a united (read, white) working class, and their explicit American exceptionalism, are all not an aberration or alien to the western communist movement. They are just latching onto the chauvinism and eurocentrism that has infected the movement for too long. The idealization and romanticization of American history are rooted in the faulty and archaic theory that the Western communist movement has dogmatically also latched onto. So, it’s frankly not surprising that these reactionary types can weasel their way into some spaces when the major communist organizations also push chauvinistic lines. 

Let’s quickly dispense of the outdated and chauvinistic line of American history is revolutionary and progressive that these PatSocs peddle. It’s built on certain lines from the works of people like Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin which are either misunderstood in the greater context of their work or should be ignored for obvious reasons, respectively. Lenin said of the American Revolution it was, “one of those great, really liberating, really revolutionary wars of which there have been so few.” The bulk of Lenin’s work wasn’t on American history and class relations–while Marx did write profusely about American politics throughout many years. Lenin also wrote far more on national liberation, self-determination, and colonialism–all of which can be analyzed in the North American conditions. It’s just not from the American exceptionalist standpoint. 

Marxist Historian Gerald Horne, whose bulk of work is on American history, conditions, and writing from the black liberation tradition–in his work “The Counter Revolution of 1776” easily refutes this perception of the American Revolution being historically progressive. He wrote that “slavery permeated” throughout colonial America’s economy and society, slave and Indigenous resistance created mass European migration to the mainland from the Caribbean, and that “white identity” was crystallized in the formation of a slave-owning and settler republic to create mass class collaboration in the face of that existential decolonial threat. The American Revolution solidified settler colonial and slave-owning relations and was not in rejection of that paradigm built by European colonialism. He argues that the new US republic was “supplanting” the British empire in terms of slavery as it was being forced away from it. 

When we get to the US Civil War, Horne says the Confederacy was connected ideologically to the American Revolution–both wanted to preserve slavery. If we understand “progressive” in the purely economistic way that LaRouchites do, then clearly we cannot label the American Revolution–and the founding of this country–as “progressive.” The “American Revolution” was fundamentally a counter-revolution against the rising resistance from Indigenous Nations and African slaves. It solidified settler-slave class relations for nearly a century. In that process, settler-class collaboration was vital to the survival of the settler-colonial project. Thus the White Identity, or Pan-Europeanism, is born. And it is that class collaboration, that Eurocentric and bourgeois development, that is the bedrock for every nascent fascist movement in the US. 

Marx wrote in a letter in 1846 to his friend Pavel Annenkov, “It is slavery which has given value to the colonies, it is the colonies which have created world trade, and world trade is the necessary condition for large-scale industry…” Later Marx in The International would warn the settler workers of the U.S. that if they didn’t deal properly with the “stain” of slavery it would hinder the entire movement. One of the founders of the modern Black Liberation movement, W.E.B. Du Bois, wrote in Black Reconstruction of America, “The resulting color caste founded and retained by capitalism was adopted, forwarded, and approved by white labor, and resulted in the subordination of colored labor to white profits the world over.” LaRouchites tend to portray both Marx and Du Bois as overtly sympathetic to the “American Dream.” However, Marx routinely connected the issue of slavery with American capitalism, and called for a revolution from the enslaved Africans and for the Union to arm them. Du Bois correctly points out the reality of settler-class collaboration being central in the US. 

Marx, even in his time with all of his own biases and ignorance of a man in the 19th century in the imperial heartland of Europe, saw the difference between progressive and reactionary national liberation movements. Ireland, India, China, and Indonesia specifically were all extensively studied by Marx for their resistance to European colonialism. Over time, moving to a multilinear and non-deterministic view of social development. Funnily enough, Marx was able to correctly critique Irish Americans for their rapid attempt to be accepted as “White” and their egregious racism against Africans in the US. Marx at the Margins: on Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies by Kevin B. Anderson goes into far more depth on that development and work by Marx that for the sake of time, I hope everyone takes the time to research themselves. 

The “Patriotic Socialists” have attempted to co-opt the slave-owning capitalist “Founding Fathers” in a tragically sad revival of a mistake the Communist Party of the United States of America has made before. For decades, the CPUSA would officially idolize figures like Thomas Jefferson, while waffling on the policy of self-determination for the oppressed Black Nation–to disastrous results. (See Gerald Horne’s Armed Struggle and Harry Haywood’s Black Bolshevik) CPUSA routinely has had issues with American exceptionalism in more liquidationist efforts like with the respective Lovestone and Browder factions, but also in more subtle ways like their aforementioned sloganeering to praise “Founding Fathers.” There have been historically egregious examples of chauvinism like the practical ignoring of Indigenous Nations outright in its historiography and theory, or with the support of Japanese concentration camps during World War 2. 

The Party, suffering from factionalism, state repression, and ineffective underground work, was also unable and at times antagonistic towards the growing Black Power movement in the 60s. Denouncing figures like Malcolm X and the Black Panther Party–after having a friendly relationship with the latter–would further show signs of Eurocentric thinking and chauvinism. The failures and setbacks of the Party led to room for groups like the Nation of Islam and BPP to form–right and left deviations of the liberation and class struggle movements. Likewise, the failures of Western Communism to deal with the Eurocentrism within it led chauvinists like Pat-Socs to co-opt the movement in the modern day. 

Hegel, the German philosopher, is foundational to the Marxist development and dialectic. He said of North Africa that it was a “land which does nothing but follow the fate of all which arrives from the great beyond…” giving weight to the “civilizational” aim of European colonialism in Africa. A key bedrock of Eurocentrism is that European history is the determining factor of human progress. Africa, Asia, and Turtle Island had no “history” – therefore European colonialism was the driving “progressive” factor of human history, especially in these regions. This has been severely disproven by the works of Walter Rodney such as in his magnum opus How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. One of the excuses for colonial and settler colonial genocide is that the native, Indigenous nations are historically obsolete. This completely ignores the dynamic socio-cultural societies of these places and their own path of development that may not have included capitalism and transatlantic slavery. The anthropologist Lewis H. Morgan, whose work was foundational in Fredrick Engels’ The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State would say that the “Aryan family represents the central stream of human progress…” Of course, Engels never critiqued this part of Morgan’s analysis–which should bring into question the whole of his anthropological work. Eurocentrism and the Communist Movement by Robert Biel further delves into the racial and chauvinistic biases of Marx and Engels–the former working on them seemingly far more than the latter–and the Bolsheviks advancing closer than them but still having theoretical issues due to Great Russian Chauvinism. 

As Marx wrote, capitalism produces its own “grave-diggers.” To think dialectically, the age of continued colonialism and heightened imperialism, produces these “grave diggers” of capitalism not amongst the “white labor” that collaborates with capitalism as Du Bois pointed out, but the most exploited peoples and nations under the colonial and capitalist system. Marx grew to understand the revolution was not happening purely in the core, and to think that was undialectical. Pressures on the colonized peoples will result in more resistance. That resistance–these national liberation movements–is where revolutionary momentum develops. When the revolution happens in the imperial core, it will be because those workers linked arms in solidarity with the oppressed nations of the world against colonialism and imperialism. In the direct context of the U.S.–where internal colonies exist due to settler colonialism more specifically (Read Addressing Settler Colonialism, Eurocentrism, and Decolonization)– the revolutionary strength and momentum will come from Indigenous Nations, New Afrika, and the imperialized people forced to immigrate here. White settlers by-and-large have blinders on and the quicker we can dismantle those theoretical blinders, the sooner we can support the much-needed and more efficient National Liberation Movements here. 

The US has not undergone the necessary Land Reform that the Reconstruction era could have produced–whites still own 97% of the private agricultural land. The majority of the settler white working class has continued to politically support the most overt fascist forces. Until the Communist Movement here, and more importantly, the major three organizations (CPUSA, PSL, FRSO), develop proper theoretical understandings of settler class collaboration and a program to deal with that threat, we will continue to deal with right-wing deviations of Communism such as the “Patriotic Socialist” movement. The communist struggle in the US is not purely a class struggle, and focusing on that purely has led to stagnation and alienation. . This is a struggle for national liberation and to decolonize Turtle Island–and it should be remembered that “decolonization is always a violent event.”